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App Development AR / VR Artificial Intelligence Events Windows

Event: Mobile Developer After-Work #15: Next Generation Apps

Mobile Apps are no longer simple tools and games. They have grown to amazingly complex systems. Which ingredients are necessary to successfully develop a next generation app?

You will need Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning. Only the best performance will satisfy your customers – or do you want to wait more than a few seconds in a mobile app? How can you visualize your user interface with HoloLens?

At the #mdaw15, you will learn how to develop and plan such apps with modern frameworks. Join the next After-Work event in St. Pölten for free at https://mobility.builders/

What is a Mobile Developer After-Work Event?

#mdaw events are mixtures of conferences with more casual meet-ups. Different expert speakers approach an overall topic from diverse perspectives. Afterwards, there’s plenty of time for networking and discussion amongst attendees – with snacks and drinks, of course.

The events target mobile developers and decision makers. The goal is to dive deeper into relevant and already known topic areas, as well as to keep up to date with the constantly evolving and changing toolset of the mobile world.

In the meantime, we can look back to 14 previous #mdaw events. Topics so far included business apps, digital healthcare, Xamarin, user experience or a Refugee Hackathon. We’re organizing the events with technology partners like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, the City of Vienna, and many others.

The community has grown to around 500 attendees, and we continue to get more and more developers on board with each event!

Together with Helmut Krämer, I’ve founded the community in 2013 and am proud that it’s still around. We’ve had a tremendous impact on the Austrian developer community so far. With the upcoming #mdaw15, we’re extending the reach geographically and host our first event outside of Vienna, to reach even more developers!

Categories
AR / VR HoloLens Windows

How to set up HoloLens Spectator View, Bonus – Troubleshooting

Did you follow the blog post series on setting up Spectator View for HoloLens? The following issues frequently occurred when testing Spectator View. To make your life easier, make sure you check these troubleshooting tips & tricks:

HoloLens Sharing Offset

Between your two HoloLenses, there can be some offset in the placing of the holograms. In one HoloLens, you can for example position your hologram directly on the table; on the second HoloLens, it’s one meter next to the table.

Categories
AR / VR HoloLens Windows

How to set up HoloLens Spectator View, Part 7 – Mixed Reality

In the final part of the HoloLens Spectator View series, I’ll add the final tweak to my sample project and show you what kind of photos the Compositor saves on your PC. Getting to this point has taken a lot more work than expected (+ a lot more blog posts, too!), but the journey was worth it! You can finally get great photos and videos of the mixed reality experience on HoloLens.

Script Execution Order

Sending the updates didn’t work right away, so I searched for other changes that the sample does differently from my app that might be responsible. One such case was the Script Execution Order.

In Unity, the order in which scripts are initialized is arbitrary. When debugging, I found an issue that an instance of a class wasn’t available yet when a script wanted to access it.

Categories
AR / VR HoloLens Windows

How to set up HoloLens Spectator View, Part 6 – Custom Messages for Sharing

To make Spectator View work in our own HoloLens project, we actually have to understand how it’s working, what it is doing and how it is related to the HoloLens Sharing Experience. Turns out that there is a lot to do in our app (including transmitting custom messages) to prepare it for the full Spectator View experience!

Synchronizing Objects: Anchor & SceneManager

The Spectator View is based on the Sharing experience of the HoloToolkit, but it contains its own “fork” of the code. Instead of us having to manually decide & code which objects and interactions to send via network messages (as in the normal Sharing use case), the fork of the Spectator View transmits some data by default to our DSLR-mounted HoloLens.

However, it’s important to understand that if you use Spectator View, you also need to integrate most of the Sharing code. Essentially, a lot of code is duplicated between the two frameworks, with only slight differences in order to give the DSLR-mounted HoloLens a special role, plus the PC running Unity also needs to connect in order to correctly render the scene.