The battle to control the metaverse: Microsoft vs Meta

INA – SOURCES
 
Microsoft this week outlined plans to introduce the 250m users of its Teams software to the more immersive virtual world known as the metaverse. Its move followed Facebook’s own vision for office meetings conducted in virtual reality, and came days after the social media company changed its name to Meta to reflect a broader corporate focus on virtual worlds.
 
Both companies said users would be able to create avatars, or animated cartoons of themselves, that would move freely between different virtual worlds. For workers, that means attending meetings, hanging out casually with colleagues or visiting “digital twins” of real-world offices and factories.
 
But important parts of this vision have yet to be spelled out, including the technical foundations that will make it possible and the terms on which the new metaverses will allow access to avatars that were created elsewhere.
 
As a first step, Microsoft said that in the first half of next year, users of Teams would be able to start appearing as avatars in the online meetings they already attend. To have one of the squares in a group video chat “filled up by a cartoon character that speaks to you is not going to feel that out of place”, predicted Jared Spataro, head of Teams.
 
Facebook, by contrast, has vaulted straight to virtual reality, with an open beta of Horizon Workrooms, a free app designed to allow employees to work together in a virtual office via Oculus headsets. Users are represented by cartoonish avatar torsos with no legs, and spatial audio technology gives a heightened sense of presence — users hear from others around the room based on where they appear to be seated in the imaginary, shared space.
 
Microsoft’s more gradualist approach — and the fact that 250m people use Teams at least once a month, compared with the 7m paying users Facebook has for its existing workplace communications software — make it the more likely place for workers to experience the new metaverse technology, according to experts in the field.
 
Mixing avatars and real faces in group meetings was a clever way to get people to start feeling comfortable interacting with cartoon versions of their colleagues, said Peter Barrett, a venture capitalist who has invested in augmented reality.
 
But it is not clear that people will welcome the new forms of virtual work or find them fulfilling, he and others warn. Heaping more types of digital interaction on workers after the strains of the pandemic would not make up for what had been lost in human interaction, said Barrett. “Everyone has experienced the exhaustion of interaction with someone over Zoom. We want to be with other humans.”
 
Most users were also likely to find VR and AR headsets uncomfortable and intrusive for more than a short time, he said, meaning that the new virtual work experiences would “have to be extraordinary to overcome the burden of the equipment”.