Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality
Microsoft Mesh
A virtual reality product that seamlessly brings mixed reality to your Teams meetings
Overview
Microsoft's mission was to update their legacy social VR platform, Altspace, and create a platform-agnostic mixed reality product that would later be integrated into Microsoft's existing social products such as Teams and Xbox. My main projects were:
Mesh Standalone Application
Mesh for Teams
Avatar Catalog
Integrating Mesh features into an existing product like Teams that already had millions of users proved to be very complex. The simplest of changes could give drastic results. We had to collaborate closely with the Teams extensibility team and ship features under their tight guidelines.
Since the public release of Mesh for Teams in FY24 Q1, the monthly active users of Teams has risen to 320 million. This is a 20 million user increase from pre-release in 2023. Mesh is a foundational stepping stone in the industry's quest for a truly capable mixed reality future.
If you would like to read more about this project, please visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh
Design
Mesh for Teams Integration
I collaborated with the Teams organization to integrate Mesh Immersive features into the existing product. This proved to be a very integral lesson in cross-functional and cross-organizational team collaboration. There were many stakeholders in both groups which required a lot of communication and understanding of constraints on a legacy software such as Teams. Features I worked on include:
Immersive View
Avatar Reactions
Immersive View
The video above shows how to access Immersive View from 3 areas: Teams calendar, pre-meeting screen, and in-meeting menu. I designed these access points as a holistic view of how users are currently accessing Teams meetings. I also designed the access of Immersive View from the Mesh standalone app.
Avatar Reactions
Avatar reactions was a new concept introduced as a feature highlighting the benefits of using Avatars in Teams meetings. Our art team developed a catalog of avatar-specific emotes and I lead the designs for integrating it into Teams: both avatar reactions and applying the current emoji reactions to the avatars.
Avatar Catalog
Microsoft avatars were due for a complete overhaul of the style and architectural codebase. The original avatars were Altspace's "toon style" optimizing for low-end devices. I worked closely with the Mixed Reality Organization's internal art team to design and create the catalog of Avatar customization options. I was closely involved in multiple aspects of the content design such as: hair styles, facial features, and clothing options.
