Microsoft launches a platform to organize meetings with holograms of your colleagues

With Mesh, the American giant is making a breakthrough in the field of mixed reality.

Microsoft announced on Tuesday the launch of an augmented reality collaboration platform: Mesh. It allows several users to find themselves in the form of avatars or holograms in the same room. A particularly useful service in a society where telecommuting has quickly gained its place.

The American firm intends to play on the alliance between virtual reality and physical elements. “A key advantage of mixed reality has always been the ability to be represented elsewhere, despite space-time barriers. I can be in a factory even if I’m not there (…) so that we have the same physical feeling of each other’s presence,” said Alex Kipman, in charge of mixed reality at Microsoft.

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Users will have to equip themselves with augmented reality glasses to see their colleagues, who are identified thanks to sensors. They will also be able to view objects and images that are added in 3D overlay to their living room or meeting room. The platform should allow the development of applications tailored to work on augmented reality glasses like Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 (3500 dollars), but also to the usual screens of smartphones or computers.

A competitive market

“People think of 2020 as the year when work moved home. But in reality, this is the year when work moved to the cloud,” stressed Frank Shaw, vice president of Microsoft. This new teleworking market has been at the heart of many ambitions for the past year. Microsoft is already getting involved with Teams, but wants to diversify its offer by relying on mixed reality. It will thus be able to stand out from the offers of the new Zoom colossus, but also from Google. Facebook is also working on mixed reality solutions, in connection with its Oculus branch.

But if these technologies are imagined for work, they could also make it possible to innovate in the context of entertainment: “A travel agency could create an experience for you to visit the ruins of ancient Greece,” suggests Frank Shaw. A possible alternative to trips that had to be postponed by the pandemic.