Microsoft Announces The Development of its Own digital Playground

The developers of Microsoft Teams unveiled 3d virtual environments and avatars, citing “fatigue in the virtual world,”. “After 30 or 40 minutes max in a meeting, it was very hard to stay engaged and focused,” said Nicole Herskowitz, general manager of Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge”

The news comes a week after Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, “All of our products, including our apps, now share a new vision: to help bring the metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

The Metaverse is a virtual universe made up of created worlds, where people can interact using avatars allowing them to meet, play, watch, and create in ways not possible before.

And while Facebook’s announcement sounds good in theory, the company paired all these platitudes with a short concept video leaving many to speculate what the pivot to Meta actually means for the social media giant.

Microsoft on the other hand said they will be utilizing AI technology to listen to a person’s voice inflections, and use that to animate the 3d avatar. We are able to interpret your vocal cues to animate that avatar, so it does feel present and it does feel like it’s there with you,” said Katie Kelly, principal product manager for Microsoft Mesh.

“The goal is that by the first half of next year, you’ll be able to go into an immersive space and then be able to collaborate and use Microsoft’s tools,” she said.

It should be noted as well, the avatars are not limited to only to 3d they can also be worn during regular team video calls. So finally if you look like garbage during you AM meet, you can attend it looking somewhat normal.

“It’s not binary, so I can choose how I want to show up, whether it’s video or an avatar, and there’s a variety of customized options to choose how you want to be present in a meeting,” says Katie Kelly, principal product manager for Microsoft Mesh, said in an interview with The Verge.

Obviously, it’s Microsofts intention to have these used in tandem with a VR headset, but thankfully for those who are more hesitant to dawn the goggles, can experience the wonders of the developments being made in the metaverse.

How does crypto fall into this? Microsoft isn’t the only company reacting to the meta mania, NFT metaverse games Sandbox and Decentraland both rose 40% and 100% respectively since the Facebook news broke last week.