The year is 2077. You shuffle into your Amazon-brand open-plan work domicile. You grimace at the lukewarm Starbucks nutrient-infused coffee in hand, paid for with Bezocoins crypto. The markets are particularly volatile today, so your mandatory nutri-coffee comes with an additional 3 hours of work hours attached. You sigh in grim acceptance. 

Some colleagues are at work early, no doubt to complete workhour debts accrued and tracked by mandatory WorkFun™ implants on loan from Meta. President Zuckerberg just celebrated the start of his 9th term in office by revealing the new product, designed to make work more Fun™ and more Efficient™, complete with seamless connectivity to the Meta-brand Meta-verse. 

You slip on your Meta Quest 7 mixed reality goggles, to join your colleagues in the Microsoft Teams metaverse workspace. While you cannot afford such expensive accoutrements in real life, your Microsoft Teams avatar sports the latest digital fashion from cyber-Gucci, complete with retro NFT Yeezy crocs. 

As your avatar awkwardly navigates the metaversal Teams room, you select a smile from your emotion picker. Facial expressions were supposedly something earlier generations of human beings had, the A.I. tooltip explains. While some scientists have claimed such things to be fake news, seeing the pixelated smiles of your colleagues enhances your productivity rating by 7% according to your WorkFun™ tracker. Settled in the infinite Zuckerverse, as you strap in for another productivity meeting, the first of several for the day. 

Welcome to the forever office

Okay, so I'm being a little dramatic in the above, but right now, it's simply hard to envision a world where any of this Metaverse nonsense actually enhances anything for anyone in practical terms.

This past week, Meta (formerly known as Facebook), kicked off its Oculus event where it outlined the future of its nascent VR platform. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is known to be spending billions upon billions of dollars chasing what he has convinced himself is the next big thing for computing and internet interaction — virtual reality. And for whatever reason, our favorite megacorp Microsoft is seemingly on board. Part of me thinks this is some kind of cynical and Machiavellian strategy to help Meta destroy itself more quickly by leading them deeper into a fiscally dissonant rabbithole Microsoft knows is actually a big nothingburger. Whatever the truth is, Microsoft has sat up and decided to bring many of its products into Mark's Zuckerworld. 

Microsoft Teams, Office, and even Xbox Cloud Gaming are all coming to the Zuckerverse. The Office and Xbox Cloud Gaming implementation are pretty pedestrian, running within a regular Window. We've seen this before with Microsoft's own Mixed Reality efforts. However, the Microsoft Teams implementation is more pervasive, with a UI that actually looks arguably better than that of Teams on Windows, complete with cartoony avatars taken from Microsoft's purchase of Altspace VR some time ago. 

In a blog post, Microsoft opined with diaphanous buzzwords about how much of its technology will integrate with Meta's platform. Corporations will be able to provision and control Meta headsets using Azure Active Directory, which will also integrate Microsoft 365 for Sharepoint cloud documents access, among other things.  In a lot of ways, it feels as though Microsoft has thrown in the towel with its own civilian mixed reality efforts, and accepted that the hardware future lies firmly with the Zuckerverse at least for enterprise adoption. 

But, I can't help but wonder, who actually wants this for their companies? What employees actually want this? Neither Microsoft nor Meta seem to be able to answer this question with any form of seriousness. 

All gas and no steering wheel

I saw a particularly hilarious headline today, which described how a "metaverse" company with a billion-dollar valuation languished at a laughable 38~ daily active users. "Decentraland" claims that the real figure is around 8000, with the 38~ daily active user figure representing transactional users only. You have to wonder how a company managed to rack up a $1.2 billion dollar valuation on the back of 38 customers per day, but therein lies an extreme example of what is undoubtedly absurd levels of hype, with abysmal levels of substance in the space. 

In Microsoft's own musings on the subject, Redmond claimed that "people crave deeper, richer ways of collaborating and co-creating from wherever they are." I'd be interested to find out who these people are that specifically use the word crave to describe spending a Microsoft Teams meeting in virtual reality. Perhaps they misheard the word cringe instead? 

Microsoft also says its "Work Trend Index" — whatever that is — suggests "50% of Gen Z and Millennial" workers "envision" doing "some" of their work in the "metaverse" in the next two years. 

Is this really the data set we're using to invest billions into this space? 50% "envision," which is essentially another word for maybe in this context, doing a vague some of their work, in a barely defined metaverse. Is the bar really this low? Apparently, it is. But, in the world of technological tunnel vision, maybe the data doesn't even matter. 

This great thread on Twitter from former Google engineer Warren Craddock describes what I believe all current Metaversal projects suffer from on a terminal level. It feels like nobody is actively telling Mark Zuckerberg or any of the other tech CEOs doing funding rounds on this imaginary world whether or not any of this actually makes sense. 

Essentially, Craddock describes how products like Google Glass failed, because the teams working on them refused to acknowledge or admit any of them had a fatal flaw, and instead simply kept plodding away hoping someone would come through with a killer app or silver bullet feature that would offset all the failings. We've seen Microsoft fall into this trap before, where a project's cultural solipsism blinds them to what the wider market actually wants, or more importantly, needs. The U.S. Army recently claimed that Microsoft's military-grade HoloLens headsets, if used in the field, could actually get them killed. If that's not screaming indictment of VR's overthought applications, I don't know what is. 

For civilian uses, Microsoft can have as many focus groups filled with leading questions as it wants, but the market will ultimately decide whether the so-called "Metaverse" lives or dies. This is, of course, assuming Microsoft and Meta haven't diluted the meaning of what the Metaverse actually is to the point where it's simply become a trendy word for the internet itself. Microsoft's "Work Trend Index" is not indicative of anything besides a will to overthink and justify funding allocation for things that could elsewise go to something far more productive. 

Does anyone, on earth, except in the most niche of highly technical industries, need a $400 VR headset strapped to their face to perform a Microsoft Teams meeting? The answer is a very hard no, for anyone with even the vaguest sense of self-awareness. 

Nobody actually wants this, except ... 

I've long held that the real reason any of this exists is due to a cognitive error on the part of Mark Zuckerberg, who has perhaps spent too much time in a reality of his own design that he can no longer see the real one. 

In a pretty telling interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg basically admitted what I've long argued — that really, this is about Apple, and to a lesser extent Google.  

Zuckerberg dressed it up in his commentary to The Verge, saying that Meta's openness will stand opposed to Apple's closedness, allowing developers to build their businesses within Meta's universe free of Apple's draconian restrictions. Of course, this is a projection. What Zuckerberg really wants here is to control a hardware endpoint to the internet. A Meta app store, free of Apple's privacy controls, which Apple has wielded like a bludgeon slicing hundreds of billions off of various ads-based business. Faced with Apple's tracking protection on the one end, and the rise of TikTok devouring Meta's younger audiences, Zuckerberg has gone all in on a comforting vision of an internet controlled, ultimately, by him. 

I can see both sides ultimately, at least analytically (especially as someone who works for an ads-based business, while also using an adblocker (don't tell my boss)). Apple's privacy controls are great for users, but it's also kind of wild that one company has this kind of power. Apple's utterly closed ecosystem gives it an undue amount of control over developers and consumers apiece, jacking up prices on its hardware, and raking devs for extortionate fees that seriously harm innovation in mobile development. Some companies are already charging a "cookie paywall" for scenarios where users block its trackers, since privacy controls are becoming so costly to businesses that offer content for free.

Microsoft undoubtedly sees a benefit to propping up Zuckerberg's app store, considering Apple anti-competitively blocks apps like Xbox Game Pass from appearing in on iPhone natively. It's potentially a low risk bet for Redmond vs. wasting money on their own Windows Mixed Reality platform which has essentially gone nowhere. But the implications of a Zuckerverse workplace potentially represent a Kafkaesque nightmare for employees who rely on remote work.

Apple aside, the idea of a company like Meta wanting a world where it can literally track what you're looking at with its headsets is creepy at best, and dystopic at worst. I'm looking forward to the first lawsuits that arise when someone is fired based on productivity data taken from one of these wearable nightmares. A man in the Netherlands recently won a court case against an employer who had fired him for refusing to turn his webcam on while remote working.

In a business scenario, these Meta headsets are essentially akin to allowing your employer to put CCTV in your home office, in your very eyes no less, with health monitors on your skin. Meta's terms of service requires that you accept that your gaze data is monitored. Even the most optimistic futurist will have a hard time denying the dystopic potential this implementation could bring, both in terms of annoying ads and employee monitoring — I.T. admins with the ability to control what you actually see via Azure Group Policy Object? How many people are craving that kind of work environment, "Microsoft Work Trend Index"? I'm sure Microsoft hasn't been asking these kinds of questions when describing the ethereal "metaverse." 

Without aggressive regulation and strict privacy controls, this could all end up morphing from a mildly irritating waste of money to something nightmares are made of. But frankly, the more likely outcome is that nobody will use it. Mark Zuckerberg seems hellbent on making it seem as uncool as possible.

Any of the much-needed regulation or privacy controls fly in the face of what Meta actually wants for this platform — a playground where it can harvest literally every aspect of your existence. For Meta, it'll be more aggressive forms of ads, 3D pop-ups on steroids. For everyone else, it could mean getting written up for not meeting your "actions per minute" quota. 

What you need to know

• Facebook Gaming is a streaming service from Meta, baked into Facebook's website and its live streaming platform. 
• Today, it started sending notifications out to partners that its apps will shut down in October.
• Facebook Gaming has struggled to meaningfully find growth in a game streaming world dominated by Twitch and YouTube. 
• Microsoft's similar Mixer live streaming platform shut down a few years ago, with its users ushered to Facebook Gaming in the process. 

Facebook Gaming is a live streaming platform run by Meta, and is analogous to platforms like Twitch and YouTube for allowing content creators to broadcast themselves to audiences. Typically, Facebook Gaming and similar services revolve around video games, although they have branched out to "IRL" streams that focus on simply chatting, art creation, or even Microsoft Excel esports. During the pandemic, live streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch enjoyed a boom period, with more users than ever stuck at home as offices and other work places shuttered.  In the post-pandemic era, we're starting to see patterns that are perhaps less favorable than some streaming platforms would like. 

During that same pandemic boom, Microsoft's own Mixer platform struggled to court new users, which spoke to the likelihood that the service was never going to be able to compete with Twitch. As such, Microsoft cut a deal with Facebook Gaming to onboard its creators, offering instant partnerships. Many users opted instead to jump across to Twitch, given its dominance in the space, and general scepticism of the Facebook platform which is increasingly divisive and "uncool" particularly among younger internet users. Facebook itself saw its first decline in monthly active users earlier this year, almost instantly wiping 20% off its share price. It's with that in mind that we cast our sights over Facebook Gaming, which may be heading the way of Microsoft's Mixer. 

Today, Facebook Gaming began notifying some of its partners that it's killing off its mobile game streaming apps. While the statement below claims that it plans to continue supporting game streaming within Facebook itself, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that this could signal a wider pivot away from live game streaming video in favor of its ethereal "metaverse" push. 

A quick glance at Facebook Gaming shows streams running far fewer concurrent numbers than the top shows on Twitch, although we can dig deeper into data provided by StreamLabs, which shows a steady decline in Facebook's miniscule 7% market share since Spring of this year. In April, Facebook Gaming sported 211 million  hours watched, which has sank to 178 million hours as of June 2022. For comparison, YouTube Gaming added 30 million hours during the same time frame. Both platforms pale in comparison to Amazon's Twitch, which racked up 1.85 billion viewing hours in June. Facebook Gaming saw half of its viewing hours wiped out from its pandemic peak, in a trend that shows no sign of abating any time soon. 

The patterns are relatively familiar as someone who followed Microsoft's Mixer, which failed to add meaningful viewing hours during the pandemic boom period that saw Twitch and other platforms hit record viewerships. Microsoft decide to cut its losses and focus on new ventures like Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming instead, in what was quite arguably the right move. 

Conversely, Meta is hedging all of its bets on the so-called "metaverse," which is a loosely-defined confluence of technologies that Facebook hopes will give it control over the point of access to a VR version of the web that lacks the privacy controls of iOS and Google Play — both of which have wiped billions off Meta's revenue streams in recent years. 

Speaking personally, I think Microsoft is making a safer bet with the cloud right now. 

What you need to know

• Microsoft, Meta, and other companies have differing visions for the burgeoning "metaverse" concept.
• Meta is planning to take up to a nearly 50% cut from creators who sell content within its metaverse.
• Microsoft President Brad Smith said he'd be "very surprised" if his company went a similar route.

It's the word on everyone's mind right now (at least, everyone in Big Tech): Metaverse. Where there's a new tech frontier, there are new ways to monetize content, and companies are starting to reveal how they plan to make money off the new dimension of technology. Microsoft President Brad Smith recently provided some insight into his company's thinking on the matter.

Speaking on CNBC's TechCheck, Smith was asked by show host Jon Fortt whether Microsoft is going to emulate Meta, which plans to impose up to a 47.5% fee (30% for sales on Quest and a 25% sales fee tacked onto the remaining amount for Meta's new Horizon Worlds metaverse platform) on creators selling goods within its metaverse ecosystem. Such a cut from Meta would leave creators with 52.5%, should Meta take the maximum amount it's currently outlined.

"I will be very surprised if you see something like that at Microsoft," Smith said. After that opening remark, he mentioned how Microsoft's view of the metaverse concept isn't monolithic, referencing the different "metaverse" sectors Microsoft already operates within, including its IVAS AR headset deal with the U.S. Army (a deal that has seen some reported road bumps). "One way you make room for developers is: You offer them a good deal," he continued, emphasizing that Microsoft is keen on attracting developers with enticing offers.

Smith's sentiment echoes Microsoft's previous amendments to its existing storefront. The company recently reduced the cut it takes from many developers as well as outlined a list of dedicated open app store principles.

We've already heard the rants and raves about how content-devoid the term "metaverse" is at its current stage. It's no secret that, since October 2021, virtually every tech company has thrown the word around without fully understanding what it means. But what if this lack of clarity and consumer understanding is actually a good thing, at least for the time being?

A lot of modern tech sectors are in a place where someone who's absolutely clueless about what's going on isn't going to have the easiest time hopping in. It's simple enough for savvy folk to make sense of generational upgrades like what's happening in PC hardware or with the Xbox Series X and oddities like the Surface Duo 2. But think of all your technologically challenged friends and how much of a hassle it is to explain these things to them from the ground up. What if the metaverse is the key to fixing this knowledge gap?

It all starts with corporations

When even the big corporate dogs don't know what they're saying, that's a good indicator that some universal definitions need formulation. And in time, there's a chance that companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and all the others will get it together and craft a definition that effectively frameworks an industry-wide set of technologies and principles. If this happens — and that's a big "if," but please, humor the idea — then there'll be a collective industry wave of corporations going, "We need to educate the consumer now that we know what we've been saying for years."

At this point, we'll see a concerted metaverse marketing push from all corners of tech attempting to get people up to speed on the metaverse. Remember when this happened with social media and is effectively why, to this day, Facebook is full of decently produced (if socially awkward or offensive) profiles from those relatives you try to avoid at Thanksgiving dinner? This is an example of what happens when corporations decide it's time to get Earth's population up to speed on new toys.

Trickle-down education economics

Lots of tech, be it game consoles, PC hardware, or high-end phones and their associated minutia are easy enough to learn about if you spend a few hours researching and have a decent amount of background knowledge. But take away that background knowledge and all of a sudden a few hours of research balloons into a mammoth research assignment, the kind that's so time-prohibitive and confusing that many "normies" will just hop ship altogether. That's why we have some console gamers hesitant to move to a PC gaming setup. That's why there are older folks still wholly reliant on flip phones. That's why many people get so bamboozled when something like Windows 11 comes along.

But with the collective power of Big Tech fueling a single, cohesive educational campaign, we could see tides change. If that consortium manages to boil down the premise of the metaverse to a one-sentence Ready Player One sales pitch, e.g., "Put on these glasses and you can live-action roleplay as the person you wish you were," and companies are able to produce tech like the Oculus Quest 2 where it's as simple as, "Wear this gadget and be done with it," then we'll be cooking with gasoline.

It'll be like a domino chain. The Big Tech folks will figure out what the metaverse is and boil it down to something digestible for the masses, the tech-savvy early adopters will hop in, education efforts will continue and the young masses (think the generation that drove smartphone adoption) will join, followed rapidly by said normie masses' older family members, and soon enough, everyone and their grandma will understand the concept of "glasses, metaverse, future."

An empty buzzword filled with potential

Right now, few people understand what the metaverse may entail. Really, it's the VR, AR, and mixed-reality enthusiasts who have an advantage, but they're a micro-percentage of the overall tech community. Everyone else is clueless, meaning this may be the great equalizer.

If the metaverse is truly set to become the next internet, this will be the fresh start so many people need to become knowledgeable and relevant again. The grandparents who don't understand email, the friends who don't "get" PC hardware, the more casual gamers who've never heard of Steam and don't know what gaming is all about these days — all of those groups can join the next "big thing" and once again become relevant in modern society. By creating a buzzword hurricane, Meta may have indirectly kickstarted an industry-wide metamorphosis that could, if all goes well, allow the forgotten to rejoin those who wear plastic bricks on their faces in the (artificial) sun.

There'll always be a place for those who reject modernity — in our social-media-afflicted, screen-obsessed world, tech deniers are often some of the happiest people on Earth. But for those who wish they could understand what the heck is going on, the many who just want to be a part of the greater tech landscape once more, the metaverse may very well be that gateway in the coming years and decades. After all: If everyone's uninformed, no one's uninformed.

What you need to know

• Microsoft's Charlie Bell discussed securing the metaverse in a recent blog post.
• Bell highlights that the metaverse will face similar security threats to existing technology, including impersonation and data theft.
• The executive calls for organizations to work together and to implement security policies now before the metaverse takes off.

The metaverse is the trending tech topic this year. Some say it's too early for the metaverse. Others say the term metaverse is just a rebranding of old technology. Regardless of which view is correct, organizations will adopt metaverse technologies over the next ten years. And with the advent of a new, or not so new, technology comes security risks.

Microsoft Executive Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management Charlie Bell discussed those risks in a blog post. The exact method of attacks within the metaverse may differ to those seen through email or other current types of technology, but the general concepts will remain the same. Regardless of the medium, malicious actors will try to use deception and human error to gain access to information.

Trying to deceive people isn't new. Bell recalls the early days of email fraud as an example. Of course, email fraud and phishing schemes are still common today. Attacks in the metaverse will use different entry points, but they'll look familiar.

"There is an inherent social engineering advantage with the novelty of any new technology," said Bell. "In the metaverse, fraud and phishing attacks targeting your identity could come from a familiar face – literally – like an avatar who impersonates your coworker, instead of a misleading domain name or email address."

To combat threats in the metaverse, Bell encourages organizations to learn from the lessons of the past. "Organizations need to know that adopting metaverse-enabled apps and experiences won't upend their identity and access control," said Bell. "This means we have to make identity manageable for enterprises in this new world."

The executive encourages multi-factor authentication, passwordless authentication, and other security measures. Many of these are already in use, so IT admins should be familiar with them.

Bell concludes his post with a call to work together. Since there won't be a single metaverse platform, general security measures and policies will be important.

"The problems of yesterday's and today's Internet — impersonation, attempts to steal credentials, social engineering, nation state espionage, inevitable vulnerabilities — will be with us in the metaverse," said Bell. "And it will take the same security community of good faith, norms and teamwork to anticipate and respond to them."

Another week, another bout of metaverse news and discussion. This time around, we have the (reportedly) sorry state of Microsoft's big AR deal with the U.S. Army. The company fully expects the Pentagon to be disappointed with its deliverables, and some suspect that what the U.S. Army wants is just too far removed from what current technology and, by extension, Microsoft, can provide. After all, can tech that barely works in ideal living-room-esque conditions actually translate to the harsh environments soldiers spend time in? Are we there yet?

That's the question hanging over the entirety of the metaverse. Be it soldiers on the frontlines with specialized HoloLens units or consumers playing Synth Riders with a Windows Mixed Reality headset in their bedrooms, there are a lot of asterisks and caveats to modern-day AR, VR, mixed reality, and metaverse-linked experiences. Tons of hardware limitations, not a lot of support, and other pitfalls have trapped this new dimension of virtual experiences in a tiny corner of tech talk that makes the current "metaverse" chatter seem overblown and disproportionate to reality. Unless, of course, you don't define the "metaverse" as a Ready Player One fantasy come true, kind of like what Meta is positioning it to be.

Do you view the metaverse as a ways off from becoming a reality, or do you define it like Microsoft does, wherein it's just a vaguely interconnected network of software that allows you to interact virtually with others? By Microsoft's definition, we're already in the metaverse.

There is always the third option, of course. The one nestled between the extremes of "yes, we're already in the metaverse" and "no, the metaverse isn't here yet." That option is to reject "the metaverse" entirely and brand it an ill-defined term spawned from the depths of PR buzzword hell.

What you need to know

• The metaverse and NFTs have both been hot topics of discussion in tech circles throughout the first quarter of 2022.
• Gartner now has a prediction that, by 2026, 25% of people will spend a minimum of an hour per day inside the metaverse.
• Gartner also predicts that the metaverse's virtual economy will operate on NFTs and crypto.

Metaverse discussion is ramping up, having gone from a phrase scarcely used before October 2021 to a core part of tech jargon that's warranting five-year predictions and outlook reports. The latest of these analyses comes from Gartner, which predicts a lot of metaverse activity by 2026.

Specifically, Gartner forecasts that a quarter of people will be spending a minimum of an hour per day inside metaverse spaces by 2026 and that by that time, 30% of organizations will have metaverse-friendly services and goods.

According to Gartner, the virtual economy of the burgeoning metaverse will be fueled by digital currencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Though many are skeptical about the future of NFTs, others see their potential to define the future of content licensing.

As for the metaverse itself, even if many would still define it as an empty buzzword, there are others who would refrain from dismissing it. Specifically, Gartner's current definition of the metaverse is as follows:

And based on that definition, the firm says it doesn't believe the metaverse properly exists yet. In other words, the forecasts it's outlining are for a 2026 landscape that will look substantially different than where we are in 2022. That is to say: Stay frosty for a potential spike in NFT and metaverse activity.

The metaverse is a concept that's been around for a long while (decades and decades, if not centuries), but its prominence in tech is a recent development. Now it's a word that's on the tip of many, many companies' tongues, companies that had never said "metaverse" before October 2021. The question is: With so many corporations aggressively adopting metaverse lingo, whose definition of the concept is primed to be the winner?

Two of the frontrunners in the competition appear to be Meta and Facebook. Meta, as its name implies, has the advantage of being 1,000% in it to win it on the metaverse concept (owning Facebook is a nice boost, too). Microsoft, meanwhile, has the advantage of being Microsoft. And the metaverse itself has the advantage of being an ill-defined concept that could be co-opted and taken over by virtually any corporate entity. So, who wins? We asked experts to weigh in.

Meta-managing expectations

There's the metaverse itself, and then the definition of the word. Two potential winners in two categories. Anshel Sag, a senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, had views on who's setting the tone for each.

"Without Meta's investments and disclosures, I don't think we'd be talking about the metaverse as much as we are today," he said, highlighting that at the moment, Meta's definition of metaverse is the dominant one. This would certainly line up with the fact that many, many companies started discussing the metaverse immediately after Facebook made its transition.

With that being said, Sag didn't see either company as having the default "correct" approach to the metaverse, even if one has been doing a better job of establishing the de facto definition.

"I think that the metaverse will comprise of all kinds of devices, whether they are AR or VR, PC or smartphone, glass or tablet," Sag stated. "Hardware agnosticism has been built into the internet of today and the 3D standards that we are seeing also take that cross-platform approach into account. In the end, the metaverse needs to be interoperable and cross-platform whether it is software or hardware because otherwise, you don't get the scale that is necessary to reach the complete internet."

Based on this proposal, Sag posited that Microsoft's vague outline for the metaverse was closest to what the metaverse may ultimately end up becoming, though he mentioned AWS and Google shouldn't be counted out of the discussion either. "I actually think that one of the companies with one of the most comprehensive visions for the metaverse is probably Intel simply because the company is looking at it from a multi-layer approach and with the understanding that the company will need to support many different approaches and that openness is key."

Sag theorized that the metaverse, once it's more properly formed than it is now, will look like today's internet with the added twist of spatial awareness and 3D objects. But as for the world of today, the one we live in, there's a way to go before that final vision starts taking shape.

Circling back to the core debate of Microsoft and Meta, Sag's final remarks touched on the fact that even though Meta is helping shape today's definition of the metaverse, the company itself is in a tricky spot to actualize its ambitions.

"I think one thing to consider with Meta's approach is that it's mostly based on monetizing transactions and software sales, while Microsoft's is about providing the cloud computing for whatever services want to enable the metaverse, and I think Microsoft's approach is inherently less intrusive and more open than Meta's, and I believe when you look at the perception of the two companies, Meta is going to have a much bigger uphill battle in terms of its perception among the average consumer," he said.

Too soon to tell

Forrester and Gartner shared Sag's sentiment that the metaverse has yet to fully take shape and we're only in the precursor stage.

Here is Gartner's definition of the metaverse:

Gartner Senior Principal Analyst Tuong Nguyen said that based on Gartner's current definition, the firm doesn't believe the metaverse exists yet. Rather, we're in the precursor era. And as an extension of that thought, given how varied the current metaverse definition landscape is, the "right" one varies depending on what you're looking for.

"Here's an analogy: What's a smartphone?" Nguyen asked. "Different versions of answers: An email tool, an SMS device, a portable gaming device, a video tool, a way to access social networking, something to listen to music and books on, etc. All these answers are true, but the most accurate is that it's a collection of all these, rather than a single 'slice.'"

Forrester VP and Principal Analyst David Truog agreed that some metaverse building blocks are taking shape, but the real thing — the fight for the soul of the metaverse — is a long way off.

"The AR/MR/VR platforms we see today (like Microsoft Mesh, Meta Horizon Worlds, Roblox, Campfire, RecRoom, Spatial, etc.) are metaverse precursors," Truog said. "They contain some of the ingredients for the metaverse but are not yet the metaverse because they're not interconnected like websites and webpages can be, on the web. And without those interconnections, there is no metaverse."

He outlined that there are phases to the metaverse we should pay attention to. First, there are the metaverse precursors. Then, there's the primordial metaverse, enabling people to travel to worlds across platforms. And lastly, the federated metaverse will take shape, wherein identity and property are enforced.

Anyone's game

To provide a TL;DR for the impatient folks out there: Meta may set the tone for the definition of the burgeoning metaverse concept, but Microsoft's vague web of software entanglements could end up more accurately reflecting what said metaverse looks like in reality. And in the end, neither company may even have the proper foundations to be the de facto leader in crafting the meta future we may all soon live in.

Unknowns are multitudinous and possibilities are infinite. The only thing that's certain is Facebook has, at least temporarily, thrown Big Tech for a loop and ushered in an era of many people confusing themselves with contradictory metaverse spiels. Should this shake out to be the beginnings of a real-world Ready Player One, just know you got to live through the precursor era. So grab one of the best VR headsets and dive in before it becomes cool.

What you need to know

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently discussed the company's acquisition of Activision Blizzard in an interview.
• Nadella also explained how Microsoft's experience in gaming will help it create the metaverse.
• He believes that the metaverse is "essentially the next internet" and that Microsoft's experience will gaming will help build the metaverse.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently spoke with the Financial Times about the company's recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The executive related Microsoft's growth in the gaming industry to the metaverse, which Nadella claimed is "essentially the next internet."

The interview between Richard Waters from the Financial Times and Nadella opened with Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, wherein Nadella explained how gaming is more than a "side bet" by Microsoft. The meeting later transitioned to a discussion about the metaverse.

Nadella drew parallels between building the metaverse and creating video games, explaining that making games is about creating a world that people can interact in as well as with. He noted that Microsoft already has experts who know how to make interactive virtual spaces that allow people to perform tasks and communicate with others in a virtual world. It's worth noting that some of these experts have been transitioning to Meta.

"Take what's happening with the metaverse. What is the metaverse? Metaverse is essentially about creating games. It is about being able to put people, places, things [in] a physics engine and then having all the people, places, things in the physics engine relate to each other," said Nadella.

The CEO took it further by saying that people already interact in games in a similar way to what we'll see in the metaverse in the future.

"You and I will be sitting on a conference room table soon with either our avatars or our holograms or even 2D surfaces with surround audio. Guess what? The place where we have been doing that forever... is gaming," explained Nadella.

In the eyes of Nadella, Microsoft's experience in gaming gives it a leg up when moving into the metaverse.

"To me, just being great at game building gives us the permission to build this next platform, which is essentially the next internet: the embodied presence. Today, I play a game, but I'm not in the game. Now, we can start dreaming [that] through these metaverses: I can literally be in the game, just like I can be in a conference room with you in a meeting. That metaphor and the technology... will manifest itself in different contexts," said Nadella.

While the metaverse is a hot topic these days, Microsoft's approach to it hasn't pleased everyone, including people within the company responsible for HoloLens. Some have argued Big Tech on the whole doesn't have a clear vision for what the metaverse is.

Nadella also shared thoughts on the metaverse in late 2021, though those comments focused primarily on working within the metaverse rather than playing.

In related news, Microsoft is reportedly struggling with its plans regarding the future of HoloLens.

Every couple of years a new piece of jargon comes along that gets Silicon Valley very, very excited. We are now at that juncture once again, wherein "metaverse" has become the word du jour. Things you used to know simply as "VR" or "video games" have now become part of the omnipresent "meta" vortex. Meta this, meta that. In the words of the late, great Norm Macdonald: "I hate meta."

The very concept of meta and the metaverse wouldn't be so frustrating if Big Tech had a cohesive vision for what it meant. But each company appears to be saying the words within the context of their own disparate inventions, analysts and "experts" are spamming "metaverse" in what feels like an effort to stay on top of a trend they didn't know was coming, and everyone's making a big fuss out of nothing. This phenomenon needs to stop.

A metatextual misunderstanding

When did the rise of the metaverse begin? Well, based on the current smorgasbord of definitions, some would argue we've been in the metaverse for the better part of four decades. Pac-Man was apparently a gateway drug to the metaverse. Sonic the Hedgehog has been luring unsuspecting children into the metaverse since 1991. Activision's Call of Duty isn't a video game property anymore; according to analysts and speculators, it's a "metaverse" product that allows you to virtually murder people. You know, like a video game.

It was the aggressive influx of analysts and experts saying "metaverse" in response to Microsoft's acquisition of Activision that sent me into this meta conniption. Three months ago, most of us would've said "Microsoft has bought Activision for IP and vidya games." Now, the proper dialogue is "Microsoft's purchase of Activision is a metaverse investment," with the term "metaverse" being a cover-all for games, software in general, any sort of virtual or augmented reality endeavor, and basically anything relating to the word "virtual." For example, that dream you had of your high school crush? Yeah, that's not real; it's virtual. Ergo, it was a metaversal dream.

Three months ago does, in fact, mark the real birth of the "metaverse" frenzy, for a reason you can probably deduce. While the concept of the metaverse has been around forever — just watch The Matrix or read Ready Player One for proof — it took Mark Zuckerberg rebranding Facebook as Meta to send all of Big Tech into panic mode. Facebook has a vision for a virtual landscape it wants to pioneer, and it dubbed it the metaverse. That makes sense. That's all well and good. What's not good is virtually every other company now cannibalizing the word, chasing after it by claiming that all their products were metaverse products the whole time and that we just couldn't see that fact yet.

A meta comedy of errors

Some of us here at Windows Central have already cracked down on Zuckerberg's Meta rebranding and dissed the term "metaverse." But now it's time to reclaim the industry from the clutches of a word it doesn't even understand. A lot of companies all using the same word to describe a hundred different things is the antithesis of language, which is designed to impart specificity. Otherwise, I could just point at a pile of dirt and call it a Ubisoft game and the dictionary would have no choice but to agree with me.

So here's what I'm asking for. I want Microsoft, Activision, all the stock bros who keep selling the "metaverse" idea without knowing what they're saying, all the analysts trying to sound in the loop, and everyone else to get on the same page with this metaverse thing. I want conformity and the restitution of language as a means of communication rather than a vessel for noise. Maybe Facebook's definition is the winner because one could argue it made the first and biggest splash in modern tech. On the other hand, anyone can point back to an earlier event and claim that was the metaverse's inception. Maybe we all need to get on board with Aristotle's Metaphysics and call it a day.

The point is, metaverse branding is all over the place. There's nothing wrong with the word sticking around, but it needs to mean something, just like how "books," "movies," and "augmented reality" all clearly define a specific medium. Big Tech owes it to each and every one of us on this metaversal experiment of a rock to clean up its act and give us a metaverse that doesn't disrespect the very concept of language.

What you need to know

• Microsoft has announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard in an absolutely massive gaming deal.
• The deal will add a ton of new studios and even more legendary gaming franchises to the growing Xbox brand.
• However, it seems the Activision Blizzard deal may also contribute to Microsoft's vision of the "metaverse" concept.
• The Activision Blizzard acquisition will "accelerate the growth in Microsoft's gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse."

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it's acquiring Activision Blizzard, a $70 billion gaming deal that will solidify Microsoft's place as a gaming powerhouse and add a plethora of studios, games, and franchises to the growing Xbox brand. Acquiring Activision Blizzard doesn't just affect gaming, however, as Microsoft is also considering how the deal can help execute its vision of the emerging "metaverse" concept.

The metaverse is a concept that has increasingly gained traction over the last few months as an evolution to how people are productive, and intends to meld the physical world with the digital world in a variety of ways. Microsoft has its own vision for what this means, and Tuesday's acquisition announcement partially ties into this. According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, "Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms."

Activision Blizzard is a huge player in the gaming industry, and possesses talent and experience in a wide variety of markets. While it's too early to tell exactly how Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard will aid in furthering the development of the metaverse, it's clear the deal has major ramifications for Microsoft and the gaming industry as a whole.

"We're investing deeply in world-class content, community and the cloud to usher in a new era of gaming that puts players and creators first and makes gaming safe, inclusive and accessible to all," Nadella said of the announcement. Many companies are touting the benefits of the metaverse and what it could mean, but not everyone is as enthusiastic. Our own Jez Corden had some thoughts on the metaverse, and why the hype isn't deserved.

In case you missed it, the Microsoft and Activision Blizzard deal will also see many new additions to Xbox Game Pass, possibly greatly expanding our list of best Xbox Game Pass games in the process.

What you need to know

• Members of the approximately 1,500-person strong Microsoft HoloLens team have been leaving.
• Many of them have transitioned to rival augmented reality company, Meta.
• Apple has also seen some of its workers transition to Meta.

As its new name would imply, Meta (formerly Facebook) is going all-in on the metaverse. In order to do that, it needs employees, the likes of which it appears to be gathering in part from rival companies Apple and Microsoft.

In Microsoft's case, it has a team dedicated to HoloLens that measures roughly 1,500 people large. However, that team has been shrinking, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. Approximately 100 people have abandoned the home of HoloLens, with over 40 transitioning to work at Meta.

This comes at a time when Microsoft not only has its commercial-facing HoloLens endeavors to worry about, but also the IVAS project for the U.S. Army. That project recently saw a delay.

According to the WSJ report, former employees said Microsoft hadn't hired enough engineers to keep up with the strain IVAS is putting on company resources. And further employee departures won't help matters, either.

Apple's team members are also cited as part of the defector wave, with former Apple employees joining Meta. Meta did not comment to WSJ about its recruiting practices.

With all that being said, at least publicly speaking, Microsoft has made it clear the metaverse is a focus. Meta snapping up Redmond's employees may, to some, suggest that one company values the world of augmented reality more and is willing to do more to ensure there's manpower behind it, but based on the publicly available information, both companies have their hands full with AR ambitions.

What you need to know

• Qualcomm will work with Microsoft to develop custom chips for augmented reality.
• The resulting chips would allow companies to make smaller and more efficient AR glasses.
• Microsoft's HoloLens 2 runs on the Snapdragon 850 CPU, which is made by Qualcomm.

Microsoft and Qualcomm announced an expanded partnership centering on augmented reality (AR) at CES 2022. The companies will work together to expand AR within the consumer and enterprise sectors. The partnership includes the development of custom AR chips that will allow companies to make lightweight glasses for augmented reality.

The hardware that comes forth from this partnership will integrate with software such as Microsoft Mesh and the Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer platform.

Qualcomm's press release on the partnership doesn't share any specifics about upcoming hardware. It's likely safe to say that the collaboration between Microsoft and Qualcomm is good news for those hoping to see consumer-aimed AR devices.

Microsoft's HoloLens 2, which runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 850, is an enterprise-focused machine. It's used by NASA and several large organizations in a variety of ways. There's even a HoloLens 2 Industrial Edition that's used in cleanrooms and hazardous environments.

Qualcomm's statement shows that AR will continue to be a focus of enterprise development, but that augmented reality could also have a place for general consumers.

"This collaboration reflects the next step in both companies' shared commitment to XR and the metaverse," said Qualcomm's vice president and general manager of XR Hugo Swart. "Qualcomm Technologies' core XR strategy has always been delivering the most cutting-edge technology, purpose-built XR chipsets and enabling the ecosystem with our software platforms and hardware reference designs. We are thrilled to work with Microsoft to help expand and scale the adoption of AR hardware and software across the entire industry."

"Our goal is to inspire and empower others to collectively work to develop the metaverse future – a future that is grounded in trust and innovation," added Microsoft's corporate vice president Mixed Reality Rubén Caballero. "With services like Microsoft Mesh, we are committed to delivering the safest and most comprehensive set of capabilities to power metaverses that blend the physical and digital worlds, ultimately delivering a shared sense of presence across devices. We look forward to working with Qualcomm Technologies to help the entire ecosystem unlock the promise of the metaverse."

With metaverse being a buzzword going into 2022, we can likely expect more companies to get on board with augmented reality and related technologies. Microsoft already brought the metaverse to Microsoft Teams with its Mesh tech.

What you need to know

• 8th Wall has launched its Reality Engine, a platform to make augmented reality experiences that instantly work across mobile and PC systems.
• It enables development for "iOS and Android smartphones, tablets, computers and AR and VR headsets."
• Reality Engine is available today and is included with 8th Wall's subscription offerings, which you can experience at no cost via a 14-day free trial.

Wondering if there's a development platform that'll let you seamlessly prep WebAR experiences for HoloLens, PC, and Android? That's Reality Engine's promise, a new development platform launched by 8th Wall. It's available today and is bundled alongside 8th Wall's existing subscription options, which start at $99 per month.

The sales pitch is thus: Developers can ensure their web creations translate to the metaverse experience with ease across Android, iOS, tablets, PC, and various headsets such as HoloLens 2.

The goal is to make immersive website development less of a hassle. Reality Engine features spatialized UI that puts 2D web elements onto a spatial control panel, universal interaction mapping for easy input assignment, environment mapping, and responsive scale capabilities.

To gain access to 8th Wall's toolset, you'll need to subscribe, which starts at $99 per month. However, you can take advantage of a 14-day free trial to get a taste of what the company's offering.

What you need to know

• AMD released its Accelerated Data Center premiere keynote on November 8, 2021.
• It announced it had secured Meta (Facebook) as a customer of its data center chips.
• It also gave a roadmap for its Zen 4 CPU plans.

AMD's recent keynote for its Accelerated Data Center event contained nuggets on the company's current business achievements as well as its Zen 4 CPU strategy, among other items.

On the business success front, AMD declared Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is a customer of its data center chips, meaning Team Red may be helping usher in the era of Zuckerberg's real-world Ready Player One. And as for chips geared toward data centers and servers capable of powering potential metaverses, AMD also offered a glimpse at its upcoming EPYC processors.

The 96-core, 5nm Genoa processor is set for 2022, and Bergamo is coming in 2023, packing a max of 128 cores per chip. Also be on the lookout for Zen 4c Zen 4 cores, which are built for cloud workloads (hence the "c").

To watch the presentation for yourself, you can head on over to AMD's YouTube channel.

There are other bits of information in the full presentation, such as the scoop on AMD's new Instinct MI250X GPU. And if you really want the full range of AMD's November 8 updates outside of just the keynote presentation's content, note that the company released testimonial videos from its business partners, including a video on how Microsoft Azure and AMD go hand-in-hand.

However, the long and short of everything presented is straightforward: AMD has something fresh coming to all of its work sectors, be they the company's best graphics cards or best CPUs.

We're back with another exciting episode of the Windows Central Podcast, and this week, Microsoft is bringing their flavor of the metaverse to Teams with Mesh next year. Dan and Zac also check out other announcements from Ignite, and Intel's 12th Gen processors.

This episode of the Windows Central Podcast was recorded on November 5th 2021.

Links:

• Microsoft is bringing the metaverse to Microsoft Teams with Mesh in 2022 | Windows Central
• Experts agree that Intel's 12th Gen CPUs bring the fight back to AMD | Windows Central
• Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev Channel can now try out Android apps | Windows Central

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Hosts

• Daniel Rubino
• Zac Bowden

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What you need to know

• Microsoft president Brad Smith recently discussed the metaverse.
• The metaverse is a joint augmented reality experience that Meta is working towards.
• Smith warns that the experience "not like dying and going to heaven."

Microsoft president Brad Smith recently discussed several hot topics, including the metaverse, in an interview with Reuters. While Smith thinks the technology will be important in the future, he tempered expectations for it. He also explained the importance of privacy and digital safety within it.

When Facebook rebranded to Meta, the company shared the idea of a metaverse that it's working towards. It is an augmented reality joint universe that allows people to interact in several ways. Meta plans to hire thousands of people to help create it. It's an ambitious idea that's drawn concern regarding privacy.

"I think (the metaverse) will be very big... and quite important," said Smith. "We have to ensure that it protects privacy, digital safety and protects against disinformation, manipulation. We have a lot to clean up."

Many of the concepts behind the augmented reality universe aren't new. Windows Central Senior Editor Jez Corden claims that "the tech industry's 'metaverse' fad is a load of bollocks." He also highlights that Minecraft is already a metaverse app.

While Smith didn't use the same type of language as Corden, he cautioned people about getting overhyped. "We're all talking about the metaverse as if we're entering some new dimension," he said. "This is not like dying and going to heaven. We're all going to be living in the real world with people."

Smith also noted that Meta likely won't be the only company to create a metaverse, stating, "everyone is going to be entering this."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also discussed the metaverse in a recent interview.

This past week, everybody's favorite robotic tech personality Mark Zuckerberg announced that he's rebranding Facebook Inc to "Meta" in reference to the company's new "metaverse" focus. The announcement spawned a wave of intrigue in the idea, although, really, it's not exactly a new concept.

I saw a tweet "leak" today that proclaimed "MICROSOFT IS DEVELOPING METAVERSE APPS FOR XBOX," which had me rolling my eyes. Specifically, the company announced new Mesh features which includes personalized avatars in mixed reality. This latest hype completely glosses over the fact that Microsoft already owns some of the largest services in this category, the biggest known to most of us as Minecraft.

Wait, what? Minecraft is a metaverse app?! Yes, yes it is.

Minecraft is one of the only games on Earth that allows cross-platform play between VR, phones, consoles, and PCs. It has a user-generated content platform (also known as UGC), where modding companies make literal millions of dollars selling custom Minecraft worlds. It even has an educational version, designed to be used by professional teachers in classrooms. Crucially, Minecraft also sports 180 million monthly active users across its connected, persistent cloud-based worlds, hosted entirely on Microsoft Azure.

Obviously, Microsoft is using Minecraft's "metaversal" design as a basis for exploring other games that could have this kind of application intent, following on from the success of the likes of Roblox and other similar titles.

So, what is the metaverse really, and why is Facebook attempting to drive hype in that direction?

Surprise, it's about money

The metaverse is an utterly redundant concept because, guess what? The internet already functions as a metaverse. The internet has different rules to our "real lives," complete with infinite hits of dopamine through various escape vectors. Whether you're living vicariously through a celebrity Instagram feed, perusing the infinite wealth of knowledge that exists on YouTube, or getting yelled at while working on Microsoft Teams by your boss, it's all metaversal. The problem for Facebook is that it's angry that it doesn't own all of it.

The metaverse is an attempt by Facebook and other companies to to create their own sub internet, where it owns every point of entry, from the hardware down to the experiences. It wants this because, right now, the current global Western internet is essentially a "metaverse" owned by Google on the search and ad front and Amazon on the retail front.

Google's dominance in search and ad placements effectively decides what websites live and die at an unaccountable whim. Anybody reading this in the web publishing game knows all too well the horror of the Google algorithm change, which can crater your traffic for arbitrary reasons and leaving you scrambling to keep your business afloat. When it comes to retail, Amazon is the dominant force so the majority of people bypass Google entirely when they need to buy something. The internet is an "open" metaverse that has coalesced in large part around a handful of dominant tech companies, for better or worse. In Facebook's case, it's definitely for the worse.

Facebook has suffered from a range of existential threats to its business recently. Anyone who knows my writing by now knows I have a passionate hate for the dystopic effects Facebook's algorithm has had on society, but let's leave that to one side for a moment.

Facebook is nervous that young people are wholesale rejecting its app. While Instagram remains steady, Facebook itself has seen a notable crash in user retention among young people, who see it as an "uncool" social network for older people. Facebook's social platforms have been besieged with negative press lately, too. A Facebook employee leaked mountains of data, revealing that the company prioritized profits over user safety, pushing divisive and hateful content on purpose. While hundreds of millions of us still use Facebook services, a wide range of people feel negative about the platform, indicating that people use it out of a sense of social obligation, rather than reverence for the brand.

Facebook's rebrand to "Meta" is, by its own admission, an attempt to de-emphasize Facebook, which given its lack of appeal to younger users, may end up being a legacy product as its users literally die off. Zuckerberg and the team are looking ahead to the future, and you can bet all the Robux you have that they're looking at Minecraft and Roblox to model their new platform on.

The metaverse already exists

Facebook's metaverse is essentially an attempt to create an internet dimension where the company can have a large hand in lifestyle flow. Like Instagram (also owned by Facebook), any retail activity would result in a cut going to the company and, therefore Zuckerberg. Any search activity could be sanitized (or sensationalized) by Facebook. Access would be governed by Facebook-made hardware like the Oculus Quest 2 (now known as the Meta Quest), which would let it sidestep the profit-devastating privacy crackdown the platform experienced on iOS recently.

Sure, there's no way the 'Zuckerverse' would hit critical mass without first spreading via the public web, but like many platform holders, there would be an effort to ensure the "premium" experience is tailored for its hardware experiences first, like how Google prioritizes YouTube development and features on Android. The Zuckerverse is just the latest extension of the platform's attempt to keep you inside its apps and services at all times. You can think of it as a more aggressive incarnation of Instagram's built-in browser, which prevents Google from accessing your delicious web cookies when you hit links. There's a reason Facebook doesn't let you add URLs to the descriptions on Instagram posts.

Reduced down, the metaverse is simply a branding exercise. It has allowed Facebook to sidestep criticism of its toxic social platforms and has given investors something to focus on for the future. Facebook's share price has been on a downward trend for this quarter, but saw something of an uptick since this rebranding exercise got underway. But, like much of what Facebook says lately, it's likely to just be smoke and mirrors.

Facebook is employing "ten thousand" engineers in Europe to make its "Zuckerverse" into an unreality, but we've seen this time and time again. And we've seen it flop, time and time again. Sony's PlayStation Home VR social experience shut down a few years ago, and very few of the concepts Zuckerberg proposes in the original reveal seem to go further than what we've seen already on PlayStation VR, Windows Mixed Reality, or even older services like VR Chat or Second Life.

If the play is VR, then I'm not sure it will be adopted as Zuckerberg hopes it will. Minecraft has had VR support for years at this point, yet it's by far the least-played version of the game. When it comes to VR, society has spoken: few people actually want to strap a giant thing on their face in order to do non-VR things. Despite the global chip shortage, it's extremely rare that I see the Oculus Quest 2 sold out on Amazon, while companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are all warning investors that their console supplies can't meet demand. VR can be fun for gaming, but I think Facebook is kidding itself if it thinks people will put on a health-monitoring headset and fill their home space with Zuckerberg-connected cameras just for the privilege of talking to friends and family while wearing a low-poly robot suit.

Minecraft has an interconnected system of programs across multiple pieces of hardware and Roblox allows people to share and create words in an enclosed ecosystem. What Facebook wants with its metaverse is just called the internet. Zuckerberg is just mad that he can't control all of it.

Don't fall for the hype

I already see bloggers and commentators speculating on what the metaverse hype means for Microsoft. The answer is nothing. It's already in the "metaverse" business from a gaming perspective, with Minecraft, and other lifestyle online games it's developing with ZeniMax Online Studios, IO Interactive, and possibly Mainframe. Microsoft announced today that you'll be able to portray yourself as a cartoon avatar in Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Mesh.

Honestly, who cares? Does Microsoft think I want to look like a bad Pixar knock-off while getting yelled at for missing meetings? (Sorry Dan.) Is this the best the "metaverse" hype offers?

Look, techbros, just call it what it is: it's the internet. It's still the same old dystopian bullshit we know and love to hate and hate to love. Zuckerberg can hire 50,000 engineers if he wants, but I wonder what society could achieve if those creative minds were funded by these billionaires to create something that actually helps the world. What they're trying to build here is a product that solves a problem that doesn't exist, unless the problem is Zuckerberg's desperation to break free of a competitive internet ecosystem.

At the end of the day, I can't help but feel like this at least partially rooted in some pathological arrogance that tech billionaires have towards average people. Are our lives are so miserable that all we need is a virtualized vision of what it would be like to be rich? It's somewhat ironic that Zuckerberg's demo of his Zuckerverse takes place in a mansion, and then on a spaceship, given that the headlines have been dominated by technocrats taking space tours into low orbit this year.

Perhaps what "average people" actually need is a world with less Zuckerberg in it, not more.

What you need to know

• Microsoft is announcing its Mesh platform for Microsoft Teams.
• The new tech lets you use your webcam to create an animated avatar for online meetings.
• Microsoft and Accenture are already using the platform as a virtual campus called the Nth Floor.
• Mesh for Teams coming in early 2022 and is part of the 'metaverse' push by technology companies.

The "metaverse" concept has been around since 1992 ever since Neal Stephenson referred to it in his book Snow Crash for a 3D world with avatars as alternatives for real people. But the term is being thrown around in 2021 faster than big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, NFT, and Internet Of Things (IoT). Heck, even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is now talking about it.

That makes Microsoft's Ignite announcement around Mesh coming to Teams in 2022 seemingly trendy, but in fact, the company has been working on the technology behind it since 2010 with ground-breaking HoloLens headset.

Announced in March of this year, Microsoft Mesh is a form of "holoportation" that lets groups of first-line works remotely collaborate on technical projects through its HoloLens platform. But today, the company is moving forward with that concept to "knowledge workers" by bringing Mesh to Microsoft Teams starting early next year.

What is Mesh for Microsoft Teams? In its earliest stages next year, it is simply an avatar that you can design to represent you in online video meetings. And no, a $3,000 Microsoft HoloLens 2 is not required, nor even a Mixed Reality (MR) headset. Katie Kelly, a principal project manager at Microsoft, working on Mesh for Teams, explained it in today's press release:

The concept falls back to Microsoft's goal with Teams to let people more closely work together when remote but addresses ongoing issues with work-from-home scenarios. Microsoft cites ongoing research that shows people are more engaged with video during online meetings, for probably obvious reasons. But some gripes lead to people flipping off their cameras, too, whether it was just burnout from too many video calls, not wanting to change attire for the meeting, or maybe even the urge to multitask while not looking distracted.

Substituting your live image for your avatar that animates based on your voice and movements acts as a buffer to those grievances while letting your team know you are present and engaged. At the very least, it's a lot better looking than a static bubble with your initials.

Microsoft Mesh for Teams is not just a concept, either. Microsoft describes its work with Accenture, which has "more than 600,000 people serving clients all over the world," and its use of Mesh for Teams. Microsoft and Accenture created the "Nth Floor," which serves as a virtual campus letting employees gather for coffee, presentations, parties, and other events no matter their actual location. Later, the same technology was adapted for onboarding new employees.

A realistic virtual reality?

What is interesting is the news for Mesh for Microsoft Teams is that it doesn't feel like some far-fetched concept akin to Facebook's recent announcement with Nintendo-level corniness. Using existing technology like office webcams and Teams to create animated avatars is a logical first step — whether on a phone, tablet, or PC.

Of course, down the road, maybe we'll all be sporting MR and VR headsets to show up to the morning management meeting while floating in some computer-generated fish tank. But for now, Microsoft's use of Mesh for Teams feels achievable. As Microsoft's Katie Kelly remarks:

Still, the overall buzzy-ness of "metaverse" does feel a bit overplayed, but maybe it is also the way to make AR and VR click with people, as clearly the application for consumers is lagging.

At the very least, Microsoft will make using its Teams software for video meetings a little less monotonous next year. Pajamas, messy hair, no makeup, all while multitasking when Barbara and John ramble on about those TPS reports? Sign us up.