Meta and Microsoft cooperating for the metaverse
A year after Facebook became Meta to stress its new focus on the metaverse, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched tools for his vision and announced a cooperation with Microsoft at an event Meta said was to “showcase our progress in making the metaverse a reality.”
Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a partnership bringing Microsoft’s Teams to Meta Horizon Workrooms.
Meta says the partnership “will bring powerful new work and productivity tools to Meta Quest Pro and Meta Quest 2 next year, including apps for Microsoft Windows 365 and Microsoft Teams and the ability to join a Teams meeting from inside Meta Horizon Workrooms.
The event included introducing Meta Quest Pro, a high-end headset for USD 1,499.99 and described as “the first in a new line of advanced headsets built to expand the possibilities of virtual and mixed reality. Its pancake lenses fold light over several times, reducing the size of the headset while showing sharper visuals. A new, curved battery on the back helps make Meta Quest Pro a more balanced and ergonomic headset overall.”
The company stressed its was designed with productivity in mind and will be a major upgrade for those who use VR as a tool for work,
“It’s also the first headset we’ve built that integrates inward-facing sensors to capture natural facial expressions and eye tracking. Raise an eyebrow, smile or simply make eye contact with someone, and your avatar will do the same. All of this helps improve social presence — the feeling that you’re right there together with someone no matter where in the world you are.”
The company also launched the next generation of Meta Avatars “that will be more expressive and detailed — and announced full-body avatars in VR, starting in Meta Horizon Worlds.” The company said that outside of VR, avatars will do video chat, starting in Messenger and WhatsApp, “so you can express yourself and react without turning your camera on”.
Meta said future research include:
- Our work to use artificial intelligence and electromyography to create more intuitive, human-centered interfaces
- Project Aria and our partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to help people with visual impairments better navigate their surroundings indoors
- Two technologies to build and manipulate 3D objects in the metaverse: neural radiance fields and inverse rendering
- Photorealistic Codec Avatars, including more robust facial expressions and Instant Codec Avatars that are faster and easier to make
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