Book Image

HoloLens Beginner's Guide

By : Jason M. Odom
Book Image

HoloLens Beginner's Guide

By: Jason M. Odom

Overview of this book

HoloLens revolutionizes the way we work and interact with the virtual world. HoloLens brings you the amazing world of augmented reality and provides an opportunity to explore it like never before. This is the best book for developers who want to start creating interactive and intuitive augmented reality apps for the HoloLens platform. You will start with a walkthrough of the HoloLens hardware before creating your first app. Next you will be introduced to the various HoloLens sensors and find out how to program them efficiently so that they can interact with the real world seamlessly. Moving on, you will learn how to create smart animations and add video overlay that implements real-time tracking and motion-sensing abilities to your HoloLens app. Finally, you will learn how to test your app effectively.

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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Title Page
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Dedication
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Welcome to the New World
Welcome to the New World
What exactly is the HoloLens?
What you need to develop for the HoloLens
Installing the software
Unity3d quick overview
Summary
2
HoloWorld
HoloWorld
Hello World!, as its customary
Saving the scene
Objects and components
First project
Physics simulations
Building the project in Unity
Summary
3
I am in Control
I am in Control
Prefabs
Installing the HoloToolkit
User Input overview
Gaze
Gesture
Voice
Animation
Mecanim
Here is the Game Plan
Our first script
Materials, textures, and shaders
Changing the color
Time to build and test
Summary
4
User-Friendly Interface
User-Friendly Interface
Reloading
Unity C# scripting
A quick example
User interface design
The Unity camera and HoloLens
Unity UI
Any object can be an interface object
Summary
5
Now That Is How It Should Sound
Now That Is How It Should Sound
Audio overview
Here is what it is all about
Unity audio components
Spatial sound and HoloLens
Let's listen to our work
Summary
6
Not So Blank Spaces
Not So Blank Spaces
Spatial Mapping
Let's get into this
Spatial Mapping in practice
Our new Skeeball machine
The home stretch
Summary
7
The Tools of the Trade
The Tools of the Trade
Persistence
World Anchors
The in-game debug window
In-game menu
Summary
8
Share What You Have Got
Share What You Have Got
Networking
Making the Skeeball game a shared experience
A very simple first step
Spawning our Skeeball machine
Filling in the blanks
The payoff
Summary
9
Putting It All Together
Putting It All Together
Our main Prefab
Importing the RampColliders
When bounding boxes collide
Finishing the Prefab
GameBall Prefab
Finishing touches
ApplicationManager
Summary
10
Fixing Problems
Fixing Problems
The Application Manager
Debugging
Profiling and fixing performance
Simplygon
Summary

Installing the software

Now, we will get our development environment installed and set up so that we can start building the next killer app for HoloLens. We will start with our main tools, Visual Studio and Unity HoloLens technical preview, and then add the extensions that will help speed things along.

Installing Visual Studio

Microsoft has made the installation process for Visual Studio very simple. Just be warned that it can take a while to download and install it:

  1. Navigate to http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/visual-studio-homepage-vs.aspx.

 

  1. Click on Download Community 2015; this is a free version of Visual Studio that works well with Unity and the HoloLens environment. By default, you should be installing at least Visual Studios 2015 Update 3.
  1. Run vs_community. exe and complete the installation process.
  2. Create a Microsoft Developers account (this is a requirement for the HoloLens development).
  3. The first time you run VS2015, you will be prompted to input your account credentials.

Unity HoloLens technical preview

Now, we will install Unity HoloLens technical preview. At the time of writing this, version 5.4. 0f 3 is the most recent and stable version. This is a custom version of Unity made to work specifically with HoloLens. As a result, it does automate a few processes for HoloLens developers:

To install Unity HoloLens technical preview, we will need to perform the following steps:

  1. Go to https://unity3d.com/partners/windows/hololens.
  2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
  3. Click on the Unity Download Assistant.
  4. Follow the instructions to complete the installation process.
  5. You will need to create an account with Unity.

Visual Studio 2015 tools for Unity

In your web browser, go to https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/8d26236e-4a64-4d64-8486-7df95156aba9. Later, click on the Download button and run vstu2015.exe:

HoloLens emulator

To install the HoloLens emulator, perform the following steps:

  1. Go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=823018.
  2. Run EmulatorSetup.exe once it finishes downloading.
  3. Install the emulator.

Note

This will not install if you do not have Windows 10 Pro installed on your development PC.

  1. This installation process can take a while.

HoloToolkit-Unity

To install HoloToolkit-Unity, perform the following steps:

  1. Enter https://github.com/Microsoft/HoloToolkit-Unity in your browser.
  2. Click on Clone or download.
  3. Click on Download ZIP.
  4. Once the ZIP file is downloaded, unzip the file to your desktop; we will copy this into our project later.
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