Author: Jonathan Stuckey
After a rather sad little-life, SharePoint Spaces (an AR/VR support feature on a site template) has been given the heave-ho! Yes, last week Microsoft (quietly) announced that the retirement of the 'Spaces' feature (see below).
Microsoft SharePoint: The "spaces" feature will retire
MC1002417 | February 11 - Due to limited usage and our focus on investing in Microsoft Mesh where immersive 3D content can be created and experienced in a multi-user collaborative experience, we will retire the spaces feature from Microsoft SharePoint Online starting March 10, 2025 and ending August 11, 2025. As another alternative, you may choose to transition some existing content to SharePoint Pages.
For those that don't know this was a frankly bizarre release of a new site-template feature in October 2020 which was then demo'd on the 'online' Ignite, and released in production by Feb 2021. It basically enabled 2 (yes 2) options for viewing AR/VR content files stored in a SharePoint site, and with the aid of VR glasses you too could see some below-average views of 3D models and rotate through 360° images and video content - assuming your bandwidth and desktop could handle the data-stream for rendering.
Unfortunately this whole area has traditionally required, and continues to be, largely a development focused environment for people creating and managing this type of 3D/2D content. The file-sizes are typically huge: nGB's per file min, and require extensive client power to run the experiences with any degree of realism or fluidity.
If you were after an environment for generating or refining an AR/VR environment you wouldn't be keeping the content in SharePoint - the access, performance and available webparts or UX options are just not available. You need to look at something like Mesh (if you want to stay MS, but more likely you'll be looking at Unity or Unreal. (See the review I did for Mesh a couple of years ago)
So there's not really much sadness in the fact this poor-cousin to the standard SharePoint site model, and with misaligned functionality is gone. In fact 4-years is probably more than a fair-go before being dropped.
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About the author: Jonathan Stuckey
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