Little bites of Bloom #1: HoloLens mixed reality capture gotchas

This should be the first part of my new series, “Little bites of Bloom” — dealing with HoloLens development (obviously inspired by https://littlebitesofcocoa.com/). As usual, don’t expect any schedule in the posts.

One of the best HoloLens developer features is the Mixed Reality Capture — by using it you can show others what you’re seeing while wearing a device.

In this post I’ll try to address some of the problems you might have with MRC and also give a few tips on how to achieve better results.

I. Any stream/capture is going to block all the others

As you know, you can watch a live stream of the mixed reality capture in many ways, including the HoloLens developer portal, the HoloLens app and possibly some program that is capable of handling the video stream (such as OBS). Also, one not obvious usage of the MRC feed is the HoloLens Skype app.

All of these use-cases use the same stream resource which apparently gets blocked for the others. If any of the above is true you can’t do the following:

• ask Cortana to take a picture or record a video (it’ll say that it did it, but it actually won’t happen)
• use a second device to watch the stream
• Answer a Skype call
• if a Skype call is running: start a live stream

II. Reducing stream lag

In our experience to achieve the smallest delay and the best stream quality you need to do the following:

a) don’t use any 1st or 3rd party software to watch the stream — just use a browser to open the developer portal (what I tried: Edge and Vivaldi — both work well)

b) this may be obvious, but try to close any applications that you don’t need

c) set up a separate wireless network just for the HoloLens— connect the PC that has the stream open via an ethernet cable

With this setup I’ve seen delays under 2 seconds, which is a lot better than the average 4–5s lag.

shore party out

To see what my colleagues and I are building for HoloLens check out our company website at http://360world.eu.