If you've played the game Portal by Valve before, you've most likely popped one portal onto the ceiling and another directly below it on the floor, dropped your Companion Cube in, and then watched it fall forever. Well, now it has been done in real life, in an actual hallway, not in a rendered world.
Thanks to some amazing work by developer Kenny Wang, better known as KennyWdev, we can see what it would look like to play Portal in our house, office building, or parking deck in mixed reality on the Microsoft HoloLens.
In case you recognize the name, we've shown off some work by KennyWdev before here on NextReality—specifically his PokéLens project, a faithful, but limited, recreation of Pokémon. The quality and details were so good, I had assumed it was made by an incredibly huge fan of Pokémon. But after seeing KennyWdev's newest project, it might just be that he's a quality game maker overall.
His choice of development environment? Unity. Of course, there are not currently many choices for mixed reality development—it's either use Unity or develop your own process. But there are enough people opting to not use Unity, and quite a few unfinished Unity-based projects lacking in quality, that one has to wonder if there is a better process. It's good to see high-quality projects coming out of Unity.
Having released PokéLens to GitHub previously, it does beg the question... will he do the same for this project? After speaking to him briefly after the release of this video, he was not completely certain of a public release for his new Portal project, but the possibility seems very high.
A lot of people have been requesting it. Just need to touch it up a bit more.
Well, the time has come. In April, KennyWdev uploaded "PortalHoloLens" to GitHub (with brief usage instructions), and I am going to download, compile, and deploy it, then play with it until my batteries dry up. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
What non-Microsoft projects have you seen that get you really excited? For developers, what is your development environment of choice? Let us know in the comments below.
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This is one of the coolest Hololens apps I've seen so far. I'd like to see this one on the headset. I actually haven't seen the original Portal. This developer is definitely on the cutting edge of MR dev.
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