Meta, Microsoft ‘mesh’ for mutual benefit

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Editor's note: At Meta Connect 2022, Meta’s annual virtual reality conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a surprise partnership with Microsoft. Last year, at the same conference, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing its name to Meta to reflect its commitment to the metaverse. And, exactly a year ago, at the fall edition of Ignite 2021, Microsoft announced a key element of its metaverse—Mesh for Microsoft Teams. While the remote working necessitated by the pandemic demonstrated that remote workers are far more efficient than most business leaders ever imagined, it was also evident that chance encounters in the hallways or those water cooler discussions were sorely missed. Mesh for Microsoft Teams, which combines the company’s Mesh platform for powering shared experiences in virtual reality, augmented reality and elsewhere with Teams, aimed to fix that. At the event, Microsoft demonstrated a pretty neat virtual reality experience with an entire 3D office mapped out by Accenture and, using either the Oculus or HoloLens headsets, the staff and new hires at Accenture could meet as avatars, move around, interact with one another, access data and edit …