Microsoft, the software and computing behemoth, is seeking to adapt part of its software service stack to the metaverse. Ihsan Anabtawi, CMO of Microsoft UAE, declared that the company was working to make its cloud division compatible with metaverse experiences, and to allow companies to use the data obtained as resources for their specific applications.
Microsoft Preparing for the Metaverse Era
Microsoft, one of the biggest software companies in the world, is one of the companies that considers the metaverse part of a digital future for consumers as well as for institutions. As part of this focus, Microsoft UAE CMO Ihsan Anabtawi commented on the plans of the company and its considerations regarding the metaverse.
To Anabtawi, the rise of the metaverse is unavoidable. This new tool must be treated as a natural occurrence that comes to complement the internet as it is known today. On this, he stated:
We should view the metaverse as the next step in the evolution of the internet, which began as an internet of data in the 1990s and 2000s, the internet of people in 2010s and is now the internet of things.
Microsoft is now working on bridging its cloud and other divisions with multiple metaverse experiences in order to allow consumers and companies to build rich applications.
Microsoft’s Metaverse Activities
Microsoft is aiming to bring more users to the metaverse, actively investing to provide the tools necessary to make this a reality in the long term. Anabtawi explained this was more than just a trend for the company. He declared:
This isn’t a short-term investment; this is bringing the full power of our work across several areas to enable the future of computing in the metaverse for business and consumers.
Part of this metaverse commitment has to do with the headset offering of the company, the Hololens 2, which will allow other companies to produce holographic prototypes instead of physical ones, and make different calculations for, as an example, the design of a product before mass production. In this sense, Microsoft’s cloud division would provide the analytics, data, and artificial intelligence needed for this task as part of its backend.
On the consumer side of things, Microsoft has also been active. In November, the company launched Mesh, a metaverse feature for its Teams app that allows the use of digital avatars in calls. Microsoft is also involved in the establishment of metaverse standards as part of the Metaverse Standard Forum, launched in June.
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