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Microsoft Partners With Meta To Bring Teams, Office, Windows, and Xbox To VR (theverge.com) 87

Posted by BeauHD from the big-partnerships dept.
During Meta Connect today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company is partnering with Meta to bring its biggest services -- Teams, Office, Windows, and even Xbox Cloud Gaming -- to Meta's Quest VR headsets. The Verge reports: It's a surprise partnership that will see Microsoft and Meta combine their strengths. Microsoft sees an opportunity to bring Teams and its other productivity experiences to a capable VR headset, and Meta gets a key partner in its grand metaverse plan. [...] The Teams experience the new Quest Pro and Quest 2 headsets will even include Microsoft adapting Meta's avatar system for Teams and Teams getting support within Meta's own Horizon Workrooms. "People will be able to join a Teams meeting directly from Workrooms," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the event. "We think that this cross-device, cross-screen experience will be the foundation of the virtual office of the future."

This virtual office of the future won't just be about meetings. Microsoft is bringing Windows 365 to Quest, the company's platform for streaming full versions of Windows to devices. "With Windows 365 coming to Quest, you'll have a new way to securely stream the entire Windows experience, including all the personalized apps, content, and settings to your VR device with the full power of Windows and Windows applications," Nadella said.

Microsoft is also bringing 2D versions of its Office apps to Quest through its Progressive Web Apps (PWA) technology. These won't be full-blown 3D versions of Office designed for VR, but if there's an appetite for VR in the enterprise, then it's easy to imagine Microsoft adapting them in the future. Xbox Cloud Gaming will even make its way to Meta's Quest VR headsets, allowing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to stream games. It's not going to be as immersive as a native VR experience for Xbox games, but you'll be able to pick up an Xbox controller and play them on a giant screen projected inside a Quest headset. Earlier today, Meta announced the Meta Quest Pro: a $1,499 virtual reality headset it's been teasing for the past year. They also announced a big addition to their updated higher-detail avatars: legs.
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Microsoft Partners With Meta To Bring Teams, Office, Windows, and Xbox To VR More

Microsoft Partners With Meta To Bring Teams, Office, Windows, and Xbox To VR

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  • Nope (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
    • Take a breather, Francis. This is an ad.

      • Re: Nope (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @08:58PM (#62958495) Homepage Journal

        In whoch case it's clear that it's a "you shouldn't".

      • Re:Nope (Score:5, Funny)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @09:06PM (#62958517)

        This is not an ad, this is a threat.

        • Facebook are desperate for someone, anyone to show some interest in their stupid VR nonsense and probably paid Microsoft some money to do a press release and pretend they were serious.
          Microsoft had that stupid Hololens thing, which cost an arm and a leg and was complete shit, so I'm going to assume that if they do expend any effort on this they'll get it wrong too.

          • Well, considering Microsoft's track record when implementing something themselves, this may just be what's needed to finally sink the metaverse for good.

            • Microsoft's best products are all based on hardware from other companies they bought out. Hmm... I wonder if Facebook will be on the market soon? Zuckerburg and Nadella are definitely talking to each other...
            • We can but hope.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            Believe it not millions of people are already loving the shit out of this VR 'nonsense.'

            Meta is developing the hardware here and the MR version like hololens is built into the new meta quest pro.

            • By millions, do you mean just you personally?

              Is there a citation for the daily active VR users for a FM/Meta VR product? Does it support millions?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shaitan ( 22585 )

                Arbitrary qualifiers you added are rejected. I don't have nor am looking for an active daily user count but suggesting such a count would be limited to Meta apps/hardware or need to be millions for the POOL of users to be millions is ridiculous. Even the 24k/daily users on VR chat represents a pool of millions of users.

                The claim was millions of vr users and indeed tens of millions of units have been sold of just the latest meta quest headset. Finding a citation that easily establishes that is trivial.

                As of

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shaitan ( 22585 )

                I will say as a follow-up to temper my other rebuttal with citation... I had a similar perception to yours on this technology not so long ago.

                There are some misconceptions that float around for different reasons. One is cause by investors in the metaverse bubble game... this is propagated by clowns trying to sell fake real estate and goods with NFTs. This is basically a bunch of scammers capitalizing on general ignorance of 'what is a metaverse' and people trying to find the answer. The real answer is the '

            • I was sent two Hololens devices last year for a remote training project the company i work for had set up.
              They are unusable and I sent them back. Later I heard that Microsoft refunded our money for the 50 or so we bought globally.

              I would love to see some sort of evidence for "millions of people are already loving the shit out of this VR 'nonsense."

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shaitan ( 22585 )

                The hololens is not VR but MR, it is a highly experimental pre-alpha of MR technology nowhere near ready for public consumption.

                My five year old jumps onto our quest 2's, loads and plays fruit ninja. Sometimes she asks us to bring in a step so she can reach the apples in the trees to feed her virtual pet dragon bogo but otherwise can mostly use the technology on her own both walking around with a virtual border and using stick controls while standing on her step. Does that sound like something which would h

    • That's sort of the problem - neither of them can do the /something/.

      Facebook can't find a use for their goggles and metaverse. Microsoft can't find a use for Teams. Putting the two together doesn't seem like it'll make the 'killer app' that gets us all flocking to buy/use it. But hey, I've been wrong before.

      As I've said before though, an AR setup where I sit at my desk and it shows me a 50" screen on the edge of my desk would be pretty awesome. Hell, I could push windows off the top and have them end up on

      • Teams is as useful as Zoom, at least it is when the servers are actually up and running.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Magic leap has had this for years but no customer base and has a developer hating apple walled garden that sucks an outrageous cut for an app store.

        This is also feature of the Meta Quest Pro... the headset they just demo'd and are about to release which does VR + AR. Of course you won't be limited to a screen floating on your desk/wall. You'll also be able to pop out windows to be their own floating 'screens'

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Should probably also mention they've added the ability to map your desk/keyboard into VR already along with your desktop. So you can use the airlink feature and do all this now but aside from your desk it won't be your office you see... more likely a much nicer office.

  • But why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fibonacci8 ( 260615 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @08:41PM (#62958429)
    Haven't we suffered enough already?

  • Eeeeeewwwwww (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Yuck.

  • Virtual cubicles. Hey Milton, could you turn that down just a little bit.

    • When 3D glasses were hot (i.e., in the eighties), I imagined that future designers designers would be "disco dancing" in a large room with 3D goggles and corresponding gloves. The "lightning" move would be a zoom, the hand rotation a rotate, the moonwalk would drag a selection, etc.

      Instead, we still are equipped with basically a teletype terminal with a rodent, and we were given a course on how to avoid RSI. In fact, the position of a monitor is actually worse than the position of the paper of the early tel

    • "I believe you have my stapler."
  • now, with legs!

  • Short answer "No" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Aussie ( 10167 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @09:03PM (#62958509) Journal

    Long answer "Fuck No"

  • Because I can't think of anything more infuriating than trying to create a DOCUMENT in vr.

    Seriously: why?

  • Clippy has entered the chat (Score:3)

    by kyoko21 ( 198413 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @09:10PM (#62958525)

    Enough said.

  • Wait a decade (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @09:17PM (#62958535)

    The real metaverse won't happen until 8K per eye displays, along with eye tracking/foveated rendering exist. Unless Apple steps in to disrupt this incremental BS, I reckon 2026 is when we will get 4K per eye VR. 6K in 2030 and 8K per eye in 2032. With foveated rendering, even present-day GPU technology can handle it because only a 480x480 portion of the screen needs to be rendered at a time.

    It needs to be at least 8K per eye because that's when you will be able to start seeing great image quality and read fine text in VR. 16K per eye, but that's probably 2040s (note, the technology to make 16K per eye already exists, but it can't be manufactured at scale .. Reference: https://www.extremetech.com/ex... [extremetech.com] ).

    • You do realize 4k per eye has been available for well over a year (PiMax 8K) and they've announced their 6K per eye (PiMax Reality 12K), right?

      • The problem with the PiMax is that they spread the 4K out over 200 degrees FoV (which is great, by the way,) but it reduces the ppd too much.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by noodler ( 724788 )

      It needs to be at least 8K per eye because that's when you will be able to start seeing great image quality

      Image quality is not the thing holding VR back. It's proper integration with the sensory system of the human body. Which won't come until we get deeply integrated neural interfaces.

      • I don't think that's necessary. What is though is some way to compensate for having to lie to the eye. Maybe some kind of holographic lens [mixed-news.com] will do the trick. The eye fatigue is the limiting factor. There are also technologies for lying to inner ear that could really give the immersion you think people want.

        I don't think people actually want it, though. Some do sure, but I think AR is going to be far bigger than VR. And then you're going to not want to screw with people's balance while they walk around.

    • No, resolution is not the (only) issue. You're focusing too much on a single aspect. It's like counting MHz for system performance all over again

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        No, resolution is not the (only) issue. You're focusing too much on a single aspect. It's like counting MHz for system performance all over again

        Given people hated wearing 3D glasses to watch 3D movies, what makes you think the public will accept wearing a much heavier and bulkier headset? Nevermind the downsides to a VR headset over 3D glasses.

        • I didn't talk about weight/volume! Just that the resolution is not the only thing that needs fixing. Weight/volume isn't the only other thing either. We need a lot of work to fool our brains properly. The last 10% (which we're nowhere near) needs 90% of the work and all that.
    • How about, "until there is some actual use for it"?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        Standing desks are all the rage at the moment, but fads like that never last. Expect this to become the next revolution in office fitness. Navigating the file system is essentially calisthenics. Telework will suddenly be encouraged ... at least for your sweatier colleagues. Typing will very quickly become a martial art.

        Expect a lot of cube dwellers to move on to less physically demanding professions, like coal mining and logging.

    • Your eyes can only perceive about 4000x4000 pixels. 8000x8000 isn't useful unless you're focusing on a small portion of the screen. If the screen in your goggles is full field of view, you don't need more than 4000x4000, or 8000x4000 if you are splitting the screen into a lens for each eye. Why quadruple the required bandwidth for no perceptible improvement in picture?

      • Your eyes can only perceive about 4000x4000 pixels.

        I am not sure what you mean by that. 20/20 vision implies that you are able to resolve features that are about 1 arc-second of separation. That means across 100 degrees horizontal, you must have at least 6000 pixels (actually more, but I digress). The Quest 2 is 105 degrees horizontal. By the way, the human eye only perceives about 1 or 2 degrees of vision at a time. I mean, try to read this sentence without moving your eyeball. We only need to accurately render a box of about 300 x 300 pixels at a time i

        • Using higher resolution in the center of the image than the periphery is something Meta claims they are doing, although I don't understand how that works. Certainly if the glasses are tracking the eye in real time, it could use higher resolution compression/decompression for the area you're focusing on than the rest of the screen. The 4000x4000 I was referring to is what you can perceive in your field of view without moving your eyes; you seem to be saying screens in glasses have a bigger arc than a fixed f

          • Without moving your eye, you only perceive a degree or two of arc, so a box with only a few hundred pixels (say 300x300) across would be good enough. Try to read this sentence .. how many words can you read without moving your eye?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Except my eyes don't get along well with vr anymore than they do with 3D glasses. And I'm not alone, people like me make up about 30% of the market. That's why VR will always be a niche.

  • Now these 3rd rated products will annoy everybody in VR as well? Talk about making things much worse!

    • I don't use teams, MS office, windows, or xbox but all of them are quite popular in their niches.

      Here, they're just bringing their own apps to meta's hardware. Seems reasonable.

  • Since Zuckerberg seems hell bent on dumping his fortunes into this, I hope MS is smart enough to take as much cash for as little effort as possible and just wait for the crash and burn while keeping their own AR teams happy enough.

    To be fair, the HoloLens (like Kinect) still seems like a solution to a problem, the focus on using AR in specialized business contexts is a good bet.

    The obsession with meetings is sad. The tech is there for a few (three to five people) to collaborate well enough. Larger meetings

  • As we pack our bags to head off to the our post 3-D existence on Earth, the first thing we would pack would be Microsoft 365, said nobody at all....

  • Is only good enough to display detailed VR graphics. It does not have enough RAM or processing power to run Teams.

  • MS already has a great VR of equal seriousnes, but mutch bigger adoption and recognition - Minecraft!

  • "With Windows 365 coming to Quest, you'll have a new way to securely stream the entire Windows experience, including all the personalized apps, content, and settings to your VR device with the full power of Windows and Windows applications,"

    ..which is utter bullshit since VR devices haven't even got a proper keyboard to write a document (never mind formatting) and have nothing like a mouse for precision pointing, which then requires an interface that looks like it's designed for a 2-year old.
    Never mind the utter stupidity of having to wear a VR helmet for doing office work.

    This idea is so full of shit that i'm wondering if Nadella is taking his bullshit intravenously.

    • Well, you can still use your actual mouse and keyboard while wearing a headset, so that's not really an issue. The real issue is that there is no demonstrated benefit in doing so. What could you possibly gain from Excel in VR? How would a Teams meeting using VR avatars be better than current videoconferencing - where you might actually be able to see a person's facial expressions and other non-verbal cues?

      VR sounds handy for things like CAD applications, but what component of Office would benefit in a

      • How would a Teams meeting using VR avatars be better than current videoconferencing

        Thankfully...no one in meetings in places I've worked for the past 13 years has really bothered or wanted a camera turned on.....

        That would mean putting more clothes on that a t-shirt and boxer shorts.

  • They're on to something there. Not office or documents, of course - meetings.

    There are many attempts already on the market to make remote meetings more tolerable, with video screens, room cameras that detect and focus on who is speaking, etc. - and for us techies that's good enough as we focus on the content of a communication.

    But managers and many non-tech people don't. For them, a meeting is mostly about people, and looking at a screen full of tiny faces doesn't work. Not enough details for emotional clue

    • I completely disagree. Meetings are where this falls the shortest because those "tiny faces" still communicate infinitely more information than a CGI avatar possibly could. No, that claim is not an exaggeration, any non-verbal communication is infinitely more than the none VR provides. Humans transmit massive amounts of information through facial expressions. Video captures that, VR does not.

      $1,500 for less information is not a sensible choice.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        than a CGI avatar possibly could

        You are assuming a CGI avatar. I'm not. I'm assuming cameras and face projection. MS Teams already removes the background if you want to and the Kinect camera can do 3D scans, so the tech exists to project your actual face into VR.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          What about the massive headset covering half of your face?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Tom ( 822 )

            If they can put a screen there, they can put a camera there.

            But yes, good point. I don't think any of the current devices has that. So you're probably right, at least for the first iteration. But hey, it's MS - never buy anything from MS before it hits version 3.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Tom ( 822 )

            Forget my earlier comment, they already put cameras inside:

            Earlier this week, Meta revealed the Meta Quest Pro, the company's most premium virtual reality headset to date with a new processor and screen, dramatically redesigned body and controllers, and inward-facing cameras for eye and face tracking.

            So the tech is there (and AI can insert the parts of the face covered by the rim).

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by narcc ( 412956 )

              I very much doubt the cameras used for eye tracking are going to be able to produce a usable image of that part of the face. They're designed for eye tracking, after all, not photography. I would guess that they'd use IR and a bright pupil system. Don't forget that the face is only illuminated by whatever is on the display. That could look more than a little odd even if you could get a usable image. Not just because of the colors either, but the angle of illumination is going to be different between the

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Tom ( 822 )

                Oh, totally. It's not that they can just switch it on. But the tech exists. Distortion can be corrected for, etc.

                I don't think this generation will get such features. But I believe there'll be enough demand for real facial expressions that the next one will get a primitive version.

  • People will have to learn how to do a facepalm while having the VR helmet on their face, before this idea of integrating Microsoft office products in VR gets implemented.

  • And that is good for getting work to buy your VR set. I'll be offering to trial this for my company for sure to get a Meta Quest Pro to add to the collection.

    That said my concern is that workplaces will try to use this to kill the flexibility workers get from remote work. Middle management would love more and reliable ways to keep you in your seat and a shared virtual office where they can go back to seeing you and what you are working on is that micromanger's dream.

    Getting rid of the micromanager making yo

  • When I read this, it immediately made me think of the "treatment" scenes in A Clockwork Orange.

    Who knew The Zuck and Redmond would team up in order to psychologically condition us all to love Clippy?


    This may be the final straw that ignites the neo-Luddite revolution against SillyConman Valley.

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