Metaverses are getting a lot of press these days. Ever since Facebook rebranded itself to Meta and announced the metaverse, ”the next evolution of social connection,” folks have been wondering just how long it’ll take Facebook to create a Ready Player One-style virtual world.

Not to be completely outpaced by Facebook, Microsoft has recently chimed in to say it’s working on its own metaverse. According to an interview between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Bloomberg, Microsoft’s metaverse will have a virtual version of Microsoft Teams that works with augmented and virtual reality hardware while still being accessible from traditional 2D screens.

Nadella also mentioned that Microsoft’s metaverse will eventually grow to include Xbox game consoles, transforming previously 2D games into more immersive experiences.

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“You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming,” Nadella said. “If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they are 2D today, but the question is, can you now take that to a full 3D world, and so we absolutely plan to do so.”

To be clear, all three of those games are virtual 3D worlds--you can go up, down, left, right, forwards, and backward in any direction you want, just through the lens of a 2D screen. Nadella seems to think that a metaverse requires a virtual reality component as in Ready Player One.

Frankly, no complaints here. Ready Player One is a cool idea and virtual reality is certainly the most immersive experience one can achieve in video games today. However, Microsoft seems to be trailing Facebook (or Meta, as we should get used to calling it) in VR technology. Most Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets have disappeared off the market (barring the HP Reverb G2), while Oculus’s Quest 2 is getting more players to try VR than ever before.

Microsoft certainly sounds like it’s all in on VR, but it’ll have to catch up to Meta before it can realize its own metaverse.

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