Unity 5.5/HoloLens: AudioPluginMsHRTF.dll has failed the AppContainerCheck check

All right, so I was finally past a couple of deadlines with paid HoloLens apps and was ready to take the plunge to update my app AMS HoloATC to Unity 5.5 and the newest HoloToolkit. After wrestling my way past some some interesting breaking changes (more about that later), I was finally at the point where everything worked again as it did before – and started adding new features. Today was the day I thought it was ready enough to justify a new submission to the store. I had tested everything thoroughly, so what could possibly go wrong.

Why, if it ain’t my dear old friend the WACK. The 'binary analyzer' has found a file AudioPluginMsHRTF.dll that does not pass the AppContainerCheck and the WACK gives me a whole bunch of suggestions that don't mean anything to me. Apparently I have to add a couple of options when I link the app, but I have not seen a linker since I wrote my last C program, which was – I think – before 2000. Now I know the WACK has some issues, so I tried submitting it anyway – but no dice. The Windows Store spitted it right back to me, with the same error. So now what?

Fortunately I have had dealt with Spatial Sound before and recognized the “Ms HRTF Spatializer” as something I just selected in Unity. After numerous (time consuming) failures trying to juggle the WACK, I took a desperate measure. I went back to a machine that had a previous installation of Unity on it – 5.4 – and checked AudioPluginMsHRTF.dll there. I found it in
C:\Program Files\Unity HoloLens 5.4.0f3-HTP\Editor\Data\VR\Unity\WindowsStoreApps. It reports being its size as 2931200 bytes
For Unity 5.5, in
C:\Program Files\Unity550f3\Editor\Data\UnityExtensions\Unity\VR\WindowsStoreApps\uap_x86, there’s a file of 13312 bytes big. Only 13kb. Yet, when you deploy and app with this only 13kb dll to a HoloLens Spatial Sound works. You can clearly hear the difference – simple stereo versus spatial sound.

So I went about and looked around where this dll is taken from when Visual Studio project is built, and found it comes from the plugins directory in the project directory of the generated solution. In my case that’s C:\Projects\AMS_HoloATC\AMS HoloATC\App\AMS HoloATC\Plugins\X86. I replaced the 13kb AudioPluginMsHRTF.dll by the one I had taken from the 5.4 installation. That fixed the WACK. Unfortunately, it also made the app crash whenever I used Spatial Sound. Nice try, no cigar. But it conformed my suspicions that the 5.5 version of this dll is indeed the thing that makes the WACK protest.

So what I did, in the end, was just get rid of ‘real’ Spatial Sound. I went to Edit/Project settings in Unity and set “Spatializer Plugin” to “None”, disabling the Ms HRTF Spatializer. Re-created the Visual Studio solution from complete scratch, and the reference to AudioPluginMsHRTF.dll and AudioPluginMsHRTF.pdb were gone. And so was the WACK error.

But of course, now my app has no real spatial sound anymore – it’s reduced to ‘normal’ Unity Stereo Panning. But a running app is better than one that does not. I have filed a bug at Unity with a repro and contacted some people within Microsoft. I will keep you posted about any progress. In the mean time, this should keep you going forward.

For those who want to try out themselves, I have made this zipped up solution including all the files I built, and you can easily check the resulting app does not pass the WACK.

Update 30-dec-2016 – the issue has been confirmed as a bug by Unity and will be addressed.

Update 31-jan-2016 – the issue has been fixed – in Unity 5.5.1p2 or higher.

A HoloLens airplane tracker 8–adding the church and the billboard

Intro

All the code to track aircraft in a HoloLens is already yours. Now the only thing I have left to write is how the Wortell Church and the billboard that appears on the map came to be. It’s not technically a part of the aircraft tracker per se, but a fun exercise in code that you might use if your company is near an airport too.

Required assets

We need two things:

• A Church
• A Billboard (and a logo to put on it)

Getting and importing the church

This was actually the hardest one. It turns on that there are lots of churches on cgtrader, but if you download for instance this church as FBX or OBJ and import it into Unity, you don’t get the promised church on the left– you get the ghost thing on the right!

As one of my colleagues - who lived in the UK for a long time before joining us - would put it: “it’s not quite what I had in mind”. And this one actually looks quite good – I have seen churches with not only textures but complete parts missing. Apparently not everyone checks the result of every format they convert to before uploading. Fortunately, the author writes he or she has created the model in Sketchup. Ain’t that nice, as you can download a free trial version of that program. So download that – and the original Sketchup model. Unpack the zip file, and rename the 3d-model.skp that’s in there to church.skp. Then double-click from the explorer and Sketchup will open, after possibly asking you about trial licensing first. I had to zoom out a little, but this is what I got

And that was indeed what I had in mind. Now hit File/Export/3D model, select FBX file (*.fbx) for “Save as “type”, choose a name that suits you and hit save

If you would import the resulting church.fbx into Unity you get this:

Although not nearly as pretty as in Sketchup, that’s more like it! To keep your project clean and make it easier to swap out this church for another one (or other building)later, don’t drag the FBX into the root of your assets, but first add a folder, then drag in the church, like displayed on the right.This way, the materials of all the imported objects don’t get mixed up.

To keep the church and the (future) billboard together, I created an empty GameObject “Wortell” in HoloGramCollection. I dragged the church in there. You will find the church too big (like way way too big), so scale it to 0.025 in all directions.Then set for location X to –0.076 and Z to 0.2915. Finally, set Y rotation to 158.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This will put the church nicely where it’s more or less supposed to be, although I think it’s about three times too big with respect to the map but otherwise it would be nearly invisible. For the record – this is not a model of the actual church that is converted to the Wortell offices, but it resembles it a little.

Getting a billboard and a logo

Getting this one is actually very easy. Go to the Unity Asset store – that is, click Window/Asset Store and type “Billboard” in filter. You will get an enormous amounts of hits but you just need the very first one, that I indicated in red. Click on it, then click “download” (or “import”, if you have downloaded it before) .

When you actually import, make sure to deselect the sample scene, as we really don’t need it:

Drag the billboard prefab from Assets/Billboard inside the Wortell object on the hierachy. You will see that once again this is way too big. Scale it to 0.03 for x, y and z, give it the same position as the church and set rotation to 0 for x, 0 for y, and 90 for z. The billboard will now look like this:

So the only thing missing is the Wortell logo – or whatever you want to put on it. I am not sure if this is the right procedure, but I went with this:

• Add a 512x512 image with your logo to Assets/App/Textures. I took this one. Notice the Wortell text is just about halfway – this should put the text at the bottom of the billboard (as is customary with our logo)
• Click on the Billboard in the hierarchy.
• Expand the “board” material in the inspector
• Drag your logo texture on the square that says “None (texture)”
• Set X and Y tiling both to 2

Net result should be like left, and the billboard standing above the church should now look to the right:

Getting the logo the way you want it to be takes a little fiddling. I really can’t tell you why you need to set those tiling values – I just found out it worked this way.

Adding some life to it

It looks pretty nice, but that billboard has all the interactivity of a wooden shed – it’s sitting there doing nothing. We want it to do two things:

• When it’s showing, it needs to be rotated to face the user – so it’s always readable
• Initially it won’t be visible at all, air tapping the church will make it visible (and invisible again, like a toggle)

After all, that’s what’s in the original video, and this very feature was even demonstrated live on Windows Weekly by none other than Mary Jo Foley herself  ;) when she and Paul Thurrott visited the Wortell offices on November 16, 2016.

Making the billboard face the user

This requires actually zero programming effort, as a billboard behaviour is already in the HoloToolkit. So basically all you have to do is:

• Got to Assets/HoloToolkit/Utilities/Scripts
• Locate the Billboard.cs script
• Drag it on top of your billboard game object in the hierarchy
• Set the script’s pivot axis to X

And you are done. If you deploy the app now to a HoloLens or emulator you will see the billboard now follows the camera. Now this may seem odd, as the billboard should rotate around the axis that runs from to top bottom – in other words, Y. But since the billboard is default rotated 90⁰ around it’s Z-axis and rotates around it’s own axis rather than a world axis, this makes sense. Kind of ;)

If you are smart, you are now are wondering why I did not use that for the aircraft label, as the billboard script also supports full free axis movement. That is simple – at the time I wrote the code for the label, I simply had not thought of looking into the HoloToolkit. So I wrote a custom script. And I kept it that way, as a kind of way to show you how I am still learning as well :)

Preparing the billboard folding in or out by air tapping

So what we want to achieve is to be able to air tap the church, but this should have an effect on the billboard. I have solved this as follows:

• Create a collider on the church
• Make a behaviour attached to the billboard that handles the folding in/out of the billboard
• Make a little behaviour attached to the church that receives the air tap and passes that to the behaviour mentioned in the previous bullet point.

First the collider. As explained in the previous episode , to be able to show a cursor on an object or select it, it needs to have a collider. I once again took the box collider for easy selection.

Only then we notice something peculiar when we look at the church from the top:

Meh. That’s annoying. Apparently the creator of this model has created it on an angle, or there’s something wrong with the conversion. Either way we will have to fix it. We do this by digging into the church object in the hierarchy and rotate the Group1 component 25⁰ over it’s Y-axis so it’s visually aligned with the collider:

Now of course church itself is no longer aligned with the road. But if you subtract the 25⁰ from the 158⁰ the church object it is rotated:

 

everything is now correctly rotated and aligned. And now for some action.

Adding the behaviours

We are almost there. First, we need the behavior that does the actual folding and unfolding of the billboard:

using System;
using UnityEngine;

public class BillBoardToggler : MonoBehaviour
{
  private float _startScale;
  void Start()
  {
    _startScale = transform.localScale.x;
    Hide();
  }

  public void Toggle()
  {
    if (Math.Abs(transform.localScale.x) < 0.001f)
    {
      // Pop up
      transform.localScale = new Vector3(0, _startScale, _startScale);
      iTween.ScaleTo(gameObject,
          new Vector3(_startScale, transform.localScale.y,
              transform.localScale.z), 1f);
    }
    else
    {
      // Pop down
      iTween.ScaleTo(gameObject, iTween.Hash("scale",
          new Vector3(0, transform.localScale.y, transform.localScale.z),
          "time", 1f, "oncomplete", "Hide"));
    }
  }

  private void Hide()
  {
    transform.localScale = new Vector3(0, 0, 0);
  }
}

So at start we save the x scale, and hide the complete billboard by scaling it to 0,0,0, effectively making it infinitely small – and thus invisible. Now if the Toggle method is called:

• If the scale bigger than 0.001, the billboard apparently was popped down. So we first set the Y and Z scale to their original value – and keep X to 0, then proceed to animate the X scale from 0 to its original value, using our old friend iTween, which we saw already in the 5th episode of this series. This lets the billboard rise out of the ground
• otherwise, the billboard was already popped up. So we animate the x scale to 0. If you look closely, you will see the billboard being reduced to its outline on the airport map. But just after that, Hide is called, letting the outline also pop out of existence.

Drag this behaviour on top of the billboard. Only one thing left to do – make sure this thing gets called when the user air taps the church. For that, we only need this simple behaviour:

using UnityEngine;

public class ChurchController : MonoBehaviour
{
  private BillBoardToggler _toggler;

  // Use this for initialization
  void Start()
  {
    _toggler = transform.parent.GetComponentInChildren<BillBoardToggler>();
  }

  private void OnSelect()
  {
    if (_toggler != null)
    {
      _toggler.Toggle();
    }
  }
}

Drag this on on top of the church. On start it will try to find a BillBoardToggler script on a sibling, and when the OnSelect method is called – a standard message sent by the HoloToolkit GestureManager – it will call the Toggle method on that, letting the billboard pop up (or make it go down again). So if you move your gaze cursor to the church and air tap on it:

Conclusion

So that’s it. No more beans to spill. This the the app and all of the app, except for the live data feed. In fact, it’s better then the app in the store, because backtracking the road I took making this app I skipped a few detours, false starts and messy things that have not turned up in this cleaned up tutorial code. That is why I can recommend everyone writing an extensive tutorial once in a while – because not only the students will learn, but the teacher as well.

The final and completed code of this app can be found here. I don’t rule out the possibility that I will write about extensions to this app at some later point, but this is what I wanted to share. I enjoyed immensely writing about it, and I hope you enjoyed reading. If you made it this far – kudos to you. I only ask you one thing – if this inspires you to write HoloLens apps too – consider writing a tutorial as well. Maye I will learn something from you as well ;)

A HoloLens airplane tracker 7–activating an aircraft by air tapping

Intro

In this episode I am going to describe how the airplanes are selected in the sky by air tapping them. This requires some changes made to both the Azure Mobile App service and the app. The change to the app service is necessary as I want to share the selected airplane between all possible HoloLenses using the app. Why? Because ;). You actually can do this with the app in the store. This is why sometimes airplanes get selected even when you don’t select them – that is because someone else, somewhere in the world, selects an airplane.

Adapting the service

We need to be able to post to the service which aircraft is active, and in the data that is pulled from the server the active airplane needs to be indicated. Remember in the very first episode the “Flight” object had an unused “IsActive” field? It won’t be unused very much longer. First, you add a reference to System.Runtime.Caching

Then, add using statements:

using System.Runtime.Caching;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Net;

Proceed by adding the following two fields:

private ObjectCache Cache = MemoryCache.Default;

private const string ActiveIdKey = "ActiveId";

We will need to add a method to post the desired active plane’s Id to the server:

[HttpPost]
public HttpResponseMessage Post(string activeId)
{
  Cache[ActiveIdKey] = activeId;
  return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK);
}

Then, in the Get method, insert right before the “return flights” statement the following code:

var activeKey = Cache[ActiveIdKey] as string;
if (activeKey != null)
{
  var activeFlight = flights.FirstOrDefault(p => p.Id == activeKey);
  if (activeFlight != null)
  {
    activeFlight.IsActive = true;
  }
}

This is a rather naive way of ‘storing’ data on a server but I am just do darn lazy to set up a database if I only want to have one simple id kept active. So I am using the MemoryCache. If you post an id to the Post method, it will simply set the cache key – which will be copied into the data in the next data download, provided it’s actually an id used in the data. Publish your service, and let’s go the Unity project again

Adding a gaze cursor – and messing a bit with it

The HoloToolkit has a number of gaze cursors, but I am not quite happy with those, so I made one for myself – by adding a bit into an existing one. The procedure is as follows:

• From HoloToolkit/Input/scripts, drag Handsmanager on top of the HologramCollection
• From HoloToolkit/Input/scripts, drag Gazemanager on top of the HologramCollection
• From HoloToolkit/Input/Prefabs, drag Cursor on top of the HologramCollection

Then we create a little extra behavior, called HandColorCursor

using UnityEngine;
using HoloToolkit.Unity;

public class HandColorCursor : Singleton<HandColorCursor>
{
  // Use this for initialization
  private GameObject _cursorOnHolograms;

  public Color HandDetectedColor;

  private Color _originalColor = Color.green;

  void Start()
  {
    _cursorOnHolograms = CursorManager.Instance.CursorOnHolograms;
    _originalColor = 
      _cursorOnHolograms.GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().material.color;
  }

  // Update is called once per frame
  void LateUpdate()
  {
    if (_cursorOnHolograms != null && HandsManager.Instance != null)
    {
      _cursorOnHolograms.GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().material.color =
        HandsManager.Instance.HandDetected ? Color.green : _originalColor;
    }
  }
}

Drag this behavior on top of the Cursor prefab. Now if you build and run the app and point the gaze cursor to the airport it should become a kind of blue circle. If you move your hand into view, the cursor should appear and go green.

If you move it back, the cursor should again become blue. Unfortunately, if you point it at anything else, you will still see the fuzzy ‘CursorOffHologram’ image. That it’s because the airport is the only thing that has a collider. To make aircraft selectable, we will need to do some work at AircraftHolder.

Updating the airplane

To be selectable, it needs to have a collider. I have chosen a box collider that is pretty big with respect to the actual airplane model – to make it easier to actually select the airplane (as it can be quite some distance away, or at least seem to be) and a box makes it possible to actually see the cursor sitting pretty stable on the selection area as it hits the collider (as opposed to a mesh collider that will make it wobble around). Go to your AircraftHolder prefab in the App/Prefab folder, and add an 80x80x80 Box Collider

And you will indeed see the cursor appear over the airplane

Getting some selecting done – code first

From HoloToolkit/Input/scripts, drag GestureManage on top of the HologramCollection. GestureManager sends an OnSelect message to any GameObject that happens to be hit by a gaze (and where, incidentally, the cursor is hanging out out) using this code:

private void OnTap()
{
  if (FocusedObject != null)
  {
    FocusedObject.SendMessage("OnSelect");
  }
}

So there needs to be an OnSelect method in the AircraftController to handle this. First we will need to add the following fields to the AircraftController:

private bool _isActive;
private AudioSource _sound;
private Dictionary<MeshRenderer, Color> _originalColors;

To the Start method, we add the following code, just in front of the “_initComplete = true;” statement

_sound = GetComponent<AudioSource>();
_originalColors = new Dictionary<MeshRenderer, Color>();
foreach (var component in GetComponentsInChildren<MeshRenderer>())
{
  _originalColors.Add(component, component.material.color);
}

So this actually initializes some things by getting the audio source and reads the color of all sub components – so we can revert it easily later. Then add this method:

private void SetHighlight()
{
  if (_isActive != _flightData.IsActive)
  {
    foreach (var component in GetComponentsInChildren<MeshRenderer>())
    {
      if (component.material.color == Color.white || 
          component.material.color == Color.red)
      {
        component.material.color = _flightData.IsActive ?
           Color.red : _originalColors[component];
      }
    }
    if (_flightData.IsActive)
    {
      _sound.Play();
    }
    else
    {
      _sound.Stop();
    }
    _isActive = _flightData.IsActive;
  }
}

If the _isActive field of the current airplane differs from the new _flightData.IsActive, then flip white things to red – or red things back to white, depending on the actual value of _flightData.IsActive. And it turns on the sound – the annoying sonar ping you saw in the movie I made in the first episode. And fortunately it can also turn in it off ;)

Next, add a call to this new method at the end of the already existing “SetNewFlightData” method. Then, add this code:

private void OnSelect()
{
  SendMessageUpwards("AircraftSelected", _flightData.Id);
}

This is like SendMessage, but then upwards through the object hierarchy, in stead of down to the children. So this will look for an AircraftSelected method in the parent.

Save the file. Now we go to the DataService, and add the following method. Make sure it is sitting between #if UNITY_UWP – #endif directives.

#if UNITY_UWP
public async Task SelectFlight(string flightId)
{
  var parms = new Dictionary<string, string>
  {
    { "activeId", flightId }
  };
  await _client.InvokeApiAsync<List<Flight>>("FlightData", 
           HttpMethod.Post, parms);
}
#endif

This does the actual calling of the App service. And then we need to go to AircraftLoader, which plays the select sound and passes the call trough to the DataService:

public void AircraftSelected(object id)
{
  _sound.Play();
#if UNITY_UWP
  DataService.Instance.SelectFlight(id.ToString());
#endif
}

Save everything, go back to Unity.

Getting some selecting done – connecting the dots in Unity

There are a few things we need to be doing in Unity, but one thing is very important. One I forgot in my first CubeBouncer demo app and in the app that’s in the store, simply because I was not aware of it. Fortunately someone who shall remain nameless here made me aware of it.

First, in the main Unity window, hit Edit/Project Settings/Audio. Then check “Ms HRTF Spatialization” for “Spatializer plugin”

Then open the AircraftHolder prefab again, and add an AudioSource. Important advice, also from the person mentioned above: hit the “Spatialize” checkbox. Then select the “Loop” checkbox and uncheck the “Play On Awake” checkbox. Finally, find a sound you would like to be played by a selected airplane. I took a sonar ping. I put it in the Assets/App/Audio folder, and dragged it on the Audio Clip property. I also moved the “Spatial Blend” slider all the way to the right but I don’t think that is necessary anymore now I use the Spatializer. Net result:

And sure enough, if you now air tap an airplane it shows like below, and it starts pinging:

Adding confirmation sound to selection

I think it’s good practice to add a confirmation sound of some sorts to any user input that is ‘understood’. This is especially necessary with speech commands, but I like to add it to air taps. Sometimes the effect of what you do is not immediately visible, and an audio confirmation the HoloLens has understood you and is working on making your command getting executed is very nice. I tend to add a kind of “pringgg” sound. I used the “Ready” file that is in Assets/App/Audio.

First, add an AudioSource to the HologramCollection and drag the “Ready” sound on top of the “AudioClip” field. Don’t forget to uncheck the “Play On Awake” checkbox.Then go to the AircraftLoader behaviour. Since this receives the message from every AircraftController and passes it through to the DataService, this is a nice central place to play the confirmation sound. So we add a new field:

private AudioSource _sound;

that needs to be initialized in the Start method:

_sound = GetComponent<AudioSource>();

and finally in the AircraftSelected method, insert this line at the top of the method:

_sound.Play();

And we are done. Now if you airtap on the aircraft your HoloLens will sound a ‘pringgg’ sound. That is, if you tapped correctly.

Conclusion

And that’s that. Selecting an airplane by by air tapping it it, and posting an id to the Azure Mobile App service is pretty easy indeed. A lot of the interaction components are basically dragged in from the HoloToolkit, very little actual programming is required. This is the power of the HoloToolkit – I use as much from what is already there, and make as little as possible myself. As any good programmer I am a lazy programmer ;)

This blog post written far, far away from home, in Sammamish, WA, USA, shortly after the MVP summit that left me very inspired – again. After posting this I will soon retire – and go to SEA-TAC tomorrow for my flight back home in the Netherlands.

Code can be found, as always, here on github.

Running a Hololens app on a Raspberry PI2–and controlling it with a keyboard

Intro

No, I am not drunk, nor did I smoke some peculiar produce our capital Amsterdam is famous for, and I did not bump my head a bit too hard on my car while getting out of it either. I was just curious how far the U of UWP would carry me. And it turns out, a lot further than I thought. It’s actually possible to run a HoloLens app on a Raspberry PI2. When I saw it happen, I actually had a bit trouble believing my own eyes, but it is possible indeed. With surprisingly little work. Although I added a little extra work to make it more fun.

Parts required & base material

• One Raspberry PI2 or 3 running the latest version of Windows 10 IoT Core.
• A keyboard that plays nice with the above
• A screen to see the result on

I used a Raspberry PI2 running the latest Windows 10 IoT Core Insider’s build and a NexDock. Mainly because I have one, it’s handy and it looks cool. Be aware that to connect the NexDock keyboard you will need a Bluetooth dongle for your RP2 – or you will need use a RP3 which has it on board.

This post builds upon my (as of the time of this writing still incomplete) series about the Hololens Aircraft tracker, but that’s only because that’s a cool app to demo the idea on. It is no part of the series. I made a separate branch of the app at the end of the 6th episode. So this is like an interlude.

Some brute-force demolishing to get things to compile

Basically it’s as simple as setting the build target to ARM:

The only problem is, if you do that and then rebuild the project, it will complain about this

For the very simple reason this dll, which is part of the HoloToolkit, is not available for ARM. Hell, HoloLens runs x86 only, so why should it be available. No-one ever anticipated using a dolt peculiar person like me trying to run it on a bloody Raspberry PI2.

There is a rather crude way of fixing it. We are not using SpatialUnderstanding anyway, most certainly not on the Raspberry PI2. So I got rid of the plugin that Visual Studio complained about, by going to this folder in Unity:

And hitting delete. Rebuild project in Unity, try to compile it in Visual Studio. Alas. Still no success

But this is a different plugin dll – PlaneFinding. Also something we don’t use. Now this is a bit confusing, as there are three folder containing a Planefinding.dll. Maybe that’s an error in the HoloToolkit.

 

Whatever. Let’s get rid of the whole plugins folder under SpatialMappping. Once again, rebuild in Unity, compile in Visual Studio. And wouldn’t you know it…

The sweet smell of success. Now I want you to understand this is no way to go about to make a HoloLens project compatible with a Raspberry PI2. This is using a mallet to hit very hard on a square peg to make it go through a round hole. I have demolished two components you might want to use in the future version of your HoloLens app. But this is not serious development – this is hacking for fun’s sake to prove a point. That is why I have made a separate branch ;).

Controlling the app’s viewpoint

When you run the app on the HoloLens this is no issue at all. If you want to see the airport and it’s planes from closer up or from a different angle, you just move your head, walk to the object of your interest – or around it. If if runs on a screen, things are a bit different. So I created this little behaviour (with “ou” indeed, which suggests the good folks at Unity have been educated in The Queen’s English) that more or less replicates the key mappings of the HoloLens emulator:

It’s crude, ugly, the result is a bit stuttering – but it does the job.

using UnityEngine;

public class KeyboardCameraController : MonoBehaviour
{
  public float Rotatespeed = 0.4f;
  public float MoveSpeed = 0.02f;
  public float FastSpeedAccleration = 7.5f;

  private Quaternion _initialRotation;
  private Vector3 _initialPosition;
  void Start()
  {
    _initialRotation = Camera.main.transform.rotation;
    _initialPosition = Camera.main.transform.position;
  }

  void Update()
  {
    var speed = 1.0f;
    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.LeftShift) || Input.GetKey(KeyCode.RightShift))
    {
      speed = FastSpeedAccleration * speed;
    }

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.LeftArrow))
    {
      Camera.main.transform.RotateAround(Camera.main.transform.position,
          Camera.main.transform.up, -Rotatespeed * speed);
    }

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.RightArrow))
      Camera.main.transform.RotateAround(Camera.main.transform.position,
          Camera.main.transform.up, Rotatespeed * speed);

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.UpArrow))
    {
      Camera.main.transform.RotateAround(Camera.main.transform.position,
          Camera.main.transform.right, -Rotatespeed * speed);
    }

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.DownArrow))
      Camera.main.transform.RotateAround(Camera.main.transform.position,
          Camera.main.transform.right, Rotatespeed * speed);

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.A))
      Camera.main.transform.position +=
          Camera.main.transform.right * -MoveSpeed * speed;

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.D))
      Camera.main.transform.position +=
          Camera.main.transform.right * MoveSpeed * speed;

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.W))
      Camera.main.transform.position +=
          Camera.main.transform.forward * MoveSpeed * speed;

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.S))
      Camera.main.transform.position +=
          Camera.main.transform.forward * -MoveSpeed * speed;

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.PageUp))
      Camera.main.transform.position +=
          Camera.main.transform.up * MoveSpeed * speed;

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.PageDown))
      Camera.main.transform.position +=
          Camera.main.transform.up * -MoveSpeed * speed;

    if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.Escape))
    {
      Camera.main.transform.position = _initialPosition;
      Camera.main.transform.rotation = _initialRotation;
    }

  }
}

Drag this behaviour on top of the camera (or for what matters, anything at all). You will be able to control the camera’s standpoint via what I have been told is the the standard PC gamer’s WASD and arrow key mappings. PageUp/PageDown will move the camera standpoint up and down, ESC will bring you back to the original viewpoint when the app started, and using SHIFT will make things go faster.

Deploy and run

Deploy the app to your Raspberry PI2 or 3 using Visual Studio – and select your PI as remote machine. Use either “Release” or “Master” build configuration. The latter should - in theory – go faster, but takes much longer (as in very much longer) to compile and deploy. Also, if you choose “Master”, the app does not always start on my PI, it’s sometimes only deployed – so you have to get it going via the device’s Device Portal. This may have something to do with me running an Insider’s build.

Either way – if you have WiFi either built-in or via dongle, that’s fine, but unless you particularly like waiting, connect your PI2/3 to a wired connection while deploying. I also observed issues when the app runs while only having WiFi connectivity – data comes in pretty slow, it can take minutes before the first airplanes appear, while on wired it takes like 30 seconds, max. Apparently my 2.4Ghz network (which the PIs use) is not that strong compared to the 5G all the other devices in the house employ.

And it works. Here are some pictures and a video of the app in action. The performance is not stellar (big surprise here, matching a $35 device against a $3000 device that comes straight out of Star Trek), but still – it works pretty reasonable.

Conclusion

Looks like the U in Universal Windows Platform is pretty universal indeed. Microsoft weren’t talking BS rubbish about this promise. This app can also be deployed to PCs (I learned that by accidentally choosing “Local Machine” as a target) and I don’t doubt it will run on phones and even XBox One, although I think I would have to ponder a little about the way to control the viewpoint on those devices as they don’t have a keyboard. Yet, an impressive result.

Code can be found here.

A HoloLens airplane tracker 6–adding an airport (and a tower)

Intro

This episode is nearly codeless, it’s all Unity and general geeky GIS stuff. We are going to cut out a piece of OpenStreetMap to depict the location of Schiphol. We are also putting a real 3D ATC tower on the map. If you look closely, it has only a very superficial liking to that of the actual Schiphol ATC tower, but those are just minor details ;)

Getting and positioning the map

Getting it was easy enough. As I wrote, I went about to cut out a piece of rectangular OpenStreetMap that contains Schiphol airport and, incidentally and certainly not coincidentally, the Wortell offices. We will deal with that in the final episode of the series.

Now positioning that map is a little tricky, as I have set the center Unity’s coordinate system to the center of Schiphol according to Google Maps. But the center of Schiphol, according to this nifty site which also displays coordinates, is found at a location that is about 25% from the bottom of the image and a little to the left.

The way I solved this was with a little bit of knowledge of geo coordinates and an advanced technique I learned in my years in Geo Information Systems, which can be described as ‘fiddling until it fits’ ;)

First order of business is to try and find out as closely as you can the lat/lon coordinates of the upper left and the lower right corner of the image. I also used latlong.net for that. As far as I could see, top/left is (52.368739, 4.706697) and bottom right (52.285193, 4.811196), while the center of Schiphol is (52.307687, 4.767424)

Now we need to go back to a precursor to this series in which I explained how to convert lat/lon coordinates to Unity’s X/Y/Z coordinates using a tangential plane. We can convert these coordinates using this code

double x, y, z;

GpsUtils.GeodeticToEnu(52.368739, 4.706697, 0, 52.307687, 4.767424, 0, 
  out x, out y, out z);
Debug.WriteLine($"{x / 15000},{y / 15000}");

GpsUtils.GeodeticToEnu(52.285193, 4.811196, 0, 52.307687, 4.767424, 0, 
  out x, out y, out z);
Debug.WriteLine($"{x / 15000},{y / 15000}");

Note I ignore the Z coordinate, and I divide the result by 15000 as that is how I scaled the airplane data as well. The result is

-0.275750329947415,0.453014630195657
0.199135521004053,-0.166804762707821

So we now know the map in Unity is 0.474885850951468 (east-west) by 0.619819392903478 (north-south) meters. We will need this knowledge soon. But first, drag your map cut-out into your App/Textures folder in Unity:

Then proceed to create a material based upon this texture. In the Materials folder, right-click, hit Create/Material and call the material “SchipholMaterial” (or whatever it is you fancy). Then drag your Schiphol texture on top of the “Albedo map” square

Next, click the white rectangle to the right of the Albedo square. That pops up a color picker – set the color to B3B3B3FF to make the Schiphol map a bit less overly bright.

Then, in HologramCollection, create a 3D Plane object. Initially this will look like this:

What is important to wrap your head around is that at scale 1:1, a plane’s size is 10x10 of these blocks which is 10x10 meters in HoloLens. We need to reduce that size so that it’s about 0.62 by 0.475 meters as that is 1:15000 scale. As 10m = scale 1, we need to scale the plane by 0.0475 for X, and 0.062 for Z (leave Y to 1).

Now drag your SchipholMaterial below the “Add Component” button on your Plane. Yes! Unity shows or Schiphol map, with the right dimensions, the right size…

… upside down. Life – and Unity is - full of these little surprises. I have no idea why this is necessary, but if you go to the transform section of the object and hit “180” in the Rotation Y box,

… that will fix it. Unfortunately, we are still not done, and I will show you why. Add a Sphere to the HologramCollection, size it 0.015 in all directions, give it the Trail Line as material. You will notice a blue dot in the middle of the image if you look from above. That’s 0,0,0 according to Unity.

(I toned down the light a little to make this better visible). Unfortunately, as I stated before, 0,0,0 should be on another place, quite a bit down and to the right, near the “Schiphol” label. If we continue to use this, airplanes taking off won’t be properly aligned with the runways :(.

Back to what we found earlier. The corners of the map should be

-0.275750329947415,0.453014630195657
0.199135521004053,-0.166804762707821

on the tangential plane we created and used the center of Schiphol as found by Google Maps as 0,0 in the horizontal plane. Now what follows this might look odd, but there is logic to that.

• Summarize both X values, and divide the result by two. That is half of the difference in distance to what should be the X-center. This is about –0.038
• Summarize both Y values, and divide that result by two as well. That is half of the difference in distance to what should be the Z-center (yeah, gets me every time too – what you tend to think of as Y from your Math class, is Z in Unity). This is about 0.143
• Add those values to X and Z position in the Plane’s transform:

And boom. Compare that to the Google maps marker coordinate and that seems to fit pretty well.

Not an exact fit, but that’s because we manually determined the corner’s lat/lon positions. But we are not talking zoning permits here (lengthy legal battles have been fought over mere centimeters on those in my lovely country) so it will do for this app.

I left the sphere in the project as a reference but disabled it, as we don’t need it anymore but you can enable it again and see it indeed shows up at the center of the map.

So. Now we have a properly sized and positioned map. There is a tiny detail missing.

Adding an ATC tower

Once again we go to CGTrader and browse around for a tower. Unfortunately the iconic Schiphol ATC tower is not available (paid or free) so I settled for the Hong Kong ATC tower that bears some superficial resemblance to it. Unfortunately there is some building in the attached to the actual tower in model - that I neither need or want. I followed this rather crude work flow to deal with that:

• I downloaded the model fbx model zip file
• Unpacked it, and renamed 3d-model.fbx to tower.fbx
• I created a folder “Tower” in my Assets folder in the Unity editor
• I dragged the tower.fbx into that folder
• And then I dragged the resulting tower prefab on the HologramCollection. It will be very large.
• Set its position to far far away, like 5000,5000,5000 to be out of the way of what we have already created.
• Double click on “Tower” to get in into view. I got about this:

Rotate around it till you get about this:

Now what we want to get rid off, is the building next to the tower. I don’t know if I am legally entitled to change a model, so I limit myself to hiding parts of it. This works as follows.

• First, make sure this button is selected.

• Select the model by clicking on the building. Not the tower. This will select the whole model nonetheless
• Click the building again. This will only select the building
• Go to the inspector. Uncheck the checkbox all the way to the top left

That will get rid of most of the unwanted stuff:

See? Rinse and repeat until all the stuff you don’t want is invisible. Remember: click once selects the whole model, click twice to select only what you want. Hidden too much? CTRL-Z is your friend. It’s a bit of a hassle, especially the small floating bits just right of the tower, but in the end you should be left with just this:

When you are done, scale the tower to 0.001,0.001,0.001 and put it’s location to 0,0,0. Select the Main Camera, then GameObject/Align View to Selected and you will see Schiphol again, with a tiny ATC tower standing on top of it. If you look at it almost dead from above, you will see that it’s a bit off to the right and the bottom, according to this aerial picture from Google Maps that ironically enough blocks the view of the actual tower itself with a label – so I marked it with a red circle

As it is the wrong tower – and as it’s not to scale, I did not bother with calculating it exact position but dragged it around a bit until it looked like it was in the same spot, which was –0.0283 for X and 0.0316 for Z. Fiddling a bit around with the view spot so I could see the tower’s base hitting the ground made it look like this:

And that’s fine with me. I’ll call it a day.

Conclusion

I have shown you how to orientate, scale and properly position (geographical) maps and objects on those maps in Unity, using some GIS knowledge, calculus, common sense and fiddling around. This makes your app look just that little extra pretty, plus it bases it in ‘real space’ which makes it extra cool.

Code – well, more like assets and config, can be found here. And I’d like to say hi to my fellow MVP Tom Verhoeff and his trainee Ryan, who seem to like this tutorial so I hope I made both their days ;)