The team at Microsoft have been working hard to make the latest Internet Explorer standards compliant, meaning that many of the historically required CSS/JavaScript hacks are a thing of the past. To aid developers, they've built this tool to help identify any potential issues with a given website. They approached us to find an innovative way to attract event/conference attendees to come and use this tool.

How it worked

Admiral Edgecase was a 5 day hack-spirited build in the basement of the Microsoft campus in Reading with a goal of creating a bit of theatre to help draw in the crowds at conferences. With inspiration drawn from the steampunk era, we created a modified arcade cabinet complete with: RGB lights, copper cladding, a supermarket till display, brass studs, knobs, raspberry pis, switches, dials, fetching green felt, edison light bulbs, arduinos, leather, a smoke machine, a plasma ball and a receipt printer.

It stands at an imposing seven feet tall, with flickering lights, a smoke machine and casters on the bottom for smooth transportation.

The user is greeted with a prompt to enter their website address and interact with various switches and lights to initiate the test sequence, after which the Admiral begins his analysis.

A few blips, bleeps and bloops later, and after a thorough billowing of smoke, the results of their test are printed out on a receipt for them to take away.

What happened next?

People even started making their very own "mini" edge cases

The Micro Edge Case by Lilian Kasem