HoloLens Development Guides

In this first part of my series on getting started with Windows Holographic, we are going to cover everything you need to get set up for developing HoloLens apps. There are many pieces coming together to make one single application, but once you get used to them all, you won't even notice. Now there are different approaches you can take to make applications for HoloLens, but this way is simply the fastest.

Generally speaking, in terms of modern devices, the more simple you make an interface to navigate, the more successful the product is.

So after setting everything up, creating the system, working with focus and gaze, creating our bounding box and UI elements, unlocking the menu movement, as well as jumping through hoops refactoring a few parts of the system itself, we have finally made it to the point in our series on dynamic user interfaces for HoloLens where we get some real interaction.

We started with our system manager in the previous lesson in our series on building dynamic user interfaces, but to get there, aside from the actual transform, rotation, and scaling objects, we need to make objects out of code in multiple ways, establish delegates and events, and use the surface of an object to inform our toolset placement.

In the previous section of this series on dynamic user interfaces for HoloLens, we learned about delegates and events. At the same time we used those delegates and events to not only attach our menu system to the users gaze, but also to enable and disable the menu based on certain conditions. Now let's take that knowledge and build on it to make our menu system a bit more comfortable.

In this chapter, we want to start seeing some real progress in our dynamic user interface. To do that, we will have our newly crafted toolset from the previous chapter appear where we are looking when we are looking at an object. To accomplish this we will be using a very useful part of the C# language: delegates and events.

After previously learning how to make the material of an object change with the focus of an object, we will build on that knowledge by adding new objects through code. We will accomplish this by creating our bounding box, which in the end is not actually a box, as you will see.

Now that we have installed the toolkit, set up our prefabs, and prepared Unity for export to HoloLens, we can proceed with the fun stuff involved in building a dynamic user interface. In this section, we will build the system manager.

The release of Unity 5.6 brought with it several great enhancements. One of those enhancements is the new Video Player component. This addition allows for adding videos to your scenes quickly and with plenty of flexibility. Whether you are looking to simply add a video to a plane, or get creative and build a world layered with videos on 3D objects, Unity 5.6 has your back.

Being part of the wild frontier is amazing. It doesn't take much to blow minds of first time mixed reality users — merely placing a canned hologram in the room is enough. However, once that childlike wonder fades, we need to add more substance to create lasting impressions.

When making a convincing mixed reality experience, audio consideration is a must. Great audio can transport the HoloLens wearer to another place or time, help navigate 3D interfaces, or blur the lines of what is real and what is a hologram. Using a location-based trigger (hotspot), we will dial up a fun example of how well spatial sound works with the HoloLens.

Many new developers are diving right into the Microsoft HoloLens, but augmented and mixed reality are fairly big subjects in terms of learning. There's a lot to cover and, unfortunately, very few places for someone brand new to Windows Holographic to begin lessons.

It seems to me you can't swing a dead cat near an augmented reality developer without hearing the word Vuforia escape their lips. PTC's software solution has become the go-to for most developers in the mobile AR space, and since they recently added full support for the HoloLens in Unity, I figured it was about time we learn to make something with it.

Now that we've set up Vuforia in Unity, we can work on the more exciting aspects of making physical objects come to life on the HoloLens. In this guide, we will choose an image (something that you physically have in your home), build our ImageTarget database, and then set up our Unity camera to be able to recognize the chosen image so that it can overlay the 3D holographic effect on top of it.

With any continuously active software, it can start to become fairly complex after a few years of updates. New features and revisions both get layered into a thick mesh of menu systems and controls that even pro users can get bewildered by. If you are new to a certain application after it has been around for many years, it can be downright intimidating to know where to begin.

Now that we've got all of our software installed, we're going to proceed with the next step in our HoloLens Dev 101 series—starting a fresh project and building it into a Holographic application. Then we will output the application to the HoloLens Emulator so we can see it in action.