Weald Spatial is our sister company that was created to focus on building virtual products for the Microsoft Mesh platform. Mesh was developed after Microsoft closed Altspace and is a Metaverse platform built into Microsoft Teams. This gives millions of companies across the world a new way to meet and collaborate with colleagues. With a custom 3D avatar and a virtual meeting room, you can engage with your team like never before. But, with the Mesh Unity SDK, you can also build rich, interactive, custom spaces. And it was this prospect that got us excited and encouraged us to create Weald Spatial as a company that would focus specifically on this challenge. Because for many businesses who wanted to use Mesh for very specific purposes, there was not an easy way to build the perfect experience.
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We quickly identified a market with a very specific problem that Mesh was perfect for. The Human Resources industry has, for a long time, had an onboarding problem. How to engage with new employees, introduce them to the company, and get their feedback. The standard solution is a series of videos and forms to fill in. It is not an exciting activity.
We decided to build a concept space that explored many areas of employee onboarding. The original concept placed the team on a spaceship that had crash-landed on a strange alien planet. The team would need to work together to collect items from the ship and ferry them out to the meeting area, where they would discuss their choices. Using the Mesh toolkit we built interactive activities that challenged the user and encouraged them to work together on the task. Through facilitation, we were able to guide them into talking about their decisions, and by placing them into three teams we encouraged competitiveness. The initial demos we made were very promising, and the activity was unlike anything anybody else had built for the platform. The Microsoft Mesh team soon became interested in the work we were doing, and we joined their internal Technical Adoption Program (TAP) for early adopters so we could report bugs and discuss future development with the team.
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The second phase of our plan was to tackle other areas of HR Onboarding, including a prequel story with the Spaceship not yet crashed and on-route. The team would be on the bridge of the spaceship and encouraged to participate in a series of activities that immersed them in the company culture, mission statement. There was a hologram video message from the CEO and inspirational quotes from other employees.
Working closely with Microsoft was advantageous, as we had direct communication with their internal team and could report, test and fix bugs in real-time. We were active on the TAP group and made positive contributions that have driven the direction of the platform over the last 12 months. The Unity SDK is extremely powerful and we were able to build sophisticated interactive elements in the activities. Over time we were able to build many different custom environments with Mesh, and have pushed the limits to what can be achieved.
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We are currently demoing the Onboarding space with companies and launching it as a product very soon. We are continuing our partnership with Microsoft and exploring other opportunities. The Microsoft Team are extremely happy with how we have pushed the limits of Mesh, and we are excited for the future of this platform.
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