HoloLens – Spatial sound

15th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

The world of Mixed reality and Augmented reality is only half real without three-dimensional sound effects to support the virtual world. Microsoft deals with this challenge by leveraging the ability of their audio engine to generate Spatial Sound. Spatial sound, as a feature, can simulate three-dimensional sounds in a virtual world based on direction, distance, and other environmental factors. Spatial Sound is based on the concept of sound localization which is a popular topic in the field of sound engineering.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Spatial sound”

HoloLens – Understanding depth (Spatial Mapping)

15th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

Building smart applications which can work in a three-dimensional space has many challenges. Amongst these, the one that tops the list is the challenge of understanding and mapping the surrounding 3D world. Applications usually depend on the device and platform capability to resolve this problem. Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality devices ships with built-in technologies to measure the depth of the containing world.

Scenarios of interest

Mapping the world around a device is critical to enable powerful scenarios in this field.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Understanding depth (Spatial Mapping)”

HoloLens – Mixed Reality Toolkit

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Game programming is an entirely different paradigm for an enterprise application developer in terms of the tools, processes and patterns used. But like any other development engagement, to kick start the development phase and to reduces the learning curve, it is always helpful to have a set of pre-baked tools handy. In the world of HoloLens application development, Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Toolkit is your best companion.
The Mixed Reality Toolkit is an open source project driven by Microsoft.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Mixed Reality Toolkit”

HoloLens – Continuous Integration

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Continuous integration is best defined as the process of constantly merging development artifacts produced or modified by different members of a team into a central shared repository. This task of collating changes becomes more and more complex as the size of the team grows. Ensuring the stability of the central repository becomes a serious challenge in such cases.
A solution to this problem is to validate every merge with automated builds and automated testing. Modern code management platforms like Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers built-in tools to perform these operations.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Continuous Integration”

HoloLens – Continuous Integration

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Continuous integration is best defined as the process of constantly merging development artifacts produced or modified by different members of a team into a central shared repository. This task of collating changes becomes more and more complex as the size of the team grows. Ensuring the stability of the central repository becomes a serious challenge in such cases.
A solution to this problem is to validate every merge with automated builds and automated testing. Modern code management platforms like Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers built-in tools to perform these operations.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Continuous Integration”

HoloLens – Using the Windows Device Portal

26th of October, 2017 / / No Comments

Windows Device Portal is a web-based tool which was first introduced by Microsoft in the year 2016. The main purpose of the tool is to facilitate application management, performance management and advanced remote troubleshooting for Windows devices.  Device portal is a lightweight web server built into the Windows Device which can be enabled in the developer mode. On a HoloLens, developer mode can be enabled from the settings application (Settings->Update->For Developers->Developer Mode).

Connecting the Device

Once the developer mode on the device is enabled, the following steps must be performed to connect to the device portal.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Using the Windows Device Portal”

HoloLens – Setting up the Development environment

17th of October, 2017 / / No Comments

HoloLens is undoubtedly a powerful invention in the field of Mixed reality. Like any other revolutionary inventions, the success of a technology largely depends upon its usability and its ease of adoptability. This is what makes software development kits (SDK) and application programming interfaces (API) associated with a technology super critical. Microsoft has been very smart on this front when it comes to HoloLens. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, they have integrated HoloLens development model with the existing popular gaming platform ‘Unity’ for modelling a Mixed reality application frontend.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Setting up the Development environment”

HoloLens – understanding the device

9th of October, 2017 / / No Comments

HoloLens is without doubt the next coolest product launched by Microsoft after Kinect. Before understanding the device lets quickly familiarize ourselves with the domain of Mixed reality and how it is different from Virtual and Augmented reality.

VR, AR and MR

Virtual reality, the first of the lot, is a concept of creating a virtual world about the user. This means all that the user sees or hears is simulated. The concept of virtual reality is not new to us.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – understanding the device”

Streaming HoloLens Video to Your Web Browser

1st of September, 2016 / / 15 Comments

I am lucky enough to have a play around HoloLens at my office. One of the interests around HoloLens might be how to share what the user wearing HoloLens is actually viewing. In this post, I am going to briefly describe how to setup streaming video from HoloLens to your web browser.

Activating Developer Mode and Device Portal

First of all, Developer Mode in HoloLens must be activated. This is the actual screen the HoloLens user can see.… [Keep reading] “Streaming HoloLens Video to Your Web Browser”