Mixed Reality (MR) — As Organizations UI/UX Digital Offering Capability
Why MR Expertise ?
Definition : Mixed reality is a blend of physical and virtual worlds that includes both real and computer-generated objects. Mixed reality (MR) is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualisations, where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.
Ux Tagline — What are the core concepts of an MR experience?
If you are using an enhanced environment app such as Microsoft HoloLens headset or glasses, your real-world surroundings will form the central element of the experience, with useful apps. This is an example of Enhanced Environment. Similarly there can be an experience for Blended MR and Immersive MR.
Keep the user comfortable — (Comfort)
To ensure maximum comfort on head-mounted displays, it’s important for designers and developers to form and present content during how that mimics how these cues operate within the wildlife .
Consider how the user sees the planet — (Holographic frame)
Users see the planet of mixed reality through an oblong viewport powered by their headset. On the HoloLens, this rectangular area is named the holographic frame and allows users to ascertain digital content overlaid onto the important world around them.
Types of mixed reality apps
One of the benefits of developing apps for mixed reality is that there’s a spectrum of experiences that the platform can support. From fully immersive, virtual environments, to light information layering over a user’s current environment, mixed reality provides a robust set of tools to bring any experience to life.
Keeping holograms in place — (Coordinate systems)
At their core, mixed reality apps place holograms in your world to seem and sound like real objects. This involves precisely positioning those holograms at places within the world that are meaningful to the user, whether it’s their physical room or a virtual realm you’ve created.
Making holographic objects feel real — (Spatial mapping)
Spatial mapping makes it possible to put objects on real surfaces. This helps anchor objects within the user’s world and takes advantage of world depth cues.
Business Use Cases — How companies are using MR — “Smashing Magazine” Articles.
• Toshiba predicts that 82% of enterprises will use MR to solve their problems in the next 3 years. One of British companies recently starts employing a mixed reality system to enhance its productivity and training quality within the manual battery building process.
• BAE Systems, a Multinational Defence, security, and aerospace company, has also been using HoloLens in its processes to make electric propulsion devices. Through the use of the device, the company has realized a 50% reduction in assembly time.
• Ford was one of the first car manufacturers to use mixed reality technology, by using it its engineers and designers are able to create a new design quickly at a lower cost. They use Microsoft Hololens headsets and custom software to impose new design features onto their clay models, which enables them to visualize how the change will look. This approach is that it eliminates the need to create a new clay prototype each time.
• Renault Truck a leading French manufacturer is using HoloLens at its Lyon based facility to improve the quality control process with its engine assembly operations. Other car makers, including Volvo and Audi, have also started to utilize MR for vehicle design.
Business Offerings as Capabilities in this Area ( Scope : Unity 3D| Mobile MR Apps)
1.First Offering is building Mobile MR Experiences using Unity 3D 2019 with MRTK Unity Plugin for building enhanced and blended MR environments using Microsoft Hololens 1st Generation gear.
- Unreal Engine for creating virtual Architecture to create virtual walkthroughs in VR Space.
- Blender for creating 3D Art.
- Using Microsoft Hololens for Unity we should be able to come up with an enhanced interface designs.
2. Second Offering developing apps for Microsoft Hololens 2nd generation hardware using open source Unreal engine which is very powerful. Our MR Engine should also be Unreal. As of Unreal Engine 4.25, HoloLens support is full-featured and production-ready.
Hardware which we should cater to :
- Microsoft Hololens 1st/2nd generation
Key Learning :
- All MR is AR but all AR cannot be MR.
- MR Expertise and AR Expertise can be worked on parallelly.
Technologies we should be focussing for Training of our Resources. :-
- Unity 3D 2019 LTS Edition– Cross Platform -All
- Unreal Engine (UE4) — Creating Architectures
- 3DS MAX , Blender 3D , Sketchfab , Googlepoly
- ARCore/ARKit/Vuforia — Covered as part of AR/VR
- MRTK Unity Plugin. — Unity plugin
- Visual Studio 2019 (16.2 or higher)
- Desktop development with C++
- Universal Windows Platform (UWP) development
7. Windows 10 SDK (10.0.18362.0)
8. HoloLens 2 Emulator (Windows Holographic, version 2004)
9. HoloLens (1st gen) Emulator
10. MRTK — Toolkit for Unity & Unreal Engine
11. MRCK — Companion Kit for Windows MR Dev
Key learning
Key stepping stone towards building MR Experience is having a solid foundation in AR/VR building apps.
Business Strategy Framework we will be focussing :-
- AR Playbook by PTC for Augmentation of Virtual Reality and mapping use cases.
Trainings Required
- We have to train resources on developing MR Applications in Unity for Mobile . It should take 1 month time for associates to get fully trained and develop a mini PoC.Some relevant trainings are as follows .