In March 2021, Microsoft unveiled its latest produce, Microsoft Mesh which is a new framework for building mixed reality applications. Guy Laliberte, co-founder of Cirque du Soleil made an appearance at Microsoft’s Ignite digital conference via holoportation, a technology application which uses 3D capture technology to beam a lifelike image of a person into a virtual scene.
People who attended the conference from all around the world experienced the show as avatars watching events unfold in a shared holographic world. This was made possible by the Microsoft Mesh platform powered by Azure.
The Microsoft Mesh platform is a mixed reality platform that permits people in various locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences on many kinds of devices.
According to Microsoft Technical Fellow, Alex Kipman, the platform gives users the freedom to experience being present with people when they are not even physically together. The platform will be widely used in numerous fields as it allows geographically dispersed teams to hold collaborative meetings and hold virtual meetups.
For now, users will be able to express themselves as avatars, and with subsequent improvements, they will get to use holoportation to project their own appearances.
The platform was built using Azure, Microsoft’s intelligent cloud computing platform, and benefits from its enterprise-grade security and privacy features to go with its vast data, computational resources, and mixed reality services.
This platform is the brainchild of years of research and development in HoloLens technology that helped to create realistic holograms and artificial intelligence models with which they can create expressive avatars.
The application of Microsoft Mesh can also be extensively used by students and professionals in various fields such as architecture, engineering, and medicine where the engineering students, for example, are able to learn about complex machines by viewing holographic models of these machines and using these models to learn about the machines without the need for seeing the machines.
Architects and engineers can take a tour of a factory and work with equipment without ever being there physically, eliminating the dangers of committing unnecessary errors.
Medical students can learn about body parts and the human anatomy while making use of a holographic model, while medical practitioners and personnel can prepare for surgeries using these holographic models, limiting the risk of death of the patients in their care.
This Microsoft Mesh platform can also be used for general meetings, visiting the casino online, attending concerts and movie premieres and many other purposes, especially in these times that have been characterized by minimized physical contact between people due to the COVID-19 situation.
Microsoft intends for Mesh to be an upgrade on the Microsoft Teams platform and not just a virtual reality platform but a virtual meeting platform as development is still ongoing on the Mesh platform to maximize its potential and make it one of the better Microsoft products.
To do this convincingly, Microsoft must make sure that the features they stated as part of the Microsoft Mesh platform are brought to actualization, and that the platform does not suffer a silent death like some of its other innovations of recent years have.
Laila Azzahra is a professional writer and blogger that loves to write about technology, business, entertainment, science, and health.