Day: May 25, 2018

My Time at the Microsoft Garage and the BCTech Summit

alexr2015

Recently, I got invited to join a pilot program started by Microsoft. It involved working with my peers from my school, and knowledgable mentors at Microsoft. The goal of the program was for the four of us (Me, Sara, Marcus, and Paige) to create a product that we could present at the BCTech Summit, all under our mentor, Stacy Mulcahy. It started off with us brainstorming a number of ideas. We got to play with the tech that they had at Microsoft, and that included 3D printers, Hololenses, and Mixed Reality/Virtual Reality headsets.

While the promise of developing something for virtual reality seemed enticing (And dear god, it really was), we also wanted to create a product that could help people who used it. After taking a day to brainstorm, we wanted to make something that could improve a user’s mental health. We decided to create a smart mirror that would detect the emotion that the user is feeling, and then react and give help on how to deal with that emotion.

 

 

 

 

Over the course of a month and a bit, we came to the Microsoft Garage in our own free time to work on developing the software to detect the users emotion, and the hardware to house everything. I worked on the software with our mentor Stacy Mulcahy. She taught me basic coding with JavaScript, how to add APIs, and how to use Visual Studio and GitHub. Marcus and Paige worked on creating a box to house the mirror. Stacy also ordered some 2-way acrylic panels for us.

The prototype was a taken apart monitor that was connected to a raspberry pi, which is all stored inside of the box. We have a keyboard and mouse connected to the prototype, but later, we would like it to be touch/voice activated. The monitor/pi is stored inside the box, and the two-way acrylic covers the monitor to create the smart mirror functionality. There is also a camera attached to the top of the mirror that scans the person sitting in front of it and sends the face to the API to get it analyzed. Once it’s analyzed, the information gets sent back to the mirror, which is displayed in the ultimate form of millennial communication: an emoji.

We’re super proud of what we created. Being able to proudly walk into the showroom, and talk to all these amazing people in the tech industry about what we built was an amazing feeling.