Microsoft has confirmed plans to establish a Cognition Africa engineering team in Lagos Nigeria having recently launched its first datacentre in Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa.

According to the company, the Cognition Africa engineering team will be responsible for the development of mixed reality cloud services to a range of devices.

Microsoft describes mixed reality as the next evolution in human, computer and environment interaction; and said it "unlocks possibilities that before now have been restricted to our imaginations".

This area of technical innovation is driven by advances in computer vision, graphical processing power, display technology and input systems.

"On one end of the spectrum is physical reality in which humans exist. On the other is the corresponding digital reality. Most mobile phones today have little or no environmental understanding capabilities. As a result, they can't offer mixed-reality experiences," Microsoft stated.

The Cognition Africa engineering team will leverage Microsoft's various mixed-reality initiatives, especially the Microsoft HoloLens which is regarded as the first self-contained holographic computer making it possible to interact with holograms.

Azure is the first of Microsoft's intelligent cloud services to be available from the new Microsoft cloud datacentres in Africa. The company said other cloud-based productivity solution, Office 365, and Dynamics 365, the next generation of intelligent business applications will soon be added.

"We are developing many new cloud services using AI and machine perception to enable rich, cross-platform mixed reality experiences. We're putting technology on a human path across all devices," the company stated.

Microsoft has yet to make an official announcement of the Project in Nigeria, but has started to recruit software developers.