Microsoft’s master plan for consumer AR: Start with the plumbing

Microsoft unveiled an ambitious new AR/VR platform called Mesh on Tuesday that allows developers to add avatar synchronization, spatial audio, shared holograms and persistent virtual spaces to any app. At the company's Ignite conference, executives demonstrated Mesh with a virtual keynote held in AltSpace, Microsoft's social VR world that is being powered by the platform going forward. Developers will also be able to build Mesh-powered apps for VR headsets, including Facebook's Oculus Quest, and desktop PCs. Support for Android and iOS will be added in the near future.

Ultimately, Microsoft plans to turn Mesh into something like the company's Xbox Live service: the plumbing that allows developers to add multi-user functionality to their own AR and VR apps at scale. And while Microsoft's own bets may be focused on the enterprise at first, the company clearly hopes that third-party developers will extend its reach to millions of consumers. "We do think this is the future of computing, beyond just enterprise customers," Microsoft's mixed reality director, Greg Sullivan, said.

Some of that expanded focus was apparent during Tuesday's keynote, which included guest appearances by James Cameron and Niantic CEO John Hanke, who demonstrated a proof-of-concept demo of a Mesh-powered Pokemon Go game using HoloLens.

Microsoft's own first test case for Mesh is a little closer to heart: The company unveiled a new HoloLens collaboration app, internally code-named Fenix but ultimately released under the Microsoft Mesh moniker, that allows teams to meet for design reviews in AR. During a demo given to a small group of journalists ahead of Ignite, Sullivan used the app to place shared holograms on a virtual table that participants could then hand back and forth, mark up, and discuss with spatial audio, all while being represented with AltSpace-like avatars.

At one point during the demo, Sullivan opened a simulated Teams call in a 2D window to show how cross-platform support with participants joining from desktop devices may look. Mesh's built-in 3D tracking allowed him to treat that 2D window as a kind of virtual camera, and move it around a hologram to show the desktop participant all angles of the virtual object.

For Microsoft, Mesh (Mesh the app, not to be confused with Mesh the platform) is more than just a demo; it's a hint of things to come. "The future default experience of HoloLens is multi-user collaboration," Sullivan said, suggesting that the home screen of the device itself could become a Mesh-like collaboration environment. And the company's plans don't stop there. "We will Mesh-enable our first-party Microsoft apps," he said. One prime candidate is Teams, the company's Slack-like collaboration service. Company executives didn't share a timeline for bringing AR meetings to Teams just yet, but Sullivan made it clear that it is part of the roadmap. "That will happen," he said.

Bringing Teams calls to AR could pit Microsoft against startups like Spatial, which has developed its own AR collaboration software. However, Sullivan singled out Spatial as an example for a company that could ultimately benefit from Mesh as well. "The Spatial guys spent a non-trivial percentage of their resources building the plumbing," he said. "We can relieve them of the burden of the plumbing and help them differentiate on the things that really are special about their offering."

While Microsoft may initially focus on Spatial-like services for HoloLens, Mesh is clearly meant for much broader use cases. Developers are getting access to Mesh for free, and cross-platform support is supposed to further accelerate adoption. "It's not locked, and I don't have to buy one company's hardware, or one company's OS," Sullivan said. Part of that cross-platform approach has been the decision not to reinvent the wheel on mobile. "We're not asking people to kind of rip out their native APIs and replace them with ours," he said. "We'll use ARKit and ARCore for anchoring and mapping."

Sullivan suggested that developers could use Mesh to create immersive social apps like Rec Room, and he likened the platform to Xbox Live, Microsoft's multiplayer game service. "You could do multiplayer network gaming before, but you had to build all the plumbing yourself. Quake and Doom, they did it, but that doesn't scale," he said. "Now, any application that wants to, will be able to have that capability."

Ever since launching the original HoloLens in 2016, Microsoft executives have hinted at plans to eventually build consumer AR hardware and services as well. "We think this is the future of computing," Sullivan said. "And implicit in that statement is, yeah, a consumer thing."

How Microsoft would get to that future has long been less clear. The HoloLens 2, which was unveiled in 2019, is an impressive piece of hardware with hand- and eye-tracking. It's also still a pretty bulky headset, with a hefty $3,500 price tag that is clearly made for the enterprise.

At the same time, the company has struggled to establish itself as a player in the consumer AR/VR space. Partnerships with companies like Lenovo, Asus, Dell and Samsung to build VR headsets powered by Microsoft's mixed-reality software largely fizzled, with only HP sticking around to iterate on compatible hardware. Now, Microsoft is now adding an interesting twist: a cloud-based platform that could power the AR apps of the future, whether they run on AR glasses made by Microsoft, Facebook or even Apple.

"One of the discussions that we've had internally has been: How much hinting, how much teasing do we do about how we think about this?" Sullivan said.

When it comes to Microsoft's vision for the future of AR beyond the enterprise, Mesh may have been the clearest hint yet.

Clarification: This story was updated on March 2 to clarify that Fenix was the internal code name for Mesh.