Amid the ongoing metaverse mania, software giant Microsoft is seeking to bring its Cloud services to the metaverse.
Ihsan Anabtawi, chief marketing officer of Microsoft UAE, confirmed the move. Speaking on the sidelines of GITEX Global 2022, Anabtawi said that “we should view the metaverse as the next step in the evolution of the internet, which began as an internet of data in the 1990s and 2000s, the internet of people in 2010s and is now the Internet of Things.”
Anabtawi claimed that the company is building a bridge to the metaverse through Microsoft Cloud, Teams, and mixed reality technologies. Following this, technologies like Mesh and Hololens and Azure Digital Twins (an IoT platform that creates a digital representation of real-world things, places, business processes and people) will be incorporated into routine services.
“This isn’t a short-term investment; this is bringing the full power of our work across several areas to enable the future of computing in the metaverse for business and consumers,” he said.
Last year, Microsoft announced the launch of a metaverse-inspired solution for its Teams app dubbed Mesh on smartphones, laptops, and holographic devices. This feature is used to introduce digital representations of the users for applications like Team calls. Thanks to this feature, these avatars are able to meet and greet each other in an immersive, digital world.
According to Jeff Teper, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Mesh is a way to “signal we’re in the same virtual space, we’re one team, we’re one group, and help take the formality down a peg and the engagement up a peg. We’ve seen that those tools have accomplished both goals of helping a team be more effective and also helping individuals be more engaged.”
Besides this, Microsoft is also part of an initiative that promotes the creation of open standards regarding metaverse tech, named the Metaverse Standards Forum. The institution focuses on establishing standards to make each one of the metaverses on the internet interoperable, which would ideally allow these worlds to communicate seamlessly.
