Build Floating Holocities with the Mapbox Maps SDK for Unity and HoloPlayer One

Written with Nick Kaufmann

This tutorial blog post was created with the #HoloCities Hackathon on February 3rd in mind. We are posting this as an early resource for attendants of the HoloCities Hackathon.

Star Wars and Blade Runner sequels this year proved that the dream of the interactive hologram is alive and well, only this time it’s not just a dream anymore. Alongside advances in AR and VR, a new wave of startups are building volumetric displays that let groups of users interact with hologram-like 3D projections — no glasses required. HoloPlayer One is a new interactive lightfield development kit made by the folks at Looking Glass that lets anyone create and interact with true floating 3D scenes from different angles.

To a map nerd, this technology immediately conjures visions of David from the film Prometheus, interacting with a holographic map of the universe. An interactive holographic map… is such a thing even possible? Yes, yes it is. In fact, because HoloPlayer One supports Unity, it’ll be a piece of cake to use the Mapbox Unity SDK and HoloPlay SDK together to build the #HoloCities of our dreams!

So what do we need?

First, you’ll want to get your hands on a HoloPlayer of course, or pay the friendly folks at Looking Glass a visit in NYC. Once you’ve hacked the doorcode and snuck into the secret hologram lair, make sure to install unity 2017.1 on your PC.

Follow these directions to set up your HoloPlayer. You’ll need to make a new project and install both Mapbox Maps SDK for Unity and the HoloPlay SDK.

Once downloaded, either go to (Assets>Import Package>Custom Package…) or just double click the .unitypackage file to import it to the currently open unity editor. Upon importing HoloPlaySDK, click the green “Apply Changes” button then “Never display this popup again”

Notice there are two prefabs in the HoloPlaySDK folder: HoloPlay Capture and Realsense Manager. These are what you’ll use to send your scene to the Holoplayer and interact with it.

Next we have to set up the Mapbox SDK. Upon importing it, go to Mapbox>Configure, then copy and paste your access toaken from your Mapbox account page. You can access the full Mapbox setup tutorial at https://www.mapbox.com/unity-sdk/.

For starters, you can experiment with some demo scenes. You can find them by filtering for “Scene” files with the “search by type” button to the right of the search bar. Most of these are Mapbox demos, but a couple are HoloPlay test scenes. We’re going to try the “MeshGenerationOnTerrain” scene for now.

The most important Mapbox settings are on the “Map” object. The map will appear once you enter “play mode”.

The map will spawn at the origin, but the default size is pretty huge, I changed the “Unity Tile Size” from 100 to 5 then dropped the HoloPlay Capture prefab into the scene, rotated it and increased the size to 15.

And, voila! You’ve got basic map visualization, but check out the other demo scenes for more ideas. Most of the tools for styling maps are covered in the Mapbox tutorials (https://www.mapbox.com/unity-sdk/tutorials/). It’s also worth mentioning the visual node viewer for the map generation pipeline- it’s under Mapbox>Map Editor on the toolbar.

Now, if you want to be able to interact with your map, drop the “Realsense Manager” object into the scene. Its child object is a cursor that will follow your fingertip! (As long as the camera is working).

Above is a simple rotation script I wrote to spin the map on the Y axis in relation to the cursor’s movement on the x axis.

One last word of caution: If you want to make the maps performant, you need to be careful with how much detail the map is loading- change the zoom value on the Map object, I changed it to 19 to reduce the number of buildings considerably, making it rotate at a good framerate.

Now that you’ve got basic maps in the HoloPlayer, the sky is the limit! What kind of Holocity would you want to build? Can you think of ways that Architects or Planners might use holographic displays to build and share their work? What about holograms designed to fit into the urban fabric? Could urban holograms create Blade Runner-esque hybrid spaces that don’t require you to be geared into a VR or AR platform to experience?

“There’s a little of every artist in their work”

— Dr. Ana Stelline, Blade Runner 2049

“Look at me — I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway. I’ve been doing fjords all my life… for a fleeting moment they became fashionable and I got a major award.”

— Slartibartfast, Planet Designer, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Learn more about what Looking Glass is doing here.
Follow along their holographic journey to the west on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Looking Glass also hosts regular Meetups at their Brooklyn lab, their next one will take place on January 31st (Wednesday).