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What if creation moved at the speed of thought?
A thought. A gesture. A change of mind... what if we could create without having to explain?
Welcome to the EPIC MSR blog
What if... AI came alive through interaction?
A collection of things that make us wonder.
Small experiments. Interesting finds. Possible futures.
A place to collect ideas, share things we find cool, and ask what might come next. Rough prototypes, tiny demos, and the occasional rabbit hole. The best way to invent the future is to live in it.
From the EPIC Research Group at Microsoft Research. Not polished answers or product announcements. Just glimpses of what happens when curiosity meets making.
A patchwork of possibilities
Nine snippets. A few loose thoughts. No final answers.
9 explorations
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What if the answer was a living artifact?
Orchestrating generative AI models can create magical experiences—the next generation of media.
* 04/2026 An idea of its time: the startup Flipbook made this hack a reality.
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What if the answer came as a data-driven image?
The boundary between data visualization and imagery begins to blur. You ask a question. Agents find the data and turn the answer into meaningful imagery.
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What if interfaces felt alive?
The future of interfaces. Generated in the moment. Evolving as people interact.
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What if any pixel was UI?
If we can generate images at interaction speed, do interfaces still need code? What changes when every pixel can respond? What does it unlock—and what new risks emerge?
* 09/2026 Runway moved in a similar direction, suggesting that perhaps this is an idea whose moment has arrived.
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What if your game followed your imagination?
This is vibe gaming. You shape the journey, but never quite know what comes next.
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What if we could edit our reality?
Unlocking generative AR. Webcam meets gen AI for magical interactive experiences.
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What if AI could give you creative superpowers?
Sketch it. Or don’t. A little generative AI magic... how far could your imagination go?
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What if a gesture could do more?
The prompt is in the gesture.
Behind the collection
Curiosity, with room to play.
This site shares some of our ongoing explorations, prototypes, technical experiments, research ideas, and hacks. More informal and immediate than papers or product announcements, it offers a window into how we imagine, build, and test possible futures for human-AI experiences.
Most of these ideas didn’t take shape alone. They grew through collaborations across Microsoft Research and with visitors from institutions around the world.
More about EPIC
The EPIC (Extended Perception, Interaction & Cognition) Research Group at Microsoft Research explores the future of human experiences with technology.
Bringing together researchers, engineers, scientists, and designers, we investigate how advances in perception, interaction, cognition, and AI can expand human intelligence, creativity, and agency.
Rather than focusing on any particular device, modality, or technology trend, EPIC pursues fundamental questions about how people understand, shape, and collaborate with increasingly capable computational systems.
Today, this includes exploring the frontier of Human-AI Interaction: inventing new interaction paradigms, interfaces, and interactive abstractions that help people make sense of, direct, and create with AI-generated content and agentic systems.