Hololens

As Microsoft works toward fulfilling its $480 million contract to supply modified HoloLens 2 headsets to the US Army, Airbus is preparing to supply advanced augmented reality apps for the device. On Thursday, the Airbus Defence and Space unit published a video demonstrating t ...more

Students from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center have been working on an augmented reality system to help teach music in a project called Music Everywhere. This application for the Microsoft HoloLens would utilize holograms to visually instruct the u ...more

In a video released Tuesday, Microsoft arguably began to position the HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality as the future of education. A smart tactic meant to coincide with their other education-related announcements made on the same day. In an effort to take back the classroom ...more

One of the truly beautiful things about the HoloLens is its completely untethered, the-world-is-your-oyster freedom. This, paired with the ability to view your real surroundings while wearing the device, allows for some incredibly interesting uses. One particular use is trigge ...more

Sky Zhou, also know as Matrix Inception on YouTube, is no stranger here on NextReality. We loved his Pokémon concept game for HoloLens, as well as his D3D Keyboard that lets HoloLens users leave notes around the house. He just can't seem to stop creating cool mixed reality app ...more

Alright, calm down and take a breath! I know the object creation chapter was a lot of code. I will give you all a slight reprieve; this section should be a nice and simple, at least in comparison. In this series on building dynamic user interfaces, what we are eventually crea ...more

One thing you'll find a lot of in the Windows Store for HoloLens is demos and mockups, but very few projects are as fully realized and fully-functioning as Muralize. Created by Magnopus, an all-female development team, Muralize first appeared in the Windows Store in late-Novem ...more

Way back, life on the range was tough and unforgiving for a HoloLens developer. Air-tap training was cutting edge and actions to move holograms not called "TapToPlace" were exotic and greeted with skepticism. The year was 2016, and developers had to deploy to their devices to ...more

Mixed reality filmmaking isn't a new concept. Disney managed to make it work in 1988 with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but not without an enormous amount of work. We haven't seen many mixed reality films of that scope since, and perhaps that's because it's still hard to accomplish ...more

Imagine wearing your HoloLens, then reaching out to touch a hologram and actually feeling it. Mind blown, right?! Now imagine that same hologram responding to your touch. I don't mean in the way holograms currently respond to an air tap, but a much more refined and precise tou ...more

With the release of the HoloLens, Microsoft has put itself in both a great position while giving the competition a serious target to aim for. This is normally the case for anyone that is first to the market with a new idea, and now we've finally got a good competitor HoloLens ...more

A new contender has entered the mixed reality ring. San Fransisco-based Occipital has just released an "Explorer Edition" of Bridge—an iPhone-based mixed and virtual reality headset that uses their popular Structure Sensor. At a fraction of the cost of a HoloLens developers ki ...more

The addition of a new research mode for Microsoft HoloLens will enable researchers and developers to tap into a wider range of data collected by the device's sensors. Available in the Windows 10 RS4 update for HoloLens, application code in Research Mode can access computer vi ...more

Occasionally, a not-so-great movie also does something so right that you have to forgive some of its sins and give it a little love. Such is the case with the latest film from Keanu Reeves, Replicas, which takes a HoloLens-style device and gives us a look at how future researc ...more

A new telemedicine application for the Microsoft HoloLens is promising paramedics and EMTs a new tool for diagnosis and treatment of patients in the field. Designed through a partnership between medical software company Exelus and HoloLens developer HoloForge, Nomadeec levera ...more

Looking to inject a little more processing juice into your HoloLens? Unity can fix you up with the Standalone Universal Windows Platform Holographic Emulation. While its name appears to have skipped the marketing department in the decision-making process, the tool enables dev ...more

Humans learn best by doing or through an experience, and so the holographic environments provided in virtual and mixed reality are ripe with educational opportunities. HoloStudy took this to heart and created an educational science app that teaches you with animated models you ...more

Logan's Run is one of my favorite movies of all time. The dialog is cheesy, the set design and special effects are wonky, and the main villain looks like he was conceived and built by an eighth grader in shop class—oh, and his name is Box. But there are plenty of things to li ...more

The human body is amazingly complex, and seeing inside one poses a variety of challenges whether you're dealing with an actual human or some kind of facsimile. Mixed reality offers the ability to get the best of both worlds by creating a holographic teaching tool for human ana ...more

After previously learning how to make the material of an object change with the focus of an object, we will build on that knowledge by adding new objects through code. We will accomplish this by creating our bounding box, which in the end is not actually a box, as you will see ...more

French manufacturer Renault Trucks is looking to the HoloLens to improve quality control processes with its engine assembly operations. An internal incubation team of about 20 employees is collaborating with technology partner Immersion to design a prototype of the applicatio ...more

Empea Berlin, a Germany-based company specializing in augmented, mixed, and virtual reality software, released a Facebook video a few months back showing off their experiments in smart home technology. Using a Raspberry Pi and a HoloLens unit, they were able to make a virtual ...more

When Microsoft release an update to the HoloLens Development Edition at the end of May, there were a bunch of cool new features added in. Among them: New voice controls that make working in the HoloLens operating system much easier. There are tons of new ways to interact with ...more

Describing how and why the HoloLens 2 is so much better than the original is helpful, but seeing it is even better. Back in February, I had a chance to test the HoloLens 2 for a couple of extended periods, and I was very impressed. But I didn't have much in the way of first-p ...more

You've likely seen light-up musical keyboards that teach you how to play a song with visual cues, but few of those devices exist and have a limited number of songs you can actually learn. But Karl Baumann and his HoloLens Hackathon team figured out that in mixed reality, you c ...more

Not content with bringing the first untethered mixed reality headset to market, Microsoft wants to expand their Windows Holographic operating system beyond HoloLens into vastly more robust technologies. Through partnerships with other hardware manufacturers, Microsoft is hopi ...more

Visualization is one of the obvious commercial applications for technology such as Microsoft's HoloLens. The ability to see the assets of a project in different scales—from micro to larger-than-life—with a quick air tap will play a large part in the coming augmented reality re ...more

Microsoft's HoloLens project is shaping up to be the forerunner of augmented reality. With jaw-dropping features that would allow you to bring entire football games into your living room and control software with your eyes, there's plenty to be excited about with the upcoming ...more

The enterprise applications powering the adoption of the HoloLens 2 are only just ramping up as developers continue to work with the still relatively new hardware. But one tech giant, namely Intel, is showing off how it's already harnessing the features of the HoloLens 2 to t ...more

The HoloLens has become a frequent sight in medical facilities around the world, but a new demonstration shows just how seamlessly it can be integrated into traditional medical procedures to improve the experience for physicians and patients alike. Professor Shafi Ahmed, a co ...more

The long wait is over — the best augmented reality device on the planet is finally available. Update #2, Friday, 12:45 p.m. ET: Yesterday's Microsoft HoloLens 2 announcement was welcome news for many but still left some eager developers scratching their heads in confusion as ...more

We've highlighted the projects of Wavelength Studios a few times over recent months for their work in the augmented and mixed reality space. Since receiving their HoloLens headsets, they've been hard at work on both development community projects as well as efforts for clients ...more

Once you've designed some holograms with HoloLens, you'll need to get them to interact with the environment. That's where Spatial Mapping comes in. There are five basic purposes for using HoloLens's Spatial Mapping with your app: Navigation: This lets your holograms know how ...more

In the previous section of this series on dynamic user interfaces for HoloLens, we learned about delegates and events. At the same time we used those delegates and events to not only attach our menu system to the users gaze, but also to enable and disable the menu based on cer ...more

At Vision Summit 2017, UK-based Rewind, one of the recent additions to the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Readiness Partner Program, showed off a HoloLens application called "Flight Deck" that genuinely blew me away. The idea of watching a live-action sports experience on a coffee ...more

Last week, we told you about Microsoft's Alex Kipman and his nomination for the annual European Inventor Award, presented by the European Patent Office (EPO). And while that's big news in and of itself, it turns out we overlooked a very important detail buried in the EPO's vid ...more

When I first started with HoloLens development last April, one of the first things I created was a window. The purpose of that window was to be attached to a wall and give the illusion of being in a different space—an effect that is often referred to as a "magic window" effect ...more

A new repository appeared in Microsoft's GitHub account a few months ago for a project called HoloJS. For those JavaScript developers out there that have been wanting to make HoloLens apps, this one's for you. Microsoft has been surprising the development world recently by fu ...more

Are there any benefits to watching a movie in a holographic mixed reality headset, or should you just stick with your TV? It's not as cut and dried as you might think. While TVs have some advantages, so does the virtual screen of a Microsoft HoloLens. As augmented reality tec ...more

Tricking your eyes into seeing 3D images isn't all that hard in movies or even in virtual reality, but when you start projecting holograms into the physical world, you run into some difficult problems. Microsoft obviously figured them out with their HoloLens, but how? The proc ...more

Complex games in mixed reality require a pretty detailed scan of the room, and getting this process right can be both time-consuming and annoying. Computer science students at the University of Washington decided to fix that by turning it into a game. Video: . It's hard to kno ...more

Rumors are swirling today that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) may have shown us the first public glimpse of the next-generation HoloLens. Are they real? Or just a prototype? We've been digging in all day to find the answers. The "Leaked" HoloLens In a video published ...more

New images reveal that Microsoft is already well underway in fulfilling its $480 million contract to provide augmented reality headsets to the US Army. The Army Futures Command recently gave CNBC a preview of the Integrated Virtual Augmentation System (IVAS), which is compris ...more

What does our future hold when augmented and mixed reality finally enter the mainstream? As developers, we are always looking for the ultimate solutions to the problems our users see. Welcome the innovative minds of DataMesh Consulting and their impressive HoloLens interior de ...more

Simulated training can help soldiers and sailors learn how to use their weapons safely, but simulations can sometimes lack the stressful environment of a real firefight. That's why the US Navy has developed a more realistic augmented reality simulator that runs on the Microso ...more

Although the HoloLens is still primarily the domain of developers and researchers, the device is nevertheless on the cutting edge of showing us what will be possible with augmented reality in the coming years. The latest example comes via Microsoft Japan and a new concept vide ...more

After more than a year and a half of silence, the rumors have morphed into reality: Microsoft has finally released an update for the HoloLens. And with that update comes a collection of new features that hint at big plans for the HoloLens this year. For most HoloLens-focused ...more

HoloMaps, an application by Seattle-based Taqtile, is available for free on the Windows Store. Taqtile, whose Vice President of Product Management was Microsoft's former Director of Business Development, is one of the few partners currently in the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Rea ...more

Microsoft's HoloLens has two gestures: bloom and air tap. While the two might not seem like much to learn, some people struggle with the air tap because the headset can be a bit particular. The easiest way to learn the proper form is to look through someone else's eyes while t ...more

An incorrectly scaled object in your HoloLens app can make or break your project, so it's important to get scaling in Unity down, such as working with uniform and non-uniform factors, before moving onto to other aspects of your app. This HoloLens Dev 101 series has been desig ...more

For those of us that were blown away by the spatial mapping and user experience in Fragments and Young Conker, the version of spatial mapping that came stock in the HoloToolkit was lackluster at best. It became apparent really quick that to get an amazing presentation would re ...more

Regular HoloLens developer and YouTuber Sky Zhou, a founding member of mixed reality studio Matrix Inception, has done it again. With an Xbox One controller in hand, watch as he makes these Pokémon battle it out Super Smash Brothers-style in his HoloLens app. Video: . I asked ...more

We've got Google Maps to help us out when we need to navigate outdoors, but Google can only map out so many indoor locations without getting creepy. And that's where Stimulant comes in. This "innovation studio" built a HoloLens app that lets you map out an area, define locatio ...more

Microsoft has informed HoloLens users that the company will begin rolling out a mandatory update for HoloLens as part of its Windows 10 October 2018 release that brings a number of new features and quality-of-life improvements to the headset. The update's new features are hea ...more

Now that we have unlocked the menu movement — which is working very smoothly — we now have to get to work on the gaze manager, but first, we have to make a course correction. A misunderstanding of how raycasting works on my part forced me to rethink a portion of the dynamic u ...more

On Monday, at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft revealed two new apps for the HoloLens apps. The apps, Microsoft Remote Assist and Microsoft Layout, will be available to HoloLens customers as a free preview for a limited time starting on May 22. Remote Assist ...more

The latest beta of the popular open-source media player VLC just hit the Windows Store, which means it not only runs on Windows 10 and Xbox One, but the HoloLens as well. VLC isn't new to Windows, obviously, but the beta released in the Windows Store offers a slew of special ...more

Crayon, a free 3D drawing application by the mysteriously named arkalian, showed up in the Windows Store recently, so I gave it a try like I do all new apps for Windows Holographic. Truthfully, I loaded it up not expecting much, but wow, was I wrong. It's a simple idea, but it ...more

Not content to merely assist surgeons via the HoloLens, Medivis has expanded its augmented reality suite to Magic Leap One with an app for medical students. On Thursday, the medical software company unveiled AnatomyX, an enterprise-level augmented reality platform for the Hol ...more

A funny thing happened on the way to the release of the virtual reality epic Ready Player One — augmented reality grabbed a major piece of the spotlight. Specifically, Microsoft's HoloLens. It all started last week when the film's director, Steven Spielberg, was quoted in an ...more