Metaverses have been all the rage lately, with Facebook reigniting the flames following the announcement of its new corporate name, Meta. But, one company that has seemingly been quite quiet on this front is Microsoft, who has since revealed in a statement from chief executive Satya Nadella (reported on by The Verge via Bloomberg [paywall]) saying it "absolutely" intends to create a gaming metaverse.
The statement was a broad promise that didn't exactly highlight Microsoft's plans all that well, but it does give us an idea of what the tech giant is aiming to achieve.
"You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming," said Nadella. "If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they're 2D today, and the question is can you now take that to a full 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so."
There's no mention as to how Microsoft will take the next stage of taking these games and bringing them to a physical space to create a metaverse, but it's not like the company lacks the technology to achieve the feat. HoloLens is continually being developed, and recently we've seen Minecraft Earth also release, which despite being a mobile game, does use AR tech.