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There are a few other places we would like to direct you to for support, both from Microsoft and from the community.
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If you want to join in discussions, please do so in the HoloDevelopers Slack, which you can join by going to https://aka.ms/holodevelopers, or in our Microsoft Tech Communities forums at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/mixed-reality/ct-p/MicrosoftMixedReality.
And always feel free to hit us up on Twitter @MxdRealityDev.
Some comments/observations on the Hololens and dev process from the Hackathon
One of the most painful things was needing to go through visual studio as a second step without having a good reason (if you can set breakpoints, there should be examples of this in the tutorials). I heard from a MS mentor that internally, there's a deploy from Unity plugin so we won't have to export from Unity and then load it into Visual Studio to deploy.
There were quite a few folks trying to do development on a Surface Book (including one on our team) and it had problems seeing when the Hololens was connected as a device w/o multiple reconnects, rebooting, etc.
Visual Studio sometimes had authentication problems w/ Hololens and that required disconnecting the Hololens, then restarting Visual Studio.
This kind of flaky tool reliability is not expected from MS tools and was a productivity killer.
For the Hololens hardware, battery life was the biggest plus, especially compared to a Tango device. Some of the Hololens had a slight rainbow/glow effect around the cursor image. It was also fairly reliable.
Some other things that would be useful for the HoloToolkit:
- direction angle from current position/camera angle to something
- distance from current position to what you're gazing on
- webcam screencap example so we can send what it sees to vision APIs
Overall, it was a well organized hackathon, so kudos to the folks organizing it and running it through the tour. Can't believe you guys haul sofas and body sized beanbags all over the country. All the mentors were great and were always friendly and helpful even in the wee hours :-)
Answers
Which hackathon was this? I ask cause Holohack Seattle was a few weeks ago.
Unity uses an old version of mono (I believe .NET 3.5). The HoloLens runs apps on the UWP which requires a more current version of .NET (I believe 4.6). Seems like a pretty good reason to build and deploy from Visual Studio, not to mention a superior code editing environment.
Is your issue on this one with the Surface Book team or the HoloLens team?
Beta with a lot of moving parts and two tooling platforms from two different companies needing to work closely together. Does not seem unreasonable to me that the tools are still working out kinks.
For more info on the slight rainbow/glow effect around the cursor you might want to refer to this page of the docs.
You might want to check out the "Direction Indicator" script in the HoloToolkit if you haven't yet.
Is the HitInfo.distance property (found in the GazeManager UpdateRaycast routine) the kind of thing you were looking for?
I agree, more examples would be great. But this might help.
I totally agree that @donas and her team really are awesome!
Windows Holographic User Group Redmond
WinHUGR.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - @WinHUGR
WinHUGR YouTube Channel -- live streamed meetings