Set-up

Project set-up

A Unity project for Microsoft Holographic platform isn’t very different to a Unity project for other platforms, with a few notable exceptions:

Ensure that the Camera you intend to track the HoloLens device’s position is tagged as Main Camera in the Inspector window. The default Camera in the Scene should already be tagged appropriately.
Set the Main Camera’s Background property to Solid Color rather than the defaulted Skybox. Set the background color to (0, 0, 0, 0).
Use the Fastest Quality Settings in Edit > Project Settings > Quality. This maximizes performance and reduces power consumption. In particular, soft shadows and shadow cascades are too expensive to use on the HoloLens, and should be avoided.
Enable the appropriate publishing flags based on which subsystems your application uses.

To learn more, see Microsoft’s documentation on Performance recommendations for Unity.

Publishing settings

The following capability flags are provided under Player Settings > Publishing Settings. System features fail if you don’t enable the appropriate capability flags.

Not all of the publishing settings below are specific to Windows Holographic. For more information, see Unity’s documentation on WSA Player Settings.


PicturesLibrary	Required for PhotoCapture capture camera frame functionality.
MusicLibrary	Required for VideoCapture audio recording functionality.
VideosLibrary	Required for VideoCapture video recording functionality.
WebCam	Required for PhotoCapture and VideoCapture.
Microphone	Required for voice recognition.
SpatialPerception	Required for Spatial Mapping.

Exporting a Visual Studio solution

Once you’ve built your project and are ready to test, export the project to a Visual Studio solution. To build for Windows Holographic, choose the following options under File > Build Setting:

Platform: Universal Windows Platform
UWP Build Type: D3D or XAML
Unity C# Projects (check this box)

Under Player Settings > Other Settings:

Enable Virtual Reality Supported.
Click the + button on the Virtual Reality Devices list and select Windows Holographic.

Checking the Unity C# Projects checkbox includes your scripting files in their own project in the generated solution. This allows you to conveniently edit and debug your scripts without needing to re-export from Unity. A re-export is only required if your project settings or content change.

See Microsoft’s documentation on Exporting and building a Unity Visual Studio solution for more details.

• 2017–05–16 Page amended with no editorial review

Getting started

Running your first application