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Mesh Development Overview

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What you can do with Mesh

As a Mesh developer, you have an exciting opportunity to bring people together in shared immersive experiences in 2D (PC) or 3D (Oculus Quest). Microsoft Teams offers the Mesh experience in pre-built Immersive Spaces, but you can create custom experiences that take full advantage of your creativity. Build imaginative settings in Unity, add 3D models created by you and others, and develop activities that will delight visitors to your experiences. You'll also help the hosts of your experiences reduce business costs by bringing distributed teams together.

Here are some examples of the types of experiences you can create:

An infographic that shows five possible types of Mesh experiences.

Click the thumbnails below to learn about what some of our partners are doing with Mesh.

a thumbnail image of the Accenture logo that the reader can click to open a larger descriptive image.

a thumbnail image of the Takeda logo that the reader can click to open a larger descriptive image.

a thumbnail image of the World Economic Forum's Mesh project title that the reader can click to open a larger descriptive image.

How building and publishing a Mesh experience works

Your custom Mesh experience starts out in Unity as a new project or existing sample. Your key to creating these experiences is the Mesh toolkit for Unity which provides a collection of features that enable you to develop rich interactive worlds. You can add content to the project/sample Scene and then upload it to a Collection in Mesh on the web as an Environment. An organizer can then create a Mesh event based on your Environment.

In the Develop environnments section of the Mesh help site, you'll find articles that introduce you to the features of the Mesh toolkit, walk you through Unity setup, and provide step-by-step instructions for building and publishing your environment to Mesh on the web. If you don't want to start from scratch, you can use one of our Mesh sample projects as a starting point.

Major steps in Mesh development
Choose your journey
(You can build from a tutorial or sample or start from scratch)
Add 3D models, textures and lighting
Add enhanced features (animations, physics, WebSlates)
Add logic with visual scripts and C# cloud scripts
Build and publish your environment
Explore Mesh samples

The Mesh toolkit in detail

An infographic that shows four of the features of the Mesh toolkit.

  • Mesh graphics tools is a collection of scripts, shaders, assets, and samples created to help improve the visual fidelity of Mesh worlds while staying within performance budgets.

    A screen shot of shaders available in the Mesh toolkit.

  • Mesh physics lets you create engaging dynamic content.

    A screenshot of the mass and gravity exhibit in the Mesh Science Building sample, with objects rotating around the sun.

  • Mesh interactables allow event attendees to select, grab, hold, and throw objects.

    A screenshot of the ball dropping game exhibit in the Mesh Science Building sample.

  • Mesh controllables enable event hosts to control and sync video and timeline playback across multiple rooms of a large event.

    A screenshot of a timeline in Unity.

  • Mesh triggers, anchors and tethers enable avatars to trigger events, move along smoothly with an object, or be attached to an object that's stationary (for example, a seat or podium).

    A screenshot of a trigger volume in Unity.

  • Mesh avatar spawn and travel points enable avatars to spawn in or move to specific locations.

    A screenshot of avatars spawned in a Mesh experience.

  • Mesh WebSlates are panels that display web content.

    A screenshot of a Mesh experience with a WebSlate on the wall showing a video.

  • Mesh visual scripting lets you add interactivity and dynamic runtime behavior to your Mesh Environments by creating script graphs instead of writing code.

    A screenshot of a visual script.

  • Mesh cloud scripting is a more traditional coding approach that lets you connect to real-time backend data, call .NET APIs via cloud-hosted server scripts, and more.

    A screenshot of a script that's used for cloud scripting.

  • Play mode with Mesh Emulator lets you press Play in a Mesh content project and preview how your content will look to attendees who join events based on your environment.

    A screenshot of a Unity project running the Mesh Emulator.

  • Mesh Uploader is how you upload the Environments you create to Mesh on the web.

    A screenshot of the Mesh Uploader with scene selection in progress.

  • Mesh Content Performance Analyzer (CPA) automatically reports content optimization issues and opportunities before content is uploaded to Mesh on the web.

    A screenshot of the main screen of the Content Performance Analyzer.

Notes

  • The Mesh toolkit is free to download; however, a Teams Premium license is required for all users (including developers and technical 3D artists) to use Microsoft Mesh. You can start building a project for free, but you must have a license in place before you can build and publish the environment.

  • Mesh brings enterprise-grade security, compliance and privacy controls for user and company data.

  • Mesh integrates with M365 apps--Teams, Exchange calendar, and Outlook--with deep links for direct app access.

Next steps

Prerequisites