Microsoft connecting people, places via metaverse: Satya Nadella

"As the digital and physical worlds come together, we are creating an entirely new platform layer, which is the metaverse," Nadella said during the company's annual 'Ignite 2021' conference.

New Delhi: As tech giants aim to invest in creating metaverse, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has said that the company is bringing people, places and things together with the digital world.

“As the digital and physical worlds come together, we are creating an entirely new platform layer, which is the metaverse,” Nadella said during the company’s annual ‘Ignite 2021’ conference.

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“We’re bringing people, places and things together with the digital world, in both the consumer space as well as in the enterprise,” he added.

The new ‘Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces’ “provides a new perspective on the way people move and interact in physical spaces a” whether it’s a retail store or a factory, or even how organisations manage health and safety in a hybrid work environment,” Nadella announced late on Tuesday.

With this, people can do analytics, get real-time insights, run simulations and automate routine tasks.

“And when we talk about the metaverse, we are describing both a new platform and a new application type similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early 1990s,” Nadella noted.

Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces is built to be extensible, customisable, and seamlessly work with your existing hardware, and the preview will be available in early December.

Nadella said that from Azure Internet of Things (IoT) to Azure Digital Twins, from connected spaces and Microsoft Mesh, “we are building the metaverse platform for you to build upon”.

“In a sense, the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world, and to embed the real world into computing, bringing real presence to any digital space. For years, we’ve talked about creating this digital representation of the world. But now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate in it,” the Microsoft CEO explained.

At ‘Ignite’, Microsoft introduced more than 90 new services and updates.

Nadella said that large-scale AI models are becoming platforms in their own right.

“This means that we are taking the AI breakthroughs and translating them into platforms for you to build upon — whether it’s deploying intelligent agents to speed up customer service, or extracting insights from volumes of unstructured data,” he said.