Each year, we host dozens of customer and partners in the Microsoft Garage. As we walk visitors through our community hub, makerspace, and most recently, our new Mixed Reality room, we often discuss everything from fostering innovation to designing spaces where people want to come together to collaborate. Across tech, banking, education, healthcare, and everything in between, one topic that….
Hacking culture comes naturally to Alex Gueniot. As the senior software engineer for PowerPoint driving technical implementation of new features, he just can’t give up on good ideas. “I compulsively need to create and to collaborate with people. That’s why I’ve been involved in almost 20 hackathon projects in the past seven years. One year, I was on six hackathon….
In high school, Kristen Laird experienced terrible burns as a result of a lab experiment explosion. She struggled for years with fear of flames, and decided to turn it around by looking her fear straight in the face and becoming an EMT (emergency medical technician) and a volunteer fire fighter. Through this experience, she has learned to experiment, explore, and….
CONTINUE READING "This Microsoft Garage intern shares how she refused to let fear define her"
It’s just before 9am on a Monday morning, and the team at Microsoft Vancouver is placing the finishing touches on a room full of circuit boards, laptops and, comically, sunglasses (winter is the rainy season, after all). Moments from now, almost one hundred middle-schoolers will descend on this state-of-the-art-facility for innovation, training, and software development, to rub shoulders with engineers….
CONTINUE READING "In the Microsoft Garage, community “making” sparks curiosity in students"
Urban legend has it that some of the greatest ideas in history started with a napkin. The Gettysburg Address, the poem that gave way to the U.S. National Anthem, and the premise of the Harry Potter series—each were reportedly born into the world through the medium of sketches on scrap paper—and when app creators put pen to paper for their….
CONTINUE READING "The napkin disrupted: meet Ink to Code, a Microsoft Garage project"
Just as the Microsoft Garage has created makerspaces around the world to give our employees and interns the opportunity to get hands-on with 3D printing and hardware-oriented projects, we have recently created several “Reality Rooms” at our Garage locations. These specialized spaces provide quick access to the latest in Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality (collectively called “XR”) all….
