Introducing Microsoft Mesh: Here Can Be Anywhere

Microsoft Mesh enables presence and shared experiences from anywhere – on any device – through mixed reality applications.

More than a year and a half into a global pandemic that forced workers around the world to abandon their offices and learn to collaborate online, Microsoft productivity experts have observed two trends: remote workers are far more efficient than most business leaders ever imagined, and they miss each other. They miss hallway moments, kitchen catch-ups and chance encounters. They miss the body language from across the conference room table that says things that can’t be said.

In other words, the ability to work from anywhere and connect with colleagues online is awesome, but remote meetings can feel impersonal and lack the small moments that build relationships and careers. Ongoing studies in Microsoft’s research organization prove this out: people feel more present and engaged in meetings when everyone turns on their video cameras, for example. But the video option can be awkward and binary – on or off. Too many people, too much of the time, are a static picture or bubble with initials.

Towards the end of 2021, Microsoft unveiled a solution to this problem that will begin rolling out this year: Mesh for Microsoft Teams. The feature combines the mixed-reality capabilities of Microsoft Mesh, which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences, with the productivity tools of Microsoft Teams, where people can join virtual meetings, send chats, collaborate on shared documents and more.ch-ups and chance encounters. They miss the body language from across the conference room table that says things that can’t be said.

Feel Presence
Connect with new depth and dimension. Engage with eye contact, facial expressions, and gestures. Your personality shines as technology fades away.

Experience Together
Digital intelligence comes to the real world. See, share, and collaborate on persistent 3D content. This common understanding ignites ideas, sparks creativity, and forms powerful bonds.

Connect From Anywhere
Enjoy the freedom to access Mesh on HoloLens 2, VR headsets, mobile phones, tablets, or PCs – using any Mesh-enabled app.

Collaborate Virtually
Colleagues – working time zones apart – come together digitally. Their common understanding helps them review data faster and arrive at more informed decisions.

Train Together Anywhere
Co-workers duplicate the serendipity of in-person learning – without the time and cost of travel – thanks to holoportation, holographic sharing, and visualization.

Get Remote Expertise
Specialists can see others’ perspectives and overlay contextual data to ensure shared understanding. It’s a better way to solve problems and make decisions together.

Design Together in 3D
Team members’ ideas and creativity flourish as they participate in design reviews using several devices. Whether physically present, or holoported, colleagues can collaborate on content in real-time.

With the 4K camera and powerful encoding and decoding capabilities, MeetingBoard realizes truly smooth and stable HD Teams meetings. Based with the AI technology, the camera brings Auto Framing, Speaker Tracking, and additional multi- people feeds underway for an enhanced meeting experience.

TV cart or wall mount, choose the way you like. Single-cable setup, get started within minutes. Yealink MeetingBoard is easy to move around and turn all your rooms into a collaborative workspace.

Mesh allows organizations to create metaverses, persistent virtual worlds for people to collaborate, places that connect the physical world to the virtual world via digital twins of people, places and things.

The scenarios for this technology originally targeted people who work with 3D physical models of everything from bicycles and high-end furniture to new jet engines and sports stadiums. These Mesh-enabled immersive spaces allow designers and engineers, students and teachers, to collaborate and iterate regardless of their physical locations. Teams can inspect plans for a factory under construction. Students can learn how to build electric cars or dissect a human.

“Now, we are moving from a set of workloads that are super relevant for first-line workers into workloads for knowledge workers,” said Alex Kipman, Microsoft Technical Fellow. “People like you and me, they sit in front of a desk. What do we do? We collaborate. What are we doing right now? We’re collaborating. So, it turns out that Microsoft has this phenomenal, amazing collaboration tool called Microsoft Teams and we’re like, “Huh? That’s where people collaborate today.'”

This ah-ha moment opened Kipman’s eyes to how Microsoft’s core collaboration tool can serve as a gateway to the metaverse – to show an audience of 250 million users a new approach to remote and hybrid work. Mesh for Teams allows knowledge workers to build and use self-expressive avatars and experience immersive spaces. As they do, Kipman said, they’ll realize, “I’d rather do that than the other thing.”