This week I’m working with the code I started last week. I think I’m going to spend some time on this demo to try and make it a proper game at some point in the future.

I’ve scaled down the car and it currently has ridiculous acceleration. I’ve added in a ramp that I can drag around. I also brought in spatial mapping so the car will drive on the floor and crash into the furniture.

I actually had a lot of fun driving this little car around. It felt a lot like driving an RC car. While this is just a toy, it was fun to play with. This makes me think it is a start for a nice game. I have a couple of game design posts and one of them talks about the difference between a toy and a game.

The spatial mapping wireframe changes color based on how far the camera is from that part of the mesh. This is built into the HoloToolkit and I didn’t have to do anything special for it.

I want to add in spatial understanding and create a track around the room include jumps that would allow the car to land on surfaces that are considered platforms or chairs or “sittable”.

Side Tangent

My biggest problem currently is time. Saying yes to something means saying no to something else. Some people say it is saying no to everything else. I don’t quite fall into that group, but only recently have I been thinking about the contents of the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. It finally became clear that I can’t do everything and there will be tradeoffs.

Currently, I’m running the LearnHoloLens.com membership site and creating YouTube videos every week as well as sending out HoloLens and Augmented Reality emails to my fellow code ninjas. These commitments every week mean I can’t do other things like play Forza Horizon 3 or any of my backlog of games. My pile of shame is pretty high, but that is a post for another day.

Enjoy the video!

This is a demo of the Magic Window for HoloLens. In order to obtain this effect you simply need to utilize the HoloToolkit-Unity package found at:

https://github.com/Microsoft/HoloToolkit-Unity

Under the Utilities folder is a Tests folder and inside of that is a WindowOcclusion.unity scene. The actual window object is made up of the 4 cubes that make the frame you see and then 4 more cubes that are large and one each side of the frame. There is one on top, one on bottom, one on the left and one on the right. These cubes have a material that have the WindowOcclusion shader applied. This occludes any item that is behind it. So the window can be seen through but the “walls” around the window are transparent to the user, but are really keeping the main scene from view.

This demo is a quick response to the #hololens_challenge found at
https://medium.com/@hololens_challenge/hololens-challenge-4-through-the-looking-glass-99d566c2b1b0#.y1j19wcv1

You should try it out. You could definitely create more complex meshes to surround the window, but the premise is the same. This is the same type of effect used in RoboRaid when you shoot your walls to expose pipes and cables, etc.

Enjoy the video!

The good folks behind Fragments and Young Conker, Asobo Studios, released to the community their spatial mapping code. It is available in the HoloLens Toolkit and HoloLens Toolkit for Unity at GitHub. So make sure you check it out.

I’ll be creating a post every Wednesday, but I’m a day early this week…

As some of you know, I’m launching a brand new membership site around HoloLens development. We’ve had open enrollment open since last Wednesday, but the doors are closing tonight at midnight. They won’t open again for a couple of months. This is the alpha (as in pre-beta) launch of the site.

I wanted to let folks know about the site and the rapidly closing enrollment period today and have created another video around spatial mapping as that is what the first master class inside of Learn HoloLens will cover.

I enjoy producing videos for YouTube and will continue to do so. However, I’d like to go more in depth and create a logical path for folks wanting to learn the HoloLens and this is why I created LearnHoloLens.com

The video shows how this new Spatial Understanding plugin knows where the floor and ceiling is and where open spaces on the floor are. It can determine where it can place objects in the scene and it is really going to make our jobs as developers much easier.

It does a great job at recognizing platforms where you could place items. The code has been available for about 10 days. I expect to see a lot of great apps created that utilize this code in the near future.

I hope you enjoy the video!

If you missed out on the enrollment, jump on the mailing list. Also, you can signup for my newsletter over on my About page so you don’t miss other things coming up.

You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel so you don’t miss any free videos I create.