SMALL TALK: Forget the ‘Zoom fatigue’, Welcome Microsoft Mesh
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Amid the pandemic that started almost a year ago, online platforms enabling virtual meetings skyrocketed in use and popularity. One of the most well-known and widely used is Zoom. The videoconferencing platform has seen explosive growth during the past 12 months as people turned to virtual meetings for the workplaces. So much so, that “Zooming” has become a generic verb to replace videoconferencing. However, a recent Stanford study warned that excessive zooming to connect with family friends and colleagues may have psychological consequences— giving rise to something called Zoom fatigue’.
Although virtual platforms are not going away anytime soon or ever, there may be better alternatives to staring at the computer screen for countless numbers of hours a day. And this is where the mixed reality platform by Microsoft steps in. At the recently concluded Ignite developers conference, the software giant launched a new platform called Mesh, that will allow individuals in different physical locations to participate in a shared holographic experience.
According to the Microsoft blog, the novel platform is the result of years of Microsoft research and development in areas ranging from hand and eye-tracking and HoloLens development to creating persistent holograms and artificial intelligence m odels that can create expressive avatars. The platform would be powered by Mircosoft’s native Azure cloud platform. This will ensure that Mesh has Azure’s enterprise-grade security and privacy features, as well as its vast computational resources, data, AI & mixed reality services.
“This has been the dream for mixed reality, the idea from the very beginning. You can actually feel like you’re in the same place with someone sharing content or you can teleport from different mixed reality devices and be present with people even when you’re not physically together.”
~ Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman
Mesh will soon offer developers a full suite of AI-powered tools for avatar creation. These would include session management, spatial rendering, and synchronization across multiple users and holoportation to build mixed reality solutions. The open Mesh standards will also allow developers to design across supported devices, which includes Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 headset, a range of other VR headsets, smartphones, tablets & PCs.
For now, the company has announced two apps that come built on the platform — Mesh for HoloLens and a Mesh-enabled version of AltspaceVR, both of which enable holographic work meetings with all the Azure’s features mentioned above. In the long run, customers will be able to choose from a suite of Mesh-enabled applications by external developers. These applications will eventually be integrated into Microsoft products such as Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365.
We might be looking at the next big thing in collaborative computing.
Quantum Leap