Blog posts by Garage Team

New VR Garage project Microgravity Lab takes students to space
Virtual reality can transport us to new lands that are near, far, or imagined. As a team of Garage interns found partnering with the Microsoft Hacking STEM and NASA Stem on Station teams, it can also demonstrate physics concepts and spark an interest in STEM careers. For the back-to-school season, we’re excited to announce the opportunity to try Microgravity Lab,....

Built by Garage Interns, find the best movie, powered by the Microsoft Recommenders collection
Challenged with rethinking how to build a movie recommendation experience, a team of Garage interns based out of Cambridge, MA created a sample app and corresponding documentation that shows how to use recommendation algorithms in an app experience. Today, we’re excited to share their project ahead of its debut at the RecSys’19 conference next week: Recommenders Engine Experience Layout, a....

Adafruit and Microsoft Garage interns team up to create Device Simulator Express
This summer 16 groups of Garage interns tackled interesting engineering challenges ranging from making apps more accessible to VR solutions for cybersecurity. One of them was sponsored by the Python Tools for AI team and electronics paragon Adafruit to and set out to make programming embedded solutions for IoT devices simpler and more available to a broader audience. Device Simulator....

Fan favorite Dictate graduates to Office and Windows
Today, we’re excited to graduate Dictate, a Microsoft Garage project, 2 years after its initial launch. The Office add-in for Microsoft Office released in June 2017, enabling Office users to be more productive with the power of dictation. Upon positive reception from users, Dictate’s approach to dictation was increasingly integrated across Office and Windows products. The feature sets are staffed....

Garage Interns add a summer’s worth of new features to release Web TS 2.0
Following the initial release of Web Template Studio in May earlier this year, Web Template Studio 2.0 is now available with additional services, inspired by community feedback and built by a second team of Garage interns. The VS Code extension helps hackers create full stack web apps quickly, now with a broader range of front and back end service options.....

Outings graduates, bringing new destination search experiences to Bing
The Garage empowers Microsoft employees to explore demand for new products and features through tangible experiments. Outings, a Microsoft Garage project, an app for iOS and Android released in December 2017 and has since generated the feedback, usage, and buzz required to confirm the sponsoring Bing team hypotheses that travel and destination search is an area for continued investment. The team has....

New Garage project Smart Tagger makes finding and tagging documents easy
We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when we can’t put our hands on that document we worked on just a month or two ago. Did I save that under Proposals or April 2019? That problem multiplies when you’re working at a large organization, trying to collaborate across multiple teams whether they’re just across the building or a few oceans.....

A new kind of focus group fuels innovation and iteration
How much time do you spend searching for documents? The answer is probably somewhere between more than expected and far too much. Finding files in your immediate work group can sometimes be tricky, but finding shared files by other teams becomes more complicated when you don’t know who the author is, what the title is, or where to find the....

Learn vocabulary from the world around you with new Microsoft Garage project
In the first week of their Garage internship in Vancouver, eight interns were inspired by a Microsoft Education team challenge to build an app that could empower literacy. Today we’re excited to announce the opportunity for literacy NGOs and nonprofits to participate in an experiment that will test their work. Read My World, a Microsoft Garage project, is an app....

As seen at Build 2019, Garage interns launch new tool that creates full-stack web apps quickly
Last week at Build 2019, we released Microsoft Web Template Studio. The VS Code extension was built by a team of Garage interns and enables simple, full-stack web app creation for the developer who wants to get things going quickly. Web Template Studio is now available worldwide in the Visual Studio Marketplace and opensource on GitHub. You can read the....

New Garage project bakes accessibility into game development via responsive spatial audio
At Game Developers Conference 2019, we shared an early peek at Responsive Spatial Audio for Immersive Gaming, a Microsoft Garage project. The Unity plug-in helps developers infuse accessibility into games by making it easy to annotate game objects with descriptive text and present it to players through interactive audio cues. The project is now available worldwide in the Unity Store.....

Interactive art: Public Radio built in The Garage by Boston design studio
Standing 10 feet tall, elegantly sloped along its front face with the soft light of rainbow LEDs glowing behind half inch of frosted acrylic, “Public Radio” is a unique art installation you’ll find at District Hall’s outdoor plaza in the Seaport, Boston’s home for innovation. Turn the metal-rimmed dials to tune to a different station as the corresponding LEDs light....