Microsoft Mesh

2023

We’ve all been there. You’re in a video call, trapped in your little rectangle, and all you want to do is throw a giant blueberry at your coworkers. We’ve got you.

Blueberries, you say?

Microsoft Mesh is a mixed-reality collaboration platform. It allows people to interact in shared, immersive spaces from anywhere in the world, across a variety of devices. Instead of the drab grid of heads we’ve become accustomed to in the 2020s, Mesh transforms online meetings into unique worlds to explore.

The Mesh platform was in development when we were contacted about the project, with early features Microsoft wanted us to stretch to their limits. Many of the available environments replicated conference rooms, which inspired about as much excitement as their real-life precedents. Our friends at Microsoft wanted to know, what would BUCK create in lieu of more office space?

Whoa. Déjà Vu.

The brief, we realized, was a question of purpose rather than aesthetics. Since 2020, we've conducted multiple experiments to create virtual hangouts for BUCK’s global staff when COVID had made mass gatherings impossible. Even now, with new norms around hybrid work, these spaces that foster casual connections between teammates and friends continue to be useful.

While our internal projects took their structural cues from amusement parks and our artists’ fantasies, with Mesh, there were hard limits on how large and detailed our first world could be.

Meshing Around

In keeping within these constraints, we looked to playground and public park design for inspiration. These are contained sites of unstructured play where participants are encouraged to invent their own games and organizational logic. These studies led to four distinct types of functional zones: the Open Field, the Lookout, a Theater, and the Hideaways. We arranged these zones into a layout that made sense and then set our artists loose. Many of them were working in mixed reality for the first time: it was often a surprise to see how they dreamed up features that would inspire playfulness the moment users loaded into our environment.

Thinking Small

Of the concepts the team developed, one grabbed everyone’s attention straightaway: a picnic scene in which users appeared to be shrink-rayed to bug-height. We thought this change in perceived scale would grant users instant permission to have fun and explore, which was validated when we invited people to the finished experience, called Picnic Park.

Hold On To Your Butts

We can confidently say this is the first virtual environment where you can dream up your own sports with fruit as throwable objects and teacups as “hoops” to dunk them in... And did we mention the dedicated gathering spot where you can ruffle the underside of gigantic mushrooms to be sprinkled with glowing spores? For a brief, blissful moment, as Mesh’s physics were being refined, you could even ride a kiwi slice into the air.

If it sounds like we’re describing a dream, that’s because it was — a dream client, dream team, and dream project. We can’t wait for the next one, and to see where Mesh goes in the future.