In the previous chapter, we have successfully developed and deployed our first holographic application on HoloLens and tested it out. You have learned the complete cycle of holographic application development, starting from envisioning, scenario identification, sketching, 3D Modeling, setting up a development environment, gestures and interactions implementation using scripting, and, finally, deploying the application on HoloLens and testing it in the real world. The application we have developed and tested is an independent application, and doesn't interact with any other external systems. However, that will not be the case in real-world enterprise scenarios, where applications usually share data with other systems, either in real time or near real time, or in an offline mode.
In this chapter and the next chapter, you will learn to build the first connected holographic application that will pull data from an external system in real time, display it within your holographic application, and interact with it. For this application development, we will follow the familiar journey of holographic application development by doing the following things:
- Identifying a new scenario or application requirements
- Detailing that scenario through a sketching and planning phase?
- Creating 3D Assets
- Developing a scene in Unity3D and applying scripts
- Connecting this application with a backend service, pulling real-time data from a service, and updating holograms based on data received from external service
- Finally, deploying it on HoloLens device and testing it with near real time data
This journey of connected holographic application development is again divided into two chapters, this current one and the next one. In this chapter, you will learn about the following things:
- Envisioning
- Scenario prioritization
- Sketching
- Connected solution overview
- 3D Model overview
In the following chapter, you will continue this same scenario, and do the development and deployment on a HoloLens device.