Blog category: Garage Projects

New Garage project Sketch Pal offers advanced, intelligent inking features
It’s that time of year again! And no, we’re not talking about the leaves changing color, pumpkin picking, or deciding on the best pop culture reference to inspire your Halloween costume (The Scoops Ahoy crew from Stranger Things, obviously) for those of us residing in the Pacific Northwest. We’re talking about Inktober, the annual artist community challenge to create a....

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....

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.....

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.....

Garage projects team up to illustrate the power of mixed reality in a new SDK and sample app
Two Microsoft Garage projects team up, proving that two heads are better than one and that the Space Needle is a lot cooler in 3D than 2D. Today, we are excited to announce the release of Maps SDK, a Microsoft Garage project that enables developers to incorporate 3D world data into Unity-based, mixed reality experiences as well as a sample....

By devs, for devs: meet new Garage projects XAML Studio and Team Retrospectives
Today, we announce two new Garage projects built by developers, for developers. Two teams, inspired by their roles building developer tools, worked on ideas to enhance the developer experience during Microsoft’s annual Hackathon. XAML Studio, a Microsoft Garage project, makes iterative prototyping easy with real-time UI module changes. Team Retrospectives, a Microsoft Garage project, closes the loop on continuous iteration,....