Your hair in a bad way, and you don't want to turn on your webcam for your online meeting?
Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) got you covered, and then some.
At its annual Ignite conference, Microsoft unveiled Mesh for Teams, an update to its Teams offering that will let you dial into your virtual call-ins as an animated avatar, sans bedhead.
What's more is that thanks to Mesh, soon you'll be able to host meetings in custom-made virtual realities, with virtual whiteboards featuring virtual PowerPoint presentations.
Yes, even in this brave new metaverse, you'll still have to suffer through tedious PowerPoint presentations. Isn't the future awesome?
By the way, metaverse is simply a catch-all term for a future where virtual, augmented, and digital realities all intersect. In the metaverse, you'll roll out of bed, throw on a VR headset and be at your virtual workspace. Or you'll be able to turn your dinner table into an Excel spreadsheet through the power of augmented reality.
There's more to the metaverse than that, but Microsoft is leaning heavily into the productivity angle for the time being. The company is undoubtedly looking to cash in as more workplaces shift to a work-from-home or hybrid model.
"This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Bloomberg in a TV interview.
Nadella has already used Microsoft's Mesh technology to visit a COVID ward across the pond, a Toyota (NYSE: TM) factory, and even the International Space Station.
Mesh refers to Microsoft's framework, allowing users to build and explore a plethora of virtual realities across a wide variety of VR headsets, including Microsoft's own HoloLens.
And if you don't own a VR headset, Mesh for Teams will work in 2-D as well.
At Ignite, Nadella cast the notion of the metaverse as an entirely new platform, equivalent to the desktop computer or the smartphone.
He said the tech behind the metaverse would allow people to "embed computing into the real world, and to embed the real world into computing-- bringing real presence to any digital space."
With Mesh, Microsoft has already carved out a niche in this as yet, hypothetical future. Consulting firm Accenture (NYSE: ACN) used Mesh to create a digital copy of its headquarters, allowing the company to host 100 virtual orientations for 10,000 employees amid the pandemic, according to Microsoft's VP, Jared Sparto.
And while the notion of showing up to work as a custom-made cartoon might seem cute a first, Microsoft hopes that the update will limit the strain of having to sit through virtual call-ins all day long.
" We got hit by meeting fatigue in the virtual world," Nicole Herskowitz, GM for Microsoft Teams, told The Verge. "After 30 or 40 minutes max in a meeting, it was very hard to stay engaged and focused.
When the Teams update rolls out in 2022, you'll be able to raise your hand and the like through certain keystrokes, and AI will animate your avatar when you speak.
"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," Katie Kelly, principal product manager for Microsoft Mesh, told The Verge. "The feeling of presence, talking to somebody, making eye contact and reactions are going to be important," she added.
Presence is something Microsoft plans to emphasize heavily as its Teams offering evolves. Custom environments, more fluid animations, and even the ability to build out a prototype in VR are just some of the things the company previewed at the conference.
And gaming is certainly not off the table. "You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming," Nadella said at the conference. He called Halo, Minecraft, and Flight Simulator, the three crown jewels of Microsoft's gaming division metaverses unto themselves.
"In some sense, they are 2D today, but the question is, can you now take that to a full 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so," he said.