Following last week’s Facebook announcement and its plans for the metaverse, it looks like other big tech firms are laying out their own blueprints. While it remains to be seen how these different metaverses take shape, for Microsoft it looks to be driven by workplace collaboration.

This is how it was presented at least during the annual Microsoft Ignite conference, which is underway this week.

One of the platforms that Microsoft used to showcase this was Teams and its new Mesh tool, that is billed as enabling hyper connectivity.

“The feature combines the mixed-reality capabilities of Microsoft Mesh, which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences, with the productivity tools of Microsoft Teams, where people can join virtual meetings, send chats, collaborate on shared documents and more,” the company explains.

“Mesh for Teams – which anyone will be able to access from standard smartphones and laptops to mixed-reality headsets – is designed to make online meetings more personal, engaging and fun. It’s also a gateway to the metaverse – a persistent digital world that is inhabited by digital twins of people, places and things,” it adds.

As these persistent digital worlds begin come to fruition, Microsoft is hoping for its Cloud solution to form the backbone of this hyper connected experience.

“The Microsoft Cloud provides a comprehensive set of resources designed to power metaverses – there will be more than one! – IoT capabilities that enable customers to create ‘digital twins’ of physical objects in the cloud; utilizing Microsoft Mesh to build a shared sense of presence on devices; and using AI-powered resources to create natural interactions through speech and vision machine learning models,” the company noted.

While the finished product has not rolled out to the general public just yet, it looks like Microsoft wants to use the metaverse to create a digital working world that allows people to connect from anywhere.

It is an ambitious goal, with elements such as cost, hardware and necessary bandwidth all needing consideration.

Either way, it looks like Facebook is not the only one focusing on the metaverse.