Author: Chad Carter

Medieval VR on the HoloLens

The Unity Asset Store is really a phenomenal thing. In a matter of an hour I was able to start a project from scratch and search for free medieval assets and bring them in to a new project without any idea what I was going to create.

First I found free music that can randomly generate itself.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34407

Then I found a cool cartoon character.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/19641

Finally, I found a neat little cartoon house.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/16674

I started a new project in Unity and brought in the HoloToolkit for Unity and then imported each of those projects.

Simply opening the house scene and removing the First Person camera and adding in the HoloLens Camera and InputManager I was off to the races. I actually placed the camera in the middle of the house and then placed the character in the house facing the camera.

Finally, I created an object to hold the music script to play the music.

I said it was an hour, but it was more like 30 minutes and then another 30 minutes of me deploying to the HoloLens and recording and editing the video.

I’m happy with the results. What do you think? Leave me a comment and let me know!

By the way, this was deployed using Visual Studio 2017. If you are using Visual Studio 2015, stop what you are doing and go grab 2017 right now. It is really excellent.

In order to make Unity use it instead of VS 2015, simply open up preferences and browse to devenv.exe in the VS 2017 folder.

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Little Holographic Dragon

Dragons are cool. Holographic dragons are even cooler. I bring a little dragon into my world after coding a simplistic AI state machine to go through the different actions and emotions this little guy has.

Plus, since I have some sort of awful congestion thing going on, you can just listen to some music while you watch the little dragon dude do his thing instead of hearing my voice. 🙂

Chad Carter 1 Comment

Unity MIDI Player on GitHub

This week I took the MIDI Player that I utilized in my HoloValentine App (get the source code) and put it on GitHub. The source code originally came from a project in CodePlex. The license was a MIT license and the code was originally created for XNA.

I took that and code from folks who had done similar work in Unity and cleaned up some bits to create a MIDIPlayer project that should easily load into any Unity project.

You can find the MIDI Player on GitHub.

Below is a video where I show checking in the latest change of creating a demo scene that plays a MIDI file on demand. The MIDI file loops, but the MIDIPlayer script can be updated to allow for a playlist. The HoloValentine App shows how to create and play a playlist.

If you are looking to play MIDI files in your Unity project, I hope this helps you!

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Unity Start, Update, and OnEnable

So last month, I did a four part tutorial on getting a bouncing ball working on the HoloLens. Unfortunately, I didn’t give entirely accurate information when in the 3rd video I said that you simply removing the Start method from the MonoBehaviour would make the Enable checkbox in the Unity inspector window disappear for the script.

It is a little more involved than that and I discuss it in this week’s video.

I also announce when I’m going to open up the LearnHoloLens.com premium membership site for new members again, so check out the video below.

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