 So Microsoft brought us down to their Redmond campus for a special event that I thought was just going to be a condensed version of their HoloLens demo. Pretty cool, but we weren't going to be able to film that. I had no idea that they were going to bring us on an exclusive tour of their Advanced Prototyping Center and Hardware Engineering Labs. This was so cool, and it was absolutely unexpected. Let's go see what they had in store for us. Intel's Skull Canyon Nock features a 6th generation Core i7 processor and Thunderbolt 3. Learn more in the link in the video description. Our first stop was their 3D printing room. Much of their rapid prototyping and concept models are realized in this very room. I tried to find more information about the specific printers that they used online, but was not all that successful. What they did tell me was that they could print at down to 14 microns for incredibly fine details, and that they could print a wide range of colors all at the same time. These 3D printers use UV light to cure the plastic as it is extruded, and each one of these printers costs about $200,000. Meaning that all 8 of them cost about $1.6 million. That's only, you know, slightly more than our $3,000 Ultimaker 2. Next up we have the CNC room, or Computer Numerical Control. This is where they run various prototypes of different metal products. The only thing they would show us currently being milled was the keyboard for a Microsoft Surface Book. Everything else was covered up in different ways and made very abundantly clear that we were not allowed to film them, which is fair. On the table they gave us a demo of the process of taking a solid block of magnesium and turning it into the body for a Surface Book, all the way down to the circular-ish pattern cut into the body that helps shed some weight while keeping the whole unit nice and strong. But this isn't the end for the CNC room. They'll build something in here and then find some problems with it and try to solve them, which anyone who has done prototyping or programming knows is just going to introduce more problems which then need to be solved as well. This process, to get down to a good level, will take about 18 months, during which they will also do durability tests, where they will test both what it can take and also what it can't. Learning what the product cannot sustain can be rather helpful for further iterations. And to be honest, it's just fun. I'm sure this had something to do with it. Speaking of iterations, though, they also showed off the design process for, yet again, the Surface Book. This area featured a tiny fraction of the prototypes that they actually had for this device, considering they were doing day-by-day iterations on that 18-month design cycle that I mentioned earlier. There were also large-scale demos of small features, like the surface locking mechanism, that were just straight-up cool. This area was great because it helped us see into the minds of the designers and the engineers working on the project as they evolved from idea to idea, like the spine of the Surface Book looking like, well, the spine of a normal book. Moving onwards, we have the Human Factors Room, where they specialize in anthropometrics, or the measurement of a human individual. They have tons of measuring devices in here, including a special room with 36 cameras mounted all around a chair. They use this room to measure Austin's head. With these accurate measuring tools, they can find what tolerances they need to build into their products, like, say, an Xbox controller. They also have a room in here that we weren't allowed to record in that can go from near darkness to 65,000 lux, and can change in color temperature from 2800 to 6200 Kelvin. Holy sh**. Moving on from there, we have the Audio Labs. Now, Microsoft has over 25 anechoic chambers, but the main one that we looked at today cost over 1.5 million dollars. It's the quietest place on Earth. They can use this room to measure down to negative 20 decibels, meaning they can literally hear air particles moving. Oh my god, that's insane. Anyways, this helps them study how the human brain processes sounds, how different shapes of products can affect their audio, and more. And last but not least, we have the Soft Room and the Paint Room, where they test color concepts and texture possibilities for a wide range of products, like keyboard covers for surface and various fabrics and textures on things like HoloLens and the, uh, well, now seemingly discontinued Microsoft Band. This tour was awesome and completely unexpected. It was fun to hang out with Austin and Judner for the day, and it didn't end here either. Next, we checked out the Garage. 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If you do decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use our offer code, LTT, that gets you 10% off your first purchase. Thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button and let me know why in the comments down below. I know this was more of a factory tour kind of thing, but we were completely not ready for that and didn't have enough time to film on site. So let me know how that went overall. Check out the link down below to see where to buy stuff, I guess, like Surface and Xbox controllers or something on Amazon. Also linked in the description is our merch store. So you can buy cool shirts like this one and our community forum where you can talk about Microsoft's prototyping lab or the fact that their watch thing is discontinued and stuff like that. If you're wondering what to watch next, click this. It's another one of our factory tours, either the Sennheiser one or the Omron one. Whoever edits this will put one of them there.