Microsoft Mesh and immersive spaces in Teams
Mesh brings 3D and avatar-based experiences to Microsoft Teams. Here's what it does and where it's used.
Microsoft Mesh is the platform for 3D / avatar-based collaboration experiences across Microsoft 365 — most visibly as immersive spaces in Microsoft Teams meetings. It's Microsoft's bet that a subset of meetings — especially large internal events, training, and team gatherings — benefit from something between a video grid and physical presence.
What immersive spaces in Teams provide
In a Teams meeting, participants can choose to enter the immersive space:
- Each participant has an avatar representing them.
- The space itself is a 3D environment — a virtual conference room, an auditorium, a beach, a board room.
- Avatars can move around the space, group up in smaller huddles, signal interest via emotes.
- Spatial audio — voices come from the direction of speakers within the space.
- Shared content (slides, video, web pages) appears on virtual screens in the space.
- Templates and custom environments branded for your organisation.
It works on Teams Desktop (Windows, Mac), the Quest VR headset (where it's fully immersive), and as a hybrid experience for mixed audiences.
Where Mesh is useful
- Large team gatherings — quarterly meetings, all-hands where the video-grid experience feels impersonal.
- Training and workshops — small-group breakouts within a larger space.
- Onboarding — new-hire welcomes that feel less transactional.
- Customer engagement — branded immersive product launches and customer events.
- Cultural events — happy hours, celebrations, social activities for remote teams.
Where Mesh isn't useful
- Daily stand-ups — the format adds friction without benefit.
- One-to-one meetings — overkill.
- Quick check-ins — too much setup time.
- High-bandwidth-constrained environments — Mesh is bandwidth-hungry.
The honest answer is that Mesh works well in specific scenarios and poorly in others. It's not "the future of all meetings" — it's a tool for a particular kind of meeting.
What's behind the scenes
Microsoft Mesh is built on:
- Avatars in Teams — the personalised 3D avatars representing each participant.
- Spatial audio engine — voices positioned in 3D.
- Custom environments — built with the Mesh Toolkit in Unity.
- Microsoft 365 identity and Conditional Access — the same identity and governance as regular Teams meetings.
For organisations wanting custom branded spaces, the Mesh Toolkit in Unity lets you create them. For everyone else, Microsoft's library of pre-built spaces is the starting point.
Licensing
Immersive spaces in Teams meetings are available with Teams Premium for richer features; basic avatars in Teams are included with most Microsoft 365 plans. Custom Mesh experiences require Mesh-specific licensing for the authoring tools.
Where this is going
Mesh has been a slow-burn product — interesting in theory, more niche in practice than Microsoft initially marketed. Adoption has clustered around organisations with specific use cases (training, customer events, distributed-first companies) rather than becoming universal.
The investment continues — better avatars, better integration with Copilot for in-meeting AI assistance, more environment templates. For most Microsoft 365 customers in 2026, it's still a "try with one event" rather than a default capability — but it's becoming more credible year by year.