Since I received my HoloLens in May 2016 I have been exploring its limits, learning how to design in the new environment and digging through the SDK.
The first project I began has primarily served as a design exploration and a technical exploration of the SDKs. It is a how-stuff-works app, currently featuring a speaker.
The app allows the user to inspect the parts of a speaker by expanding, moving, scaling or rotating each component.
When a component is selected an informational card appears as a tagalong explaining how it functions as a part of the whole.
To further develop this project I will be adding idle and reactive animations to the 3D components and tagalongs, sound design, bug fixes and further refine the design.
Working with HoloLens poses several design challenges. The displays are additive light which means they act like a projector in the sense that black is transparent and ambient light greatly impacts visibility. It is similar to designing a HUD for a game, in the sense that you have no control over the background or what is behind your object or menu. The scale of everything is relative to physical space. Finally, everything is rendered real-time resource usage greatly impacts battery life and poses the potential of thermal throttling of the device.
