A multiplayer HoloLens experience TL;DR - we created a networked AR game by enhancing the well acclaimed VR version of WAA! and sending 'The Little Astronaut' on a new journey for two or more HoloLenses.

After doing a couple of successful projects on Microsoft's Hololens platform for our clients, we decided to take our holographic know-how to a new level by addressing the multiplayer options of the new Mixed Reality plattform.

Being lucky enough to have access to a couple of HoloLenses (thanks, friends and relatives!) for more than two weeks we concentrated on the perils of syncing these for a multi user experiences.

(longer and funnier version here.)

By taking our own intellectual property of WAA! VR fame we came up with a concept for an Minimum Viable Product of an Augmented Reality experience of the Little Astronaut.
Two aspects were important to us: the development cycle should be as short as possible (read: no feature creep) and the game should be fun (spoiler alert: we achieved both). So this what Peter jotted down:

A no-brainer was to use the Unity plugin for the prototype, since Unity is the platform of choice when it comes to game development for us. Also, the plugin seemed to be the most advanced entry into holographic development. We soon found out that the community efforts to improve the Unity Plugin for the MR platform is hard at work and the Github project was steaming with life. This had the advantage of baing always up to date - and the disadvantage of constant change that didn't make life easier.

But with a little help of beforementioned community and a lot of work with ironing out bugs we finally made it to the first prototype.

It took us several rounds of polishing steps to finish the MVP; especially the snchronisation of the World Anchor kept making problems. But we got everything to work after looking into the code and more and more grasping the concepts of the MR platform.

So we are proud to announce that we finished the prototype!

If you want to test drive it or if you'd like to create a multiplayer HoloLens experience for your client: don't hesitate to contact us!

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