Meta partners with Microsoft for immersive team meetings in metaverse

Facebook parent Meta on Tuesday announced its partnership with tech giant Microsoft to integrate Office 365 suite with its Quest VR headset.

The collaboration aims to strengthen the former's metaverse initiatives. It would enable Meta Quest users to conduct immersive team meetings where they can interact with content from Microsoft apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and SharePoint within virtual reality.

The announcement was made during Meta's annual Connect developer conference.

As reported by TechCrunch, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated, "We’re bringing the Microsoft Teams immersive meeting experience to Meta Quest in order to give people new ways to connect with each other.”

As per reports, Microsoft’s streaming game service, Xbox Cloud Gaming, will soon arrive on Quest devices.

Meta had earlier announced partnerships with Adobe and Autodesk to offer immersive experiences to its users.

Recent developments

Since 2020, global software giants Meta and Microsoft have been betting on metaverse sectors. In October last year, Meta unveiled its plan to build a metaverse. During the same year, Microsoft unveiled Mesh for Teams, which is a metaverse version of Microsoft Teams.

In 2021, as part of its metaverse initiative, Meta launched Horizon Worlds, a metaverse platform for users to socialise virtually. Last year, Microsoft launched HoloLens 2 and "holoportation"—enabling users to project a life-like hologram of themselves or an avatar to interact in the mixed reality world.