Back in April I got my hands on one of the first HoloLens dev kits. \u00a0Since then I’ve been playing around and learning the new mechanics behind programming for Mixed Reality technology. \u00a0There are a lot of new aspects to the HoloLens hardware that is new to the programming community. \u00a0One aspect in-particular is that the HoloLens generates this beautiful and fairly accurate mesh from the environment around you. \u00a0The only problem is that this mesh can have overlapping polygons, holes, and jagged edges. \u00a0Also the raw mesh alone doesn’t give you any specifically useful information about the parts of the mesh. \u00a0It doesn’t tell you what parts of the mesh are walls, floors, ceiling, tables, etc. \u00a0The HoloLens just sees it as one huge object\/mesh.<\/p>\n

Even though the raw mesh doesn’t provide you with any useful information, Microsoft does provide the HoloToolKit. \u00a0Which does have a tool to do some mesh processing. \u00a0However, I found the information calculated\u00a0by the HoloToolKit to be very broad and generic. \u00a0For instance, it will give you a list of planes and tell you if the planes are walls, floors, ceilings, or tables. \u00a0Although the planes that I received when I ran the tool were patchy, didn’t match the full lengths of the walls, and on some occasions extended past the plane length. \u00a0This became extremely annoying for my two-story house with a loft. \u00a0Where it kept trying to separate the two floors in-half with a giant plane through the middle of my house. \u00a0These planes are not accurate enough to use for real world physics calculations without some object falling through the map. \u00a0But these planes can be used to find a basic blank spot on a wall to put a hologram (Like say an alien invading mother-ship… RoboRaid).<\/p>\n

With that said, depending on the app you are developing you may not have as a specific need as I do and can use the HoloToolKit. \u00a0However, for those of us who need a little more information about our surroundings. \u00a0We are at the moment required to develop our own mesh processor.<\/p>\n