Using Unity3D to create great holographic apps

Microsoft says the best way to build HoloLens apps is to use Unity3D. Unity3D, or Unity as some people call it, is a cross-platform game engine. This application was first used to create OS X applications in 2005, but has grown to support more than 15 platforms at the moment. Since one of those platforms is Direct3D on Windows, this was an obvious choice for the HoloLens team as the way to build 3D worlds.

Next to being a game engine, it also is a development environment for this engine, making it a great tool with which to create HoloLens apps. Unity3D natively supports HoloLens as a platform, so you do not need to install plugins.

Unity is not free. However, the Unity Personal license is all you need if you want to develop HoloLens apps and is free if you fulfill the requirements. I suggest that you go to their website to look up the exact license agreement, but basically it says that if the company using Unity has less than $100,000 in annual gross revenue, you are free to use the tool.

When you install Unity from their website, you also need to install the Unity plugin for Visual Studio. There is a very good reason for this. Unity allows you to deploy to all their platforms from within the Unity editor itself, with one notable exception--the HoloLens. The final compile and build and the deployment still need to be done through Visual Studio.

Next to the Build and Deploy scenarios, we will also need Visual Studio to write scripts. Although you can use MonoDevelop, a free independent development tool based on the Mono framework, I still recommend using Visual Studio. You need Visual Studio anyway, so why not take advantage of the power of this IDE?

One word of warning--you should make sure that you have enough memory in your machine to have two instances of Visual Studio running at the same time. You will use one instance to edit your scripts, and the other to do the building and deploying of the UWP application.

Scripts in Unity are pieces of code that enhance or change the behavior of objects or add new behavior to them. Unity itself is more a 3D design environment and leaves the writing of the scripts to other tools. So you will find yourself switching between the Unity editor and the Visual Studio editor quite a lot.