Microsoft Mesh Now Available in Microsoft Teams: Supports 3D and VR Meetings
On January 24, Microsoft launched its immersive 3D meetings inside Microsoft Teams. It will let people meet in virtual spaces with or without a VR headset. The company’s mixed reality platform, Microsoft Mesh came out of preview and integrated into Teams. The 3D Mesh meetings in Teams perform at optimum with a VR headset, with the tech giant only supporting Meta’s Quest devices currently.
With Mesh VR, you can engage in virtual 3D meetings, and the spatial audio feature imitates the ability to have private conversations you have in an office by moving away from other co-workers in a virtual space. The amazing part about it is the 3D spaces are customizable and there are games like tossing bean bags or icebreaker questions for you to play with remote colleagues who you haven’t met before.
Is Microsoft Mesh Available for Users?
The standard features include 3D immersive experiences using next-generation technology that help virtual connections feel more like face-to-face interactions and are available on PC and Meta Quest VR devices. If you want to deploy it in your teams it is available in Microsoft Teams business plans and requires a Teams Premium license. The plans start for small businesses from $4 per user/ month and for enterprises, they have plans like Microsoft 365 E3 which is $36 per user/ month.
Enterprises Using Microsoft Mesh Today
Many organizations opted for the immersive 3D experience in Microsoft Teams. Beginning from Bp to Takeda, some of the biggest enterprises have done it.
Accenture
One of the largest consulting firms globally created a strategic partnership with Microsoft to design a solution that maintains authentic connections promotes cultural understanding, and encourages unity across the organization.
Ellyn Shook, Accenture’s Chief Leadership & Human Resources Officer in talks with Microsoft explained that the new onboarding experience helped the new employees understand the company’s culture, core values, and how Accenture drives value for the clients, people, and communities. All in a collaborative, immersive way that transcends space and place.
Takeda
Takeda had a unique challenge of finding a cost-effective way to help their geo-diverse workforce connect and further their common cultural understanding. They created a custom solution designed to inculcate engagement, strengthen the commitment to their corporate philosophy, and speed product innovation: the Hirameki Garden. The garden, created in Microsoft Mesh, enables a virtual location for large, company-wide events like town halls and all-hands meetings.
bp
They created a specialized physical meeting space called Highly Immersive Visualization Environments (HIVEs). This permitted experts to understand and team up on complex problems in a way that wouldn’t be possible with traditional tools.
Roger Rohatgi, Vice President and Global Head of Design for bp, shares that “highly immersive visualization environments open the path to a more digital and collaborative future for bp. By partnering with Microsoft Mesh, we can explore how to use advanced technology for faster, more informed, and safer decision-making as we pursue our ambition to become an integrated energy company.”
Final Thoughts
Microsoft has always been in the news, whether it was stopping updates of Windows 10 or launch an in-house AI chip. This feature though being innovative and engaging needs to witness the adaptability and utility of most organizations. As Microsoft confirmed many international organizations have been using it, but overall how many companies use Teams as their mode of corporate communication? We have to see since the upgrade how many enterprises actively engage in it.