A hackathon project for Microsoft HoloLens which focused on the potential medical application of serving as personal computers for doctors and nurses to handle patient records.
Mixed Reality and HoloLens
I couldn't imagine using with a ~$3,000 piece of equipment, let alone hack with it, until I got invited into Reality Virtually 2018. RV2018 is a hackathon that took place in MIT Media Lab in order to bring together people from all fields in order to explore the application of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies for building new experiences. The HoloLens is Microsoft's VR headset with transparent lenses that allows the user to experience AR experience, and it's technically the first to classify itself into a new category as Mixed Reality.
Designing for hand gestures
The Microsoft HoloLens is a completely different realm of spatial design, as I've only been developing and designing for VR until this point. In order to interact with the HoloLens, it uses cameras in the front in order to capture and recognize the space it's in, as well as recognize and capture your hands which will eventually be used to capture gestures to perform commands. You can do things like:
- Open your hand from a pointed pose - Bloom
- Point and poise - Ready
- Tap with your pointer finger - Tap
- and many more!
With a pretty limited basis of interactions, it was actually a perfect fit that anyone could then pick up the VR experience, look around, and cross a street with a button. However, the point of the experience is to teach users when to cross a street safely, therefore we designed guidelines that essentially told the player in VR the proper neccessary steps to crossing a street such as:
- Find good crossing locations
- Look both ways before crossing the street
- Watch for turning traffic
