Blog category: Hackathons

Making Smart Cities: The power of hackathons brings together Rogers, UBC students, City of Kelowna, and Microsoft to advance 5G smart city applications
The convergence of industry, public service, enterprise, and academia occurred in January 2020 when Rogers reached out to Microsoft to discuss a potential collaboration with UBC that would showcase the capability of 5G networks when paired with Azure Edge Compute technology. The plan was to get a group of the most creative computer science and electrical engineering students from UBC....

Hackathon project mirrors courage, accelerates progress in the Microsoft Garage Residency
The project team of epilepsy data tracking app “MirrorHR” finds success and support in a Residency with The Garage. For seven years, Microsoft’s Hackathon has sparked new opportunities and given employees the creative space to champion innovative solutions and ideas that can make a difference and solve critical problems. MirrorHR is here to accomplish just that, to achieve a vast....

Garage project Sketch 360 comes to Surface Duo
Nearly two years ago, we released a Garage project created by a passionate engineer who channeled his classical architecture training and love for drawing into a 360 sketch app. Sketch 360 enables artists to create full, 360-degree, panoramic sketches with ease, using an innovative grid design. Originally released on Windows and designed around Surface Laptop, Surface Go, and the power....

Microsoft Hackathon 2020 Grand Prize Winner: Customizable digital assistant
What if you could train a digital assistant on what was important to you and teach it to do tasks, like look up today’s pollen count, book the next open local campsite, or alert you when an item goes on sale? The grand prize winning team of Microsoft Hackathon 2020 did just that with their customizable digital assistant project, built....

Zero Waste Certified: Sustainability at Microsoft Hackathon
While Microsoft’s Puget Sound campus has achieved Zero Waste Certification since 2016, the Hackathon was the first Microsoft event to achieve that honor in 2018, and again in 2019. With sustainability as a priority, the Hackathon planning teams share details of what it means to be zero waste. Every summer Hackathon brings together employees from different disciplines and organizations, along with....

Windows Insiders hack sustainability at Microsoft Hackathon
What do a forester, a developer, and a software architect have in common? A passion for problem-solving and, as it turns out, stopping illegal timber trade. Antonio de Marco, James Mundy, and Mauro Petrini came together from different corners of the world to participate in the 2019 Microsoft Hackathon. Their objective was protecting biodiversity through sustainable forestry by solving one....

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....

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 Externs from MIT collaborate with The Met to spark global connections to art using AI
To help celebrate the second anniversary of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access Program, The Met teamed up with Microsoft engineers and MIT students and faculty to imagine new ways in which their encyclopedic collection could be explored by global audiences. The collaboration started with a 2-day hackathon in December 2018 at The Garage in Microsoft’s New England Research....

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,....

Meet Ear Hockey: our newest Garage project infuses inclusive design into the arcade classic
Three years ago, a team of Microsoft employees joined together on a quest to make gaming more fun and accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. After years of hacking on machine learning algorithms in their spare time, talking with customers in the blind and low vision community, and partnering with gaming experts, the team releases their....

Finally, a way to sketch 360 degree VR scenes
As new technologies, tools, and platforms spring to life in augmented and virtual reality, a new era of XR design and artistry is unfolding. Today, we announce the release of a project that empowers creators to spend less time explaining, editing, and re-doing XR creations, and more time being creative. Sketch 360, a Microsoft Garage project, is a UWP app....