Over the past week I’ve gotten an email from one of my Learn HoloLens members about creating a master class on spatial understanding. I also received a couple of comments on my previous spatial understanding videos.

In particular, I was asked if it still worked with the latest versions of Unity and the HoloToolkit for Unity. I did some investigating and the timing couldn’t have worked out any better.

Not only do the latest versions work, they now also work in the Unity Editor itself. The updated code was just merged into the master branch yesterday during the time I was creating the demo.

The demo shows the latest version of Unity and the version of the HoloToolkit as of 2/14/2017 in the morning. Then I grabbed the latest version again in the afternoon which incorporated work by Robert El-Soudani (aka MrBobbyBobberson) from Microsoft.

These changes not only fixed the GUI issue that broke because of the InputManager changes, but also allows the spatial understanding components to work inside of the Unity Editor.

This will allow for much faster iterations when working with spatial understanding.

You can see the journey in this week’s video…

Remember, it isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey…

I’m going to work to release my first HoloLens app. Originally, I was going to release a different app as my first app, but I decided I wanted to release something for Valentine’s Day. Fortunately, this is a simple app and I had created it a couple of years ago with a target audience of one – my wife.

At this point, this is just an alpha preview of the app. It may look a lot different by the time it ends up in the store … or it may look exactly the same – it will depend on how much time I can spend on this before submitting it to the store.

In the video I mentioned the shader that is being used to display the spatial mapping data. While it has some really bad shearing in places it is a really nice looking shader. I found out about this shader from James who asked a question in our monthly Live Q&A sessions in the premium membership site over at LearnHoloLens.com. As I worked to answer his question, I looked at both the shader here and the SpatialMappingTap scene in the HoloToolkit to get the shader to only work when I tapped instead of always updating.

The shader can be found on GitHub at:

https://github.com/rolandsmeenk/HololensScanningEffect

His accompanying blog post can be found at:

http://smeenk.com/hololens-scanning-effect-in-unity/

Here is the video where I demo the shader and the alpha preview of the upcoming HoloValentine game.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

This week we have the fourth and final installment of the Holographic Bouncing Ball Tutorial. This tutorial discusses spatial mapping and adds in the spatial mapping prefab from the HoloToolkit into the scene so the ball can actually bounce in the real world off of real world objects.

If you enjoyed this tutorial series, where we just scratched the surface, make sure to check out LearnHoloLens.com to get premium HoloLens development content.

Enjoy!