A lightweight spectator view solution for your Mixed Reality app

 

Overview

Spectator View is a great solution for sharing your Mixed Reality content in videos and live demos.

Compared with HoloLens‘ Mixed Reality capture, you can achieve much higher resolutions and a very stable video stream.

With Spectator View, you live stream a high definition video from an external camera to a Desktop or Laptop computer.

There your holograms are rendererd into that stream in the Unity Editor, so you can either show it in real time or encode it to a video file.

 

However, there are some challenges when you want to include Spectator View in your app:

 

  • Everything needs to be shared, including subtle aspects like gaze, to mirror exactly how the HoloLens user interacts with the app
  • The standard Spectator View setup, as recommended by Microsoft, is quite expensive and requires you to remove the headband of your HoloLens
  • Integrating the code from the open source Spectator View project into your app requires a deep understanding of how Spectator View works
  • Calibrating your Spectator View rig is more tricky than one may think

 

Our solution

For our shared HoloLens experiences, we use a custom Spectator View rig consisting of:

 

  • a GoPro Hero 5, mounted on the HoloLens
  • a Razor Ripsaw capture card
  • a Laptop computer with a dedicated GPU

 

 

The Laptop either runs a copy of the HoloLens app, when networking is carried out in a peer-to-peer fashion, or a special server component.

We have successfully implemented both kinds of apps with Spectator View support, fine-tuned to achieve optimal rendering performance on our hardware.

Our overall setup is portable and allows us to produce FullHD video material with a frame rate of up to 60 fps.
You can move the rig freely around to find the perfect setting for your shot.

 

 

Our Spectator View solution enables us to produce compelling video material and to show our Mixed Reality apps in action during live presentations.

Our service

Benefit from our experience, when integrating Spectator View into your solution.

We offer consultancy and software development for:

  • setting up and calibrating the Spectator View rig, e.g., using our custom GoPro mount
  • turning your app into a shared experience
  • integrating Spectator View into your app
  • tuning the Spectator View code for your individual requirements