ArcGIS Runtime SDK Hololens

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01-22-2017 02:24 AM
MartinSteibauer
New Contributor

Hi,

I'm interested in developing GIS Applications for the Microsoft Hololens. I found a video, that shows that this should be possible with the ArcGIS Runtime SDK:

25 - 5172 ArcGIS Runtime and the Microsoft Hololens 480 - YouTube

Regarding this, I've some questions:

1. What do I need to develop an GIS App for the Hololens (Software, SDK, Developer Account, ...)

2. What's already possible - e.g. is it just for visualization or can I also enable e.g. select by attributes or some like that?

3. What about licensing? Let's say I want to sell my application. How much to have to pay to be able to do this?

I'd be grateful for some answers.

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5 Replies
dotMorten_esri
Esri Notable Contributor

The Runtime doesn't officially support HoloLens. The specific demo you saw has nothing Runtime in it (the title is a little misleading - the runtime bit is in the beginning, before the HoloLens part).

However because HoloLens runs UWP apps and because we deliver binaries to run in UWP apps, it is possible to call into the runtime within a HoloLens app. However we do not support any type of 3D rendering into holographic apps. The demos you've seen uses Unity3D to render 3D models, and nothing from the runtime is used for that. However you could for instance use a location in your 3D World to convert it to a longitude/latitude, and then use this to for instance do reverse-geocode using the runtime. My demo here does exactly that: HoloLens Reverse Geocoding - YouTube 

On a side note you can use CityEngine to create your 3D models and import them into your Unity App (that's what the youtube video you referred to has done)

There are a lot of tutorials on the HoloLens website showing how to build Holographic apps using Unity, so that's really where you start.

MartinSteibauer
New Contributor

Hi Morten,

thank you very much for your reply!

Since I'm an app developer for hololens, I'm also familiar with Unity.

Great video! That's what I'm interested in. I don't just want to visualize a 3D model e.g. a DEM with some layers - I want to develop an app which enables user interaction like simple queries. Let me give you an example: Let's say I have DTM overlayed with the results of land use classification. My app should visualize the specified extent of the data, zooming should be possible and you should get e.g. the name of the land use class if you tap on a specific polygon.

So I don't want to export a static 3D model and integrate it into my hololens app. I want to build an hololens app which enables some interaction with the visualized data.

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dotMorten_esri
Esri Notable Contributor

That's all possible - but for the most part, you would have to write all of that in Unity yourself.

You could use the runtime to make some data queries (that's how the geocode in the video was working), but that's about it.

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thomasbales
Occasional Contributor

Morten, could you give a quick example of how to properly import the .net sdk into unity? I would like to query some of my feature services in unity  for a hololens project and I have not been able to get it to compile.

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dotMorten_esri
Esri Notable Contributor

I was never able to make this work in Unity. I had to make a facade for compiling Unity, then use the "real" API once I'm over in UWP and compiling. It was pretty tedious. However things might have improved a lot since I worked on this a few years ago.

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