Microsoft’s Mesh Will Let Us Beam Ourselves to Work as Holograms

A little over a year ago, millions of people wouldn’t have been able to fathom doing their jobs without going into their offices (for months on end, at that). Yet a year after much of the Western world shut down due to Covid-19, those same people—or, the ones who haven’t suffered the misfortune of losing their jobs—have been working from home, aided by tools like Zoom and Slack. We’re all really hoping this is the last pandemic we’ll ever see, but nonetheless, new tools for remote work—or, really, for any sort of human interaction that involves participants in different physical locations—will continue to come to market.

One of these is Microsoft’s Mesh, unveiled last week at the company’s Ignite conference. With the tag line “here can be anywhere,” the mixed reality platform promises to make remote interactions feel more lifelike than they ever have. A promotional video for the technology shows real-time holograms of people being beamed in to work alongside others, and 3D data popping up in midair. It is, in short, really cool.