It’s Gotta Ship with Something…
In addition to working on volumetric video, I planned, designed, and managed the production of the base group of holograms that shipped with the first version. While HoloLens has always been focused on enterprise customers and solutions, there’s a long history of business focused products shipping elements of fun, with delight encouraging customers to share their experience with others, helping build demand.
Original hologram by Lisa Hazen.
During the development of the first HoloLens I was mostly focused on the production of human holograms via our volumetric capture technology. I had been among the first few dozens of people who were in on the earliest stages of development, but volumetric video had been my life for a few years. And then our team moved from being part of Microsoft Research, to being full-fledged members of the HoloLens dev team, and things changed.
The base set of holograms were designed to give people something to dive into, to encourage discovery, and build experience and comfort with new UX paradigms like the air tap. Performance was a key motivator behind developing a low-poly visual style that would look good, not strain the system, and fit with the overall visual ethos established by the design team. In the end, we produced nearly 100 pieces of original art (including a subset that had animation) for the first collection of holograms that shipped with HoloLens.
Style sheet for the HoloLens hologram collection.
Original storm cloud low poly art by Jeremiah Shaw & Danny Jones, and original campfire low poly art by Eric Benacek.
I had to build a case for ensuring that there was a rich collection of materials available at launch. My original vision called for a much wider range of material than we were able to produce (I don’t think Alex Kipman and Darren Bennett ever trusted me all that much, but Alex got fired before I got laid off, and they added a bunch more holograms for v2, so draw your own conclusions about who was right), but there’s a much wider range of material available now, and the ability to bring in content from sources like Sketchfab means the original need has long since been met.
When the device shipped, the web was filled with people sharing videos of their first experience, playing around with the collection we created.