(Troubleshooting asset placement)

• This week:
  • Sunny and Jamie worked on object placement and having them show up correctly (in terms of orientation and location) in Hololens, and debugging issues that popped up along the way. Sunny also set up the development environment on his laptop and solved issues with getting the emulator running.
  • Brandee and Sara helped with testing and troubleshooting our project with the Hololens. We especially worked this week on asset placement.
• Accomplishments:
  • We have been able to get a spatial map of the room that we have been working in, and place some of our assets aligned with horizontal/vertical surfaces within this map. We have also gone through the parts of the Hololens tutorials appropriate and important for our project which has improved our understanding of what we will need to do in the future.
  • We figured out a way to correctly add and structure prefabs in Unity so that they can be identified and placed appropriately within our map by the placement script.
  • We have a much better idea of how rotation and position values of an object in Unity translate to appropriate values for the object to appear correctly in Hololens.
  • We have a better understanding of the scripts applicable to our application (we are using a subset of the scripts made available by Microsoft in their tutorials).
  • We were also able to get the complete development environment set up on another machine, so that has increased productivity a little.
  • We were able to place an object on either a vertical surface or horizontal surface.
• Problems encountered:
  • We struggled the most with having objects show up correctly in the Hololens. It’s easy to add them in Unity and they may also show up correctly when “played” in Unity, but that hasn’t always translated to the same results when the app is launched in Hololens. We made changes in Unity that seemed most logical for fixing a problem, but often they didn’t have any effect in the Hololens. For example,  when launched in the Hololens, we have had objects show up rotated unexpectedly by 180 degrees along one axis or never appear in the room. Getting to the root cause took up a good amount of time: multiple cycles of making changes in Unity, building, launching from Visual Studio and scanning the resultant environment to understand what could have gone wrong.
  • One other problem that we have been constantly seeing is that between two launches of our app in the Hololens from the same position, some objects might not show up at all or might show up with an incorrect orientation/position in one of the runs relative to the other.
  • There is very little help available for most Hololens related issues due to the relative nascence of the platform. Besides, having just one machine/device where we can see the results limits what we can do in parallel; although we have the emulator running, its screen blanks out most of the time we run it and so it doesn’t help.
  • We are wondering if we can make the game for our room in WID, and during our presentation, provide a video demo of our game in action. We think this will give more people the ability to check out the game and make creating it much more possible for us. Not only will we not need to worry about getting the Hololens into our classroom, but we can more effectively build and test.
• Plans for the upcoming week:
  • Meeting on Monday and Wednesday to work on placing more assets and aligning them correctly in the room.
  • Adjust timeline goals to accommodate for setbacks working with the Hololens
  • Begin brainstorming presentation