What this book covers

Chapter 1, Let's Begin!, examines the device, and sees what it does and how it works. After that, we get our first taste of developing and creating our first simple holographic app.

Chapter 2, Designing Your App, is all about how to get the best workflow for writing a holographic app. We discuss design techniques and start working on RockOn, the app that is the basis for all chapters in the book.

Chapter 3, Gestures and Events, explains how to deal with gestures when controlling your apps. We talk about why gestures are important, and how we can get the events when the user performs those gestures, while reading these chapters. We also explain how to track hand movements and other input methods.

Chapter 4, Make Some Noise - Sounds, is the chapter where we dive into the sound capabilities of the Mixed Reality world. This chapter introduces HRTF and spatial sounds, and how we can create those in our own apps.

Chapter 5, Be Heard - Voice Interactions, is the place where we dive into voices. This chapter covers how to synthesize voices and how to interpret voice commands. It also covers making the device sound less robot like and, of course, adding voice commands to RockOn.

Chapter 6, Take a Look around You - Spatial Mapping, is where we define the differences between VR, AR, and MR. Here, we take a look at how the HoloLens is able to scan the world around us and how we can get that depth data into our own apps.

Chapter 7, Let's Talk! Communications between Devices, is the chapter where we investigate the options to have two or more devices talk to each other. We discuss networking and the discoverability of devices. We also discuss world anchors and why they matter.

Chapter 8, Speed Up Your Development - Advanced Unity3D, is the chapter where we teach you some advanced topics, such as performance improvements and ways to streamline your workflow in Unity. We also introduce the HoloToolkit, a set of open source components you can use in your own apps.