Blender Lego Art for HoloLens

This blog was originally posted on Blender Lego Art for HoloLens.

Who doesn’t love Lego? And if you have used Blender before…who doesn’t love Blender? -:)

Combining both seemed like a great idea, so that’s what I did…Using Blender I create some pretty simple Lego pieces that can be used to build both simple and complicated models.

A single piece is 0.25 by 0.25 and it’s made out of a single vertex. In the image, the colors are just used to give an idea of the different pieces.

The main point is simply to create a new Blender file, append the different pieces and start building.

At first it’s kind of complicate because you need to deal with the X, Y and Z positions…but once you get used to it…it’s becomes a little bit addictive -:)

Now, the name of the blog is Lego Art, right? So…if you look online for Pixel Art instead, you will find a lot of nice images…like this one…

The perfect candidate for Lego construction! By putting the pieces together and simply assign them the right material…we can get this…

And with some more time and dedication…we can get this…

Anyway…with a collection of models…we can think up and bundle them together into a Microsoft HoloLens application -;)

The application itself is easy…you start by looking at all the models on a shelve…you can select one, make it smaller, bigger, turn it left or right or simply go back to the shelve.

Here’s a video showing how it’s look like.

Greetings,

Blag.

Development Culture.

Room with a View – HoloLens, Unity3D and Blender

This post was originally posted on Room with a View – HoloLens, Unity3D and Blender.

Since the last month or so I have been enlighten myself with an awesome Blender course…and while I had some previous experience by reading some books…nothing could get me to the point that I’m at now as this course…so…enough said…it’s more than highly recommended 🙂

So…one of the challenges was to create something just using primitives…that means…cubes, spheres, cones and so on…nothing fancy…no modifiers…no extra knowledge…so I was able to come up with this…

That was a nice start…but I knew it needed something else…beside getting textures for it of course 🙂 It looked pretty plain…so next step was making it nicer…and this came along the way…

Now…it looks fancy, doesn’t it? Everything hand made created in Blender -;)

So…next step was to figure out what to do with this…it looks too nice to just leave it there on my hard drive…so I start thinking and then remembered that the Holographic Academy has a really nice demo called Origami…in this demo you need to select an origami ball that will drop down a paper plane and then hit a fan that will explode and in turn open a crack on the floor where a nice underground world can be seen…truly amazing if you ask me…so…I had an idea 🙂 Why not have a d-shop frame that will explode when selected and then open a hole in the wall where the room that I designed in Blender could be seen…that sound like an impressive demo to me…so that’s exactly what I did 😉

Here’s the video for your viewing pleasure…hope you like it 🙂

At first I though it was going to be a lot of work…but it wasn't really like that…here are some highlights…

* I enclosed the room in a black box with a hole so it be looked through…

* In Unity3D I simply used an Unlit shader…as black is processed as invisible on HoloLens, having the model in a black unlit box gives the same impression as being invisible…hence…it looks like a hole in the wall…

* I used some spatial mapping to be able to pin the frame and the room to the wall…so it didn’t float around but instead looked like the room was inside the wall…

* When I first imported the model from Blender into Unity3D…none of my textures were available…which seemed odd to me…as they were there and were actually assigned…it turned out that I need to choose every single piece of the model and do a smart unwrapping…so the shader knows exactly how to implement the texture…

* I first I tested out with the emulator…which is good…but doesn’t really implement the same measure units that the real device uses…so while it looked fine on the emulator…it looked too far away on the HoloLens…so a lot of testing was needed in order to get it into the right position…

* To shoot the video, at first I tried using Camtasia…but of course…the rendering wasn’t was I was expecting…one thing is to look it from the HoloLens and other thing is looking from the laptop…so instead I used a recording from the Live Streaming of the HoloLens itself…and that was the trick…

As you can imagine…this now brings a whole world of new possibilities and demos…

Now it’s your turn to show us…what can you do 😉

Greetings,

Blag.

Development Culture.

Microsoft HoloLens on SAP’s d-shop

This post was originally posted on Microsoft HoloLens on SAP’s d-shop.

One of SAP’s d-shop main goals is to gather, learn and share knowledge on the latest technologies and Microsoft HoloLens haven’t been out of our radar -;)

But…what is HoloLens?

HoloLens is a Mixed reality device…which is basically a mix of Virtual (Oculus Rift) and Augmented (Google Glass) Realities.

One of the most important features on Mixed Reality is that it allows you to create Holograms that can be blended into the real world and interact with them.

HoloLens will map your room and recognize that you have a coffee table, a sofa, a lamp, and so on…when you place your Holograms on a table or sofa, the Hologram will not go through it, but instead sit on it…and this allows to do amazing things like creating a Hologram of a lamp to be placed next the sofa and see how it looks. And that’s just one of the many uses cases that HoloLens can provide.

At the d-shop Silicon Valley, we believe that using and coding the HoloLens is an awesome experience.

So…what you do need to start coding and creating amazing experiences?

In this page you will find all the tools that you need, which includes Visual Studio, a tailor made version of Unity3D and the HoloLens emulator.

Also, it would be really good for you to take a look at the Holographic Academy videos…which guide you through the basics notions of HoloLens coding…

But…with this blog what we really want to show you a video with some of the demos/projects that we have created at the d-shop Silicon Valley.

Word Clock With this app, you can literally read the time -;) This demonstrates text usage in Unity and it was adapted from a Python application.

d-shop Robot This app uses a d-shop robot model built using Blender. This demonstrate Spatial Mapping and simple voice commands.

SAP Puzzle Game This app displays a sliding puzzle game that has two modes…easy and hard…it demonstrates how to clip an image and distributed into multiple cubes, it also demonstrates basic voice commands and physics.

HoloHouse This app is a project built for a bank in Dubai to be used as a real state application. The models were build using 3ds Max by an external company. This app demonstrates how to use Unity scripting to rotate the houses, fade the lights, lift the roof and floors of the houses and display annotations.

Now that you have seen what can be done in a couple of weeks…why don’t you join us at the d-shop and show us what you can do! -:D

Greetings,

Blag.

Development Culture.

d-shop's very first Hololens Hackaton

This post was originally posted on d-shop's very first Hololens Hackaton.

On August, Wednesday 3 we hosted our d-shop’s very first Hololens Hackaton. People who had never used Unity3D before and of course who had never code for the Hololens before gathered together to have a fun and exciting learning experience.

Thanks to the hard work and organization efforts from my team partners Aaron Williams and Julia Satsuta we had three awesome guys from Microsoft Vlad Kolesnikov, Petri Wihelmsen and Jaime Rodriguez.

The first day was spend with explanations of what Hololens is…a quick introduction to Unity3D and a design thinking / brainstorming part where the teams could develop their ideas.

The second day started with Hololens coding and coaching from our side. People were totally excited and pumped up…trying things out on the Unity3D editor…on the Hololens emulator and on the device itself.

As a way to include more people and leave the teams working without too many distractions, we had a session on Hololens on Building 7…open for anyone to join in…

After that, we went back to keep coaching and helping the teams. They needed to be fully ready by 3:30pm as we had the demo presentation at 4:00pm.

The demo presentation happened at the cafeteria on Building 8.

We had 5 teams presenting their awesome work…

Holoterior

Design your dream room

Mechannotate

Order part on the go...don't waste your time filling sheets

Next Talent

Engage your newly hired talents by immersing them in your culture and history

TripIp

Planning your next trip? Get the seat that it's more comfortable for you

The Wesley Crushers

Is your pipe broken? Check it...measure it and request a replacement

As you can see…all the teams put a lot of effort and created some really awesome demos…but…there’s always need to be only one winner…so the last team to present was the team who won…so…congratulations “The Wesley Crushers” team!

After this really nice experience…I’m sure we’re going to come back for more…Hololens is still a brand new technology, so there’s still a lot to learn, a lot to hack and a lot of possibilities.

If you’re in Palo Alto…come and visit us! Remember that the d-shop is located on the first floor of Building 9 on Deer Creek Road -;)

Greetings,

Blag.

Development Culture.