Mixed Reality with Power Apps

As many of you know, I support Power Apps at Microsoft. Power Apps is the low-code, no-code app development platform. Now, combine that with Mixed Reality and we have something very interesting happening. Let’s define Mixed Reality. Mixed Reality, unlike Virtual Reality, is the ability to see designs, structures and characters within our world. Virtual Reality is when you are completely immersed in another world. With the camera of your phone, we can have an app in which you can preview 3D models in, let’s say, your living room. A couple of industries that comes to mind are the real-estate and interior design industries.

How cool would it be for you to be standing in your living room, you launch a Mixed Reality Power App, and while looking through your camera, you see that new couch or desk sitting in your living room? Then you could move it around, change colors, modify the size, and make decisions such as what color you should choose, the size, the orientation. Then maybe you can send it to the manufacturer to produce it.

Or maybe you are a real-estate developer and want to construct a new office building next to some existing ones. You could overlay a diagram from an architect directly on the current location that your existing office stands via your phone and a Power App.

Let’s take a look at how it is currently being used in some industries.

Manufacturing industry. In this example, the customer is trying to imagine how this robotic arm will fit inside the warehouse. The image can live in SharePoint or OneDrive. Maybe you want to send the Mixed Reality screenshot to a manager to get approval if they like the placement. That is where Power Automate can come into play, which is our workflow engine.

Another example is how Pepsi is using it to visualize promotional materials on refrigeration equipment at vendor sites. Just think of how much time this saves. The vendor can send an image to Pepsi, Pepsi then takes the image and overlays it in a Power App to visualize and possibly get approval on a new promotional campaign. We just eliminated a costly physical visit to a vendor site and did this all remotely via a Power App.

This is the exciting aspect of my profession, new technology like this that combines reality with virtual reality (Mixed Reality). You can see the potential in many industries. For more information, take a look at a blog we released in April. Let me know what you think!!