HoloLens companion map - unity3d

I am implementing a "companion map" for a HoloLens application using Unity and Visual Studio. My vision is for a small rectangular map to be affixed to the bottom right of the HoloLens view, and to follow the HoloLens user as they move about, much like the display of a video game.
At the moment my "map" is a .jpeg made into a material and put on an upright plane. Is there a way for me to affix the plane such that it is always in the bottom right of the user's view, as opposed to being fixed in the 3D space that the user moves through?

The Orbital Solver in MRTK can implement this idea without even writing any code. It can lock the map to a specified position and offset it from the player.
To use it what you need to do is:
Add Orbital Script Component to your companion map.
Modify the Local Offset and World Offset properties to keep the map in the bottom right of the user's view.
Modify the Orientation Type as Face Tracked Object.
Besides, the SolverExamples scene provided by the mrtkv2 SDK is an excellent outset to become familiar with Solver components

Related

How to put markers in the real world with mapbox and unity when making an augmented reality app

I'm making an augmented reality app with Unity and Mapbox for both ios and android. I have data sets that I am using to make markers in the real world when someone uses the app. I collected json files and converted them to geojson files and then I made a custom map in Mapbox Studio with these 4 different geojson files. Basically I want to have the markers from the datasets I collected to show up in the real world. I am not sure how to get these markers to show up in the real world and not with building prefabs. Example of my custom app made in Mapbox. Each color shows a different category of markers. There are four categories.
Here is an example of what I am referring to.
In this image skeletons can show up in the real world.
Here is an example of what I am not referring to.
In this image droids are place in a map but it is not the real world. It is like Pokemon Go where the map is generated with location but you don't actually see the real world when you are playing.
I already have my Unity project set up and this is the final step, but I am just having issues getting it to show up in the real world. So far, tutorials only show on to get it to reflect something like Pokemon Go.
You will have one scene with a stationary Camera. Your code will monitor the MapBox data in Update(), constantly passing the current GPS position and receiving your list of markers/points of interest. You can simply randomly spawn skeletons in a sphere area (see https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Random-insideUnitSphere.html) around the Camera's transform position once you detect that the user's GPS position is in within a certain distance of the center of your point of interest. Keep track of that list, and destroy the skeletons once they leave the area - and have some way of making sure you only spawn them once for that area.
Your skeletons should have a NavMeshAgent, and you should generate a NavMesh onto the ARFoundation plane for them to walk on. In this case, the plane is probably dynamically created and you may need to use the dynamic NavMesh component https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/NavMeshComponents. If you tell the NavMeshAgent to go to a specific point it will walk to the closest point - so even though you get a random position in the sphere in 3D, the skeleton will move or spawn onto the nearest point so there is no need to figure out how to convert it to the 2D plane space.
Your AR view, both the tracking of the camera position/angle and the generation of a plane representing the ground, will be something generated by ARFoundation and it is simple to add the basic functionality. They have a prefab that already includes the camera and generates the plane for you. You can get ARFoundation via the Unity Package Manager. It will work with many different types of devices.
You should start with a cheap Android phone or tablet, even if you own an iPhone, because it's easier to load the APK and debug/develop your app via Android build.
This is a simplification. I recommend using Singletons, ScriptableObjects, Object Pooling, and other Unity paradigms and plenty of other things within Unity that would help you but as another user pointed out - you may want to spend time learning Unity, ARFoundation, MapBox, and ask more specific programming questions when you are ready.

How to make Holograms move relative to user's head in Hololens 2?

I am creating a simple App on Hololens2 using Unity. I create two game objects and want them to move based on the user's head movement i.e. they do not stay still at a place in space but move relative to the user's head. However, I am not sure on how to enable this setting. Can someone please help?
The Orbital Solver provided in MRTK can implement this idea without even writing any code. It can lock the object to a specified position and offset it from the player. It is recommend to refer to the SolverExamples.unity which is located at /MRTK/Examples/Demos/Solvers/Scenes to get stated Solver components.
If I understand you correctly, you want to have a object at a specific distance from the HoloLens 2 at any given time.
So that (for example) a cube is always in the upper right corner of the users view.
If that is the case you can position the desired object as a child to the Main Camera (located under the MixedRealityPlayspace) in the hierarchy view.

Clickable and Rotatable models using Unity and ARToolkit

Can the 3D models used with the markers be made clickable and rotate able using Unity3D engine and ARToolkit unity. Basically in the AR desktop application we are making , we want to implement this functionality on the 3D models as well. Kindly need help in this matter. ThankYou.
The only issue you could find is that the Transformation of the AR Tracked Object changes based on the visual information.
If you simply use that as a base object and put any other models as children of that one, you can modify their position and rotation in the same way you would do for any other situation.
So, as you see, the Marker scene has nothing but an AR Tracked Object, this is the object that will be updated with the pose of the marker.
Then, the Cube is a child of this object. If you modify the localPosition or localRotation of the cube it will work as you want it.
The Cube is a child of the Marker scene, its global position and rotation will be a combination of the position and rotation of its parent with its local position and rotation (this is standard 3DEngine / SceneGraph behaviour).

crosshair pointer enter on vuforia unity project

I have successfully enabled 3d object detection through vuforia in Unity. I have attached a crosshair (reticle) at the centre of the screen in screenspace overlay. when the user moves his phone over the 3d object which is produced upon object detection, I want a label to appear when crosshair crosses different parts of the 3d object. I tried many methods including, collision, cursor and reticle. It is not working.
Is there any easy way to implement this so that I can use event trigger pointer enter to make few things happening on the game.
I successfully solved my problem. The solution is using worldspace crosshair.
Most of the crosshairs available in the assets are cemeraspace. therefore using a worldspace corsshair solved my problem. It may be useful to someone in future.

How to display a part of a scene in another scene (Scene Kit + Swift)

First, I just want to introduce to you guys my problem, because it is really complex so you need this to understand it properly.
I am trying to do something with Scene Kit and Swift : I want to reproduce what we can see in the TV Show Doctor Who where the Doctor's spaceship is bigger on the inside, as you can see in this video.
Of course the Scene Kit Framework doesn't support those kind of unreal dimensions so we need to do some sort of hackery to do achieve that.
Now let's talk about my idea in plain english
In fact, what we want to do is to display two completely different dimensions at the same place ; so I was thinking to :
A first dimension for the inside of the spaceship.
A second dimension for the outside of the spaceship.
Now, let's say that you are outside of the ship, you would be in the outside dimension, and in this outside dimension, my goal would be to display a portion of the inside dimension at the level of the door to give this effect where the camera is outside but where we can clearly see that the inside is bigger :
We would use an equivalent principle from the inside.
Now let's talk about the game logic :
I think that a good way to represent these dimensions would be two use two scenes.
We will call outsideScene the scene for the outside, and insideScene the scene for the inside.
So if we take again the picture, this would give this at the scene level :
To make it look realistic, the view of the inside needs to follow the movements of the outside camera, that's why I think that all the properties of these two cameras will be identical :
On the left is the outsideScene and on the right, the insideScene. I represent the camera field of view in orange.
If the outsideScene camera moves right, the insideScene camera will do exactly the same thing, if the outsideScene camera rotates, the insideScene camera will rotate in the same way... you get the principle.
So, my question is the following : what can I use to mask a certain portion of a certain scene (in this case the yellow zone in the outsideView) with what the camera of another view (the insideView) "sees" ?
First, I thought that I could simply get an NSImage from the insideScene and then put it as the texture of a surface in the outsideScene, but the problem would be that Scene Kit would compute it's perspective, lighting etc... so It would just look like we was displaying something on a screen and that's not what I want.
there is no super easy way to achieve this in SceneKit.
If your "inside scene" is static and can be baked into a cube map texture you can use shader modifiers and a technique called interior mapping (you can easily find examples on the web).
If you need a live, interactive "inside scene" you can use the sane technique but will have to render your scene in a texture first (or renderer your inside scene and outer scene one after the other with stencils). This can be done by leveraging SCNTechnique (new in Yosemite and iOS 8). On older versions you will have to write some OpenGL code in SCNSceneRenderer delegate methods.
I don't know if it's 'difficult'. As we have to in iOS , a lot of times the simplest answer ..is the simplest answer.
Maybe consider this:
Map a texture onto a cylinder sector prescribed by the geometry of the Tardis cube shape. Make sure the cylinder radius is equal of the focal point of the camera. Make sure you track the camera to the focal point.
The texture will be distorted because it is a cylinder making onto a cube. The actors' nodes in the Tardis will react properly to the camera but there should be two groups of light sources...One set for the Tardis and one outside the Tardis.