Microsoft, one of the world’s largest software and technology companies, announced that it is preparing to enter the realm of metaverses. The announcement comes days after Facebook reported that it would be renamed Meta and would develop its own virtual world.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared a series of messages on his Twitter account, in which he assured that the metaverse is the present and it is changing the way people see the world and participate in it.
One of the advances that Microsoft has in this regard is to create a metaverse that is adopted by companies. “As companies accelerate their digital transformation, the metaverse can help people meet in a digital environment, make meetings more comfortable with the use of avatars and facilitate creative collaboration from around the world,” said the company on his blog.
To achieve that, they have created Mesh, a new platform that will be connected with the Teams teleworking tool. With this integration, Microsoft wants to mix virtual reality with the workplace.
The concept of metaverse was first made known by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in 1992. This refers to virtual world in cyberspace where people interact, socially and economically, through their icons or avatars.
Workers would be represented by 3D animation
In the Microsoft metaverse, each worker will be able to create their own avatar in 2D or 3D, which will be used in video calls through an animated version. With the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the avatars they will have the voice of each employee to interact with other co-workers in meetings, having conversations and other types of activities.
Microsoft takes this new step, sustained in recent months in which the pandemic has forced many workers to stay at home and make that their new office.
Companies will be able to create their own metaverse in which workers will have 3D avatars to interact with each other.
In that sense, Nicole Herskowitz, general manager of Microsoft Teams told The Verge that “after 30 or 40 minutes at most in a meeting, it was very difficult to stay engaged and focused.”
Each company will have the opportunity to create their own metaverse with the help of Microsoft. In addition, the language will not be a limitation for communications, since the company founded by Bill Gates, will incorporate translation and transcription support. All of this, they hope to implement in the first half of next year.
“I think what really separates how Microsoft approaches the metaverse and our own experiences is starting with the human experience, so the sense of presence, talking to someone, making eye contact and reactions will be important,” added Kelly.
Xbox video games will also have their metaverse
Nadella also talked about how the metaverse too will be part of the video games created for Xbox, among which Halo, Minecraft and Flight Slim stand out, although on this aspect he did not give many details.
The executive said that people “can absolutely expect” them to develop “things” for video games.
If you take Halo as a game, it’s a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, just like Flight Sim. In a sense, these are 2D today, but the question is, can you bring that into a full 3D world now? So we absolutely plan to do it, “he told Bloomberg.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Facebook took the first step with metaverses, among the list of large companies, on October 20.
The company indicated that it intends to build a computing platform based on the metaverse concept. For this purpose, it would rely on technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, a fact reported by ..
In this way, everything seems to indicate that the novelty for the coming years will be a mixture of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, through various platforms such as Microsoft or Facebook.
Metaverses and blockchains: a relationship of years
However, metaverses are not new to the cryptocurrency and blockchain realm. One of those is Decentraland, a virtual world based on Ethereum, which even has its own native token called MANA and which, after Facebook’s announcement, its price rose by 400%.
Decentraland, although it is also a metaverse like those proposed by Facebook and Microsoft, differs from them because it has a greater degree of decentralization.
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