Microsoft‘s immersive meetings solution Mesh will launch in public preview in October.
Initially announced in May at Microsoft Build, users can experiment with Mesh’s XR impact on Teams meetings in only a few weeks.
Users can join immersive spaces using tools already accessible, whether via Microsoft Teams or a custom immersive space in Mesh. Immersive spaces will be available initially through a PC or Meta Quest VR headsets.
Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President of Microsoft Teams, wrote in an accompanying blog:
Microsoft Mesh is not merely another innovation, but a solution that enables your distributed workforce to connect like never before in a 3D immersive space, helping virtual meetings and events feel more like face-to-face connections.”
From the “View” menu while in a Teams meeting, a user can then choose the “Immersive space” option. Users will then evolve their 2D meeting into a 3D immersive experience.
IT admins must double-check that they have one of several enterprise subscriptions before they can enable the Mesh app in the Teams Admin Centre — Teams Essentials, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Microsoft 365 E3/E5, and Office 365 E1/E3/E5.
What Capabilities Does Mesh Bring to Teams?
There are several key capabilities that Mesh ushers into Teams.
Firstly, users will have avatars. As they enter an immersive meeting, a user either selects an avatar they have pre-built for traditional 2D Teams meetings or generates a new one. Avatars can be customisable to reflect a user’s appearance, style, or mood.
Users can also choose from one of the pre-made 3D environments that suit the meeting’s requirements. These encompass a variety of contexts, from a large-scale social gathering or a smaller round-table discussion. Users can select where they sit in an immersive meeting to build connections with their colleagues. They can also liberally transition between conversations.
Mesh for Teams’ includes spatial audio and audio zones, meaning users can have several simultaneous conversations and communicate straightforwardly in subgroups without losing track of what people say.
Mesh also introduces interactive activities that users can engage in with coworkers. Colleagues can play built-in interactive games for team bonding. Users can spot designated areas to roast marshmallows, throw beanbags, answer fun icebreaker questions, and more within the immersive space. Users can also use live reactions, including hearts, thumbs up, and claps, to express themselves during meetings.
Immersive spaces in Teams enable collaboration for all meeting participants, including those who join from outside the immersive space. If users join from a standard 2D Teams meeting experience, they can still see, hear, and interact with coworkers in the immersive space. Content will be visible to all meeting attendees if a participant shares their screen.
Custom Immersive Spaces and Easily Joinable Events
Users can create custom immersive spaces in Mesh tailored to their business needs beyond meetings. These include employee events, training, guided tours, and internal product showcases. Users can leverage a no-code editor to personalise the event or the Mesh toolkit to utilise Unity’s engine for customisable immersive experiences.
Users can schedule events by leveraging existing templates or can generate new events in Mesh. When the event is ready, the organiser can rehearse their talk or presentation or make any changes to the event.
Attendees can discover Mesh events via their daily Outlook and Teams calendars without being required to go to another app or platform to overview and join the events.
Mesh isn’t Microsoft’s Only Next-Gen Offering Arriving This Autumn
Microsoft finally announced long-anticipated release dates for its AI-powered productivity tool Copilot this month.
Copilot was released for consumers on Windows this week, while Copilot 365 will roll out for enterprise customers on November 1. Microsoft also presented a soft relaunch for Copilot. As well as a striking new logo, Microsoft said that it was rolling all the individual Copilots together as one unified product “for a consistent user experience” rather than what had been initially intended as separate Copilot AIs for different services, namely Windows 11, Bing and Edge.
What 365 Copilot provides beyond Microsoft Copilot is commercial data protection, guaranteed security, privacy and compliance, the AI-powered Microsoft 365 Chat, and integration across the Microsoft 365 Apps.
365 Copilot can offer real-time summaries and action items extrapolated from Teams meetings. Copilot can produce new Word projects or blogs by pointing it towards files, which it can leverage as prompts. It can visualise data or projections in Excel. In Outlook, Copilot can customise any email to match a user’s specific style and tone of voice, including personalised sign-off.
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