Back at Microsoft’s annual SharePoint Virtual Summit in May 2018, the company announced it was getting ready to ship a new VR maker tool set called Spaces for SharePoint, the web-based collaborative platform for enterprise customers. Now, Microsoft says Spaces is nearly ready for a general release to all SharePoint users, which is slated to happen at some point in the first half of 2020.

With Spaces, Microsoft is aiming to provide point-and-click simplicity by letting users create immersive environments on the fly by using media such as 3D assets, 360 photos, and 360 video—all of which is stored in SharePoint folders. Critically, users don’t need coding skills, or experience with game engines such as Unity of Unreal to make a simple VR environment.

The web-based immersive platform is currently in private preview, however Amy Scarfone, the Principal Design Manager at Microsoft Mixed Reality, announced in a recent VR/AR Association podcast that a public preview will be available for standard SharePoint users “ideally in Q1, but certainly in the first half of 2020.” The news was first reported by German VR publication MIXED.

Microsoft says the file exchange and digital collaboration software is currently in use by 400,000 customer organizations worldwide, so flipping the switch to allow those users to start creating environments for immersive headsets is poised to be one of the bigger VR software rollouts to come to the enterprise sector.

Scarfone says they’ve been working to support every tethered PC VR headset; she also notes the Mixed Reality team is currently optimizing for Oculus Quest as well, Facebook’s $400 standalone VR headset.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Ok, let’s be real here. 1 out of 100 people using this will create a vibrant masterpiece. The other 99 are going to take turns trying to make their coworkers both sick AND bored. It’s going to be an all new kind of hell.

    People will literally miss the days of being able to stare off into space and check their phones. Bosses will LOVE THIS! For the people who use it, it’s going to be the reprogramming scene in Clockwork Orange. It’ll be inescapable torture.

    This might, actually, be a negative blow against virtual reality.

    • Yeah – it would be so much better if only a person could somehow, say, close they eyelids while wearing the VR headset, and just relax or doze off. Sadly, few people seem to know the secret of closing their eyelids, and so this clever form of using the headset to snooze while the boss thinks they are working will remain a secret forever and…

      What the hell you talkin’ about, Willis?

  • @rtovr If you want to get these infos faster, follow my subreddit. thats where mixed got it from, too. they just dont mention where they get infos

    • I’m a regular listener of the VR/AR Association podcast. I’ve listened to the whole episode and extracted the most useful information about it to be consumed within a minute for our readers. So far, as I know, I was the first person on the internet to publish this information. I then forwarded this info to Scott, who decided it’s worth an article. In this wole process, your subredit was not involved.

      Also, we do XR news scouting since early 2015, (almost) 24 hours a day, 7 weeks a day. Every day, we scout an average of about 30 to 50 news and then decide, which of these we will publish as a news article. Or own news aggregator is pretty big by now and well sorted.

      “they just dont mention where they get infos”

      We *always* link back to our origin sources. In cases where we weren’t able to scout a piece of news ourselves, and it’s a very rare find, we put a “Via:” in the article.

      I kindly ask you to stop spreading misinformation about how we do our work.

      • I’m sorry, it’s just too obvious as I’ve told you before. I don’t even understand why you don’t admit it.

  • Jason Cohen

    We all ready have been doing this for awhile now and have a very refined easy to use platform – https://www.yulio.com/

  • deHavilland

    “Unity of Unreal” ─ which one will be pleased or unpleased by the mistype? ;-)