With the shipping of the HoloLens Dev Kits, release of the dev tools and Build 2016, it seems like a good day to provide you all a quick round-up of a few developers delving deep into HoloLens...
First some links to get you started;
HoloLens Development
Start building holographic apps.
Documentation, forums, specs, and more are ready. We can’t wait to see how you transform the ways we create, connect, and collaborate.
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Windows SDK and the HoloLens emulator
Get the tools you need to build apps for Windows, including holographic apps. There is no separate SDK for HoloLens; holographic app development uses Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 with the Windows 10 SDK (version 1511 or later). Don't have a HoloLens? You can install the HoloLens emulator to build holographic apps without a HoloLens. We also recommend installing the Unity game engine as an easy way to get started creating holographic apps.
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Holographic Academy
The Holographic Academy is a space for learning. Our engineering team has designed tutorials for you to learn how to create impactful, holographic experiences with Microsoft HoloLens.
HoloLens Development Overview
Developing holographic apps uses the Universal Windows Platform. All holographic apps are Universal Windows apps, and all Universal Windows apps can be made to run on Microsoft HoloLens. With Windows 10 and familiarity with middleware tools like Unity, you can start building holographic experiences today.
Basics of a holographic development
To make holograms possible, Windows exposes an entirely new set of features to developers. There are six fundamental building blocks for mixed reality holographic apps:
World coordinates
Gaze input
Gesture input
Voice input
Spatial sound
Spatial mapping
Interaction with HoloLens has been designed around gaze, gesture and voice. This is sometimes referred to as GGV. The environmental understanding features like coordinates, spatial sound and spatial mapping provide the ability for holograms to interact with both the user and the world around them.
Holograms are made of light and sound, which depends on rendering. Understanding the experience of placement and persistence, as demonstrated in the HoloLens shell is a great way ground yourself in the user experience.
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Now lets get to the posts from the field. First up is Rene Schulte.
Holo Dev 101 - Getting started with HoloLens Development
The HoloLens SDK was just made available during Microsoft’s largest developer conference /build in San Francisco.
Without a doubt, the HoloLens is the most impressive device in the market in recent history. It is mind blowing and revolutionary but it’s also surprising how the development experience is quite familiar for many developers compared to how different the actual user experience is.
The first dev kit devices are also shipping to a few lucky developers but you can actually start developing for HoloLens even without a device. The emulator works very well; it nicely emulates gazing, the most important gesture, even the speech recognition engine and spatial sound are emulated very well.
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Vangos Pterneas, Friend of the Gallery, has a number great posts...
Hololens – The Ultimate Introduction
As an engineer, I used to be quite skeptic about wearable computers. The reason was simple: wearable experiences were just not good enough. A few months ago, I was speaking at the annual Microsoft MVP Summit and I had the opportunity to experience Hololens first-hand. And it totally changed my view.
Hell, it is not “just good”. It’s real. It’s there!
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Hololens – The Basics
First things first. Hololens is a lightweight headset that projects holograms in front of your eyes. Using Hololens, you can navigate into the physical world and interact with virtual 3D objects. You can touch, gaze, rotate, and even use your voice to invoke commands.
Hololens is equipped with a depth camera. The depth camera can measure the distance between any physical point and the Hololens device. Using the depth sensor, Hololens is able to recreate and understand the world around it! The representation of the various surfaces is called spatial mapping.
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Hololens System Requirements
The official Microsoft Hololens SDK is out, so it’s time to start developing our own Hololens apps. First, read an introduction about Hololens.
In this blog post, I would like to inform you about the system requirements and the developer tools you need to install.
Hololens comes with a powerful Windows SDK and a powerful Unity plugin. During the development process, we’ll be using both Visual Studio and Unity3D. Unity is the most advanced 3D gaming engine; plus, it’s extremely easy to get started with it.
The complete Hololens development package includes:
Hololens Device (order now)
Hololens Emulator
Hololens SDK
Hololens Unity plugin.
That’s right… Hololens comes with an emulator, so you do not need an actual Hololens device to develop your apps! You can start developing Hololens apps right now!
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Installing the Hololens SDK
The past few days have been really exciting for Natural User Interfaces. Microsoft released the official Hololens SDK and started shipping the first developer devices. I wrote a detailed review of the capabilities of the device a few days ago.
No Hololens device? No problem! The SDK comes with a Hololens Emulator that lets you test your apps and holograms without having a physical device.
Today, I’ll show you how to successfully install the SDK. Since the SDK is still in Developer Preview mode, not every computer will be compatible. I installed the SDK on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop and a Surface Pro tablet with absolutely no issues. However, I had no luck on my Apple machines (sad). Before downloading the SDK, you need to ensure that your computer meets the proposed Hololens system requirements.
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Hardware Requirements ...
Getting Started with Hololens and Unity3D
Microsoft released the official Hololens SDK a few days ago and I published an introduction to Hololens that went viral. Today, we’ll dive into Hololens Development using the Emulator. I’ll show you how you can build your first Hololens project using Visual Studio and Unity3D.
Prerequisites
Before writing any code, please ensure that your computer meets the minimum requirements have successfully installed the SDK.
Your computer should meet the following specifications:
64-bit Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, or Education (The Home edition does not support Hyper-V)
64-bit CPU
8 GB of RAM or more
In the BIOS, the following features must be supported and enabled:
Hardware-assisted virtualization
Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)
Hardware-based Data Execution Prevention (DEP)
GPU (The emulator might work with an unsupported GPU, but will be significantly slower)
DirectX 11.0 or later
WDDM 1.2 driver or later
Important! You need to have hardware virtualization enabled in your PC. To enable hardware virtualization, follow these instructions (yes, you’ll have to modify your BIOS settings).
Read more about the system requirements.
Read more about installing the SDK.
Step 0 – Install the SDK ...
We close with a couple posts from Abhijit Jana...
Start Building Holographic Apps with Microsoft HoloLens
Windows Holographic is a mixed reality platform for developers. Developer can leverage the Holographic API with Windows 10 to built the apps through holographic experience. Microsoft HoloLens is the holographic device that lets you create holograms, objects made of light and sound that appear in the world around you. This looks just as if they are real objects around you and you can interact with them using gaze, gestures and voice commands. Interesting !! Yes, of course ! This is the new era of development and it’s like building the future.
Over the past few years I worked extensively with the amazing device Kinect for Windows and as always, I “’Thank You” for your continues encouragement on my work that I shared over past years and for sharing very positive feedback on my Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Book. Now, for me it is time to take step ahead and explore the new device HoloLens, and I will keep continue sharing cool stuff over here based on my learning. To start with, this post is all about getting started with the development with HoloLens.
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Building Different Types of Apps
Holographic Apps uses the Universal Windows Platform, and all the Universal Apps can be run on Microsoft HoloLens. On the other hand, to built the holographic 3D elements using Unity. So, here is the option you can choose for. ...
Bringing Your Universal Windows Apps to Microsoft HoloLens
The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) enables one app to run on every Windows devices running on Windows 10 – could be a desktop, tablet, Phone, Xbox, IoT device like Raspberry Pi2 or even on Microsoft HoloLens. That means that all the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps built for phone or desktop /devices can work on HoloLens too. These will be projected and rendered on a 2D surface.
This is a great way to start your development with HoloLens when you are coming from a Device App Development background. By brining your Universal Windows apps to HoloLens, you can run the apps beyond the screen and introduce a hands-free computing with it. You can start using Gaze, gestures, voice command to interact with you apps.
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Enough for now, that should be a great series of starting points for you on your HoloLens journey...
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