When working on Unity HoloLens-projects in teams, sometimes merge conflicts in Unity scenes are unavoidable. Even though the Unity scene file format is text-based, the automatic merge of a standard GIT merge tool wouldn’t always correctly recognize the changes from different versions.
Luckily, Unity comes with a merging tool that is specialized on scene files: UnityYAMLMerge / Smart Merge. However, it’s not straight-forward to integrate into a workflow.
The public transport departure monitor has been incredibly helpful – it dramatically cut down the waiting times at the bus stop, as it allows to leave the apartment exactly on time to reach the bus.
The setup is based on a Raspberry Pi with a simple LCD display. I’ve combined this with a motion detecting power plug, so that the Raspberry is only active when I’m in the entrance area of the apartment. As such, the energy consumption is minimal.
The Arlo security camera by Netgear is one of the few cameras that doesn’t need a power supply, so is easier to use outdoors. The cameras have motion-sensing integrated and upload a short video sequence around the motion event to the Netgear backend. Great about the Arlo ecosystem is that this is possible with the free plan as well; you can access the recordings of the last 7 days already with the free basic plan.
For my use case, I wanted to also take periodic pictures / recordings. These can then later be stitched together for a time-lapse.
At the Microsoft Build Tour in Vienna, I had the opportunity to present an enhanced version of the Bluetooth Beacon talk. With the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft released a massive update to the Bluetooth LE capabilities of the OS. This finally allows developers to use the full potential of modern Bluetooth scenarios, including sensors, wearables and beacons.
At Build 2017, Microsoft released three new sessions explaining the capabilities of the new APIs:
Even though the sessions reference example code and blog posts that should have been released together with the session recordings, still none of that is available so far. That gave me the opportunity to explore the new APIs based on the short documentation overview page and the videos.
When capturing a Mixed Reality scene through HoloLens Spectator View, the resulting photos and videos look amazing. But how to make them more realistic? The right blending mode in Photoshop helps.
Of course, the captured Spectator View photo is in many ways different to what you see in HoloLens. First off, it’s only 2D; in the HoloLens, you’d see a real 3D hologram. In this area, the live HoloLens view is much more impressive.
On the other hand, the actual resolution and field of view of the HoloLens is less than a (potentially) 20 Megapixel+ Unity rendering that shows holograms all around you. But the field of view is difficult and somehow unnecessary to simulate as we’re looking on the scene from a 3rd person perspective.
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/
#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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
With the first Bluetooth 5 devices just released (first and foremost the Samsung Galaxy S8), Bluetooth Beacons like Apple iBeacon and Eddystone by Google gain a lot of potential. Increased range means future beacons will cover a much larger area, without increased power consumption. With the payload increase of beacon advertisement frames from 31 bytes to 255 bytes, the amount of information transmitted by beacons can substantially increase.
In my session about Bluetooth Beacons at the Mobile Developer After-Work #14: Creating Immersive Environments, I provided a short update about the latest news. Unfortunately, recording of the live session at the event failed. Therefore, I’ve re-recorded it – you will miss the live experience, but I did have a little more time for more detailed explanations of some important facts, so it’s well worth watching again even if you have been at the #mdaw14 Event!
The 45 min recording is now available on YouTube.