Microsoft plans its metaverse entry in India

Microsoft in India has announced that its Mesh for Teams metaverse offering will go live in the country in the first half of the year. Its metaverse building block Microsoft Mesh complements its mixed reality hardware HoloLens 2.0. The company has also announced a public preview of two solutions in India — the Microsoft Mesh app, where users can view in 3D; and the AltspaceVR, which will be used to hold meetings, townhalls in virtual reality and 2D mode on PCs.

Microsoft India, interestingly, is also getting vocal about creating an open ecosystem for its next phase of metaverse-backed growth. An open ecosystem might become a pre-requisite for building cross-platform experiences once metaverse becomes a mainstream reality.

Metaverse features are being integrated differently into the various verticals of Microsoft’s business, says Praveen Mellacheruvu, Country Head-Business Applications, Microsoft India.

“If I look at the metaverse, it is manifesting itself in different ways in different parts of the Microsoft Cloud stack. On the Azure side, there’s Mesh. On Teams and productivity, there’s a metaverse use case. And Dynamic suite is still a bit old school till now and primarily focussed on solving some critical problems around businesses over remote access. For instance, help someone repair a complex set of machinery sitting 10,000 km away. This is where it uses HoloLens to spot where the machine is. That’s where Dynamic is adding value through technology for use cases like maintenance, services, training and audit, to name a few, and how to do this remotely. This is gaining traction during the pandemic,” Mellacheruvu added.

According to Sodhi, Microsoft Cloud provides a comprehensive set of capabilities to power metaverses that blend the physical and digital worlds by connecting and creating digital twins of places, people and things, and enabling collaboration in mixed reality.

“Our IoT capabilities enable customers to connect to physical assets and create their digital twins in the cloud. Our AI capabilities help reason on this data and enable natural interactions using powerful speech and vision machine-learning models. Microsoft Mesh transforms collaboration and connection by creating a shared sense of presence from anywhere, on any device,” he said