Categories
App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare HoloLens

How to Combine the Mixed Reality Toolkit, Unity 2017 and Visual Studio 2017

Update 20. December 2017: A new release of the Mixed Reality toolkit is now out as an official release. It’s recommended to use this, along with Unity 2017.2.1f1.

Update 13. November 2017: The latest source code of the Mixed Reality toolkit now combines both HoloLens and Mixed Reality headsets into a single toolkit that works with one Unity version: 2017.2.0p1 MRTP 4. It’s a special fork of Unity that is optimized for the “Mixed Reality Toolkit Preview”. A later version of Unity will hopefully combine all environments into a single release again. Read more about the environment setup at the GitHub pull request.

Update 19. October 2017: In the meantime, Unity 2017.2 final has been released, and the dev branch of the Mixed Reality toolkit has been merged back to the master. You should now be fine using the following versions for HoloLens development: Unity 2017.2.0f3+, Mixed Reality Toolkit (master branch), Visual Studio 2017.+4, Windows 10.0.15063.0 SDK.

Original Article: Lately, the tools required for HoloLens / Mixed Reality development have been undergoing profound changes. All three tools involved in building HoloLens apps are being restructured:

  • Unity 2017 unifies Virtual / Augmented Reality APIs, making them flexible enough to target all platforms (e.g., phones with ARKit / ARCore, VR, AR). This also involves new and renamed APIs.
  • HoloToolkit has been renamed to Mixed Reality Toolkit, as Microsoft expands the scope to include the new VR headsets with inside-out tracking going on sale this fall.
  • Visual Studio 2017.3 also introduced some major changes under the hood. This is combined with the C# engine used in Unity slowly being migrated from the old Mono runtime to more recent versions of C#.

With the latest Unity 2017.2.0b11 release, everything should now be coming together. In this blog post, I’m describing how to use the latest versions of the tools for creating and deploying a HoloLens app.

Categories
App Development AR / VR Events Windows

Windows Developer Day, Oct 10th, Vienna: Mixed Reality, Xamarin & more!

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update brings an impressive array of new features for developers. At the Windows Developer Day, the Microsoft engineering teams will introduce the latest news for developers.

One of the most exciting is Windows Mixed Reality as a feature of the base operating system, bringing Virtual Reality to the masses with reasonably priced VR headsets. Additional topics include Xamarin, .NET Standard 2.0 and the XBox Live Creators Program.

MVPs (Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals) around the globe organize viewing parties. Through the Austrian mobility.builders mobile developer community and together with fellow MVP Helmut Krämer, I have the honor of hosting the local streaming party in Vienna.

Categories
App Development Digital Healthcare

Basics of Web Technology: HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Accessibility & WordPress

It’s important to know the basics of how the web works. In one of the introductory lectures at Digital Healthcare, we look at HTML5, CSS, JavaScript & more. Understanding basic web technology is required to ensure that web sites have excellent usability as well as accessibility.

This includes how to make sure navigating the page works with screen readers, as well as that the design works well for people with e.g., (color) vision deficiency. Accessibility is especially important for websites and mobile apps of public sector bodies, based on a new directive of the EU that will come into effect in all member states soon.

Categories
Digital Healthcare

Reading Blood Oxygen Saturation (SpO2) and Pulse through MySignals / Arduino

The MySignals HW BLE v2 – eHealth and Medical IoT Development Platform for Arduino contains sensors that measure more than 20 biometric parameters. One of the most interesting is the Bluetooth LE SpO2 sensor. How to get started reading live data and visualizing it on the TFT display of the board?

What is the MySignals HW Kit?

The MySignals HW kit contains a shield that requires an Arduino Uno as base. In contrast to the (more expensive) MySignals SW kit, the HW kit is rather basic. Powering it up results in a white screen, instead of a nice interface on the screen. The rest is up to the software developer. As the development is based on Arduino, you need the latest version of the Arduino IDE.