Earlier this year, May 21st, Microsoft made some interesting announcements in the SharePoint Virtual Summit pertaining to mixed reality and AI.

SharePoint Spaces brings that immersive, mixed reality experience in a device agnostic manner. Following is a blurb from the announcement, highlighting a key point along with some other relevant details in a simple and concise way.

“SharePoint spaces empower creators to build immersive experiences with point-and-click simplicity. You can get started with smart templates to create a mixed reality environment complete with beautiful surroundings, ambient sounds, rich textures, and lighting. You then add content, which can include files you already have in SharePoint, allowing you to repurpose your existing data, documents, and images. Our customers already store over a petabyte of 3D content, including 360-degree videos created with mobile phones. SharePoint spaces are the most natural way to view and interact with 3D content, empowering people to interact with objects that might be too numerous, too large, or too dynamic to experience in the real world or in a two-dimensional environment.”

It seems there is no need for any additional hardware, just the point-and-click, i.e. the mouse can be leveraged to serve the purpose as well. Out of the primary use cases listed around Recruiting and onboarding, Learning & Product development, I think the last one may be the most impactful. As far as the onboarding and learning uses cases are concerned, there are more-real-and-less-virtual ways to make the onboarding & learning process immersive and engaging. After all it’s about connecting with the colleagues and/or other trainees in the physical world, isn’t it?

In my opinion, the product development use case would benefit the most. Reason being, the documents, conversations, and other relevant information along with the product 3d models/drawings can be accessed in SharePoint itself now, without a need for switching applications. The context is not lost, and the users now get access to more processed information from the meaningful conversations.

One can add some more forced use cases like the sales teams using SharePoint Spaces to presents the numbers in their sales meeting instead of using excel sheet. PowerBI and other excel add-ins do a much better job on that one, and that space is already overcrowded. I don’t find these use cases convincing enough.

Although, what I would love to see on the SharePoint roadmap is a marriage between SharePoint and SixthSense.

Allow me to elaborate…but first a blurb from the site itself explaining the concept.

“…Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.”

What if we could simplify the bare minimum requirement of SixthSense from “a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera” to the likes of “point-and-click simplicity” and make it work with SharePoint Spaces? Imagine a situation where one can use SixthSense to capture the information from the physical world, and then move it into the virtual world of SharePoint Spaces…the value add will be huge and the potential practically limitless!