Week 5 (Part2): Arduino + the HoloLens. Can this work?
Arduino + the HoloLens. Can this work?
In collaboration with the Iot group, we got to discussing about how we could incorporate the two to make a unique experience that is combined with arduino sensors and data. Although this idea seems very exciting to us as this creates a new dynamic level to the HoloLens scene, the HoloLens is still quite new and there is little information out there. Though optimistic, I went on a research rampage to find what was out there to discover and learn from.
Although what I did find was this -
HoloLens to Control Smart Devices
In 2015 Ian Sterling created an app that allows you to interact with smart objects in your very own home through augmented reality using gestures. The way this is achieved is by connected the augmented reality device to an Arduino to create an independent network. Any device that is Arduino based can be then controlled by the HoloLens.
The connectivity between Arduino and a mixed reality device is something which holds a huge amount of creative opportunity for developers to create some very exciting applications
HoloLens Image capture > Arduino LED
This project did not discuss how they achieved the demo of the end result or what methods they used, but from what I can gather an image is captured through an Arduino app. The pixels in that image are then analysed and RGB values sent to its corresponding LED to configure a replication of the image captured.
HoloControl
Here for this project, a controller is linked to the HoloLens via bluetooth and uses an Arduino board to read the joy stick buttons state.
I’m not entirely sure if this would b beneficial to us since we may not want to use controllers, but at least discovering existing projects allows us to imagine what could be useful for our purposes.
There is also a github link where a tutorial an in depth explanation can be found about this project.
Getting Another Opinion
With not much luck on in depth explanations on how to link an Arduino board and the HoloLens I emailed Suleiman, Pat and Bachir to see if they had an ideas. Pat replied saying —
I don’t think too much has been posted about it, however it would be similar to retrieving data from other APIs into Unity. I’ve got an article on that here: https://www.sitepoint.com/web-apis-and-iot-in-unity/
You’d just need a way to send data from an Arduino to a service on the web. Then Unity can read the data back from that service :)
In this article, Pat talks about importing IoT data into Unity3D, however this information is not specified to Arduino data or the HoloLens. Despite this I think the method of importing data will be very similar and we should explore this further.
I am hoping that Justin’s Week 6 lecture will shine some light on how to achieve this further and more discussion with the IoT group will need to be done to come to a conclusion about how we will execute our ideas.
