If you’re worried the metaverse will be all fun and games, fear not: Microsoft is taking its own stab at the idea, and it will have PowerPoint and Excel. From a report: The company is adapting its signature software products to create a more corporate version of the metaverse — a concept promoted by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg that promises to let users live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds. The first offering, a version of Microsoft’s Teams chat and conferencing program that features digital avatars, is in testing now and will be available in the first half of 2022. Customers will be able to share Office files and features, like PowerPoint decks, in the virtual world. “This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction,” Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Nadella himself has used the technology to visit a Covid-19 ward in a U.K. hospital, a Toyota manufacturing plant and even the international space station, he said. Microsoft also has plans for gaming and entertainment. “You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an interview with Bloomberg. “If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they’re 2D today, and the question is can you now take that to a full 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so.”
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