Microsoft Mesh public preview finally available, Mesh toolkit available as a free download

Last month, Microsoft announced that Mesh public preview will be available in October. As expected, Microsoft today announced the public preview of Microsoft Mesh, a new 3D immersive experience for the workplace. Microsoft Mesh will make Teams meetings and events feel more like face-to-face connections. Mesh toolkit will allow organizations to create fully customized, multi-user 3D experiences depending on their needs. Microsoft Mesh will be available for all Teams Premium users while the Mesh Toolkit will be available as a free download for developers. Also, the Microsoft Mesh content can be experienced by users on a desktop PC or in VR.

Microsoft Mesh in Teams will support the following:

• Avatars: As you enter an immersive space, choose an avatar that you’ve already built for standard 2D Teams meetings or create a new one. It’s easy to customize your avatar to reflect your appearance, style, or mood for the day.
• 3D environments: Choose from one of the ready-made 3D environments that fits your meeting’s needs, whether it’s a big team social gathering or a small round-table discussion.
• Seat assignments: Select where you sit in a meeting or event to drive connections with your co-workers. You can also freely move from one conversation to another.
• Spatial Audio and audio zones: Have multiple, simultaneous conversations and communicate effectively in subgroups without talking over each other.
• Interactive activities: Play built-in interactive games for team bonding within immersive spaces. To get started, you can see a few designated areas to roast marshmallows, throw beanbags, answer fun icebreaker questions, and more.
• Live reactions: Use live reactions such as hearts, thumbs up, clap, and more to express yourself during discussions.

 With Mesh, organizations can elevate team building, training, product demos, collaboration, social connections, and more.

The Mesh toolkit includes:

• Mesh graphics tools, a collection of scripts, shaders, assets, and samples created to help improve the visual fidelity of Mesh worlds while staying within performance budgets.
• Mesh physics, used to create enabling and engaging dynamic content.
• Mesh interactables, allowing participants to grab, hold, throw, select, anchor, tether and spawn
• Mesh controllables, enabling event hosts to control and sync video and timeline playback across multiple rooms of a large event.
• Mesh web slates, enabling designers to add a panel that displays a given web page.
• Mesh visual scripting, which lets you add interactivity and dynamic runtime behavior to your Mesh environments without writing code.
• Mesh cloud scripting, which lets you connect to real-time backend data and call .NET APIs via cloud-hosted server scripts.
• Mesh play mode, which lets you press Play in a Mesh content project to preview how your content will look like running in Mesh for multiple users.
• Mesh uploader, used to build Mesh-compatible asset bundles from your Unity content and upload them to your Mesh World.
• Mesh Content Performance Analyzer (CPA): automatically reports content optimization issues and opportunities before content is uploaded to the Mesh catalog.

Once the 3D environment is created using Mesh toolkit, it can be uploaded to the Mesh portal for publishing to a Microsoft 365 tenant. You can learn more about Microsoft Mesh here.