Microsoft made it easier to develop Holographic apps by releasing the HoloToolkit which is a collection of tools and scripts which can be used to implement key features easily. Until October 2017, things were breezy and I thought I had features figured out with the HoloToolkit. However, Microsoft released the Mixed Reality (MR) Toolkit in October 2017. If you’re like me, who started with Hololens apps last year, then you’ll see that most of your previous apps break with the latest MR Toolkit upgrade.
Therefore, in this article, I focus on upgrading the existing environments to the MR Toolkit. The following articles will be showing how Hololens apps can be built using the latest MR Toolkit released in October 2017.
You probably would have already finished some of the installations outlined below per my previous post
1. Get Unity 2017 2.0f3 Personal version
2. Get Visual Studio 2017, Community edition. Make sure you have the Windows 10 SDK for Fall Creators Update (10.0.16299.15). This should be automatically available when you installed VS 2017. If not, download it from here
3. Get the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update .You need at least 1709 or later. You’ll need to ensure you have all your updates installed before getting the Fall creator’s update.
4. Get the MR toolkit for the Unity version you just downloaded (or previously have) from https://github.com/Microsoft/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity/releases
Yes, they are still calling the latest MR ToolKit as HoloToolkit.
After you’ve exported, this will be saved as a Unity package
I was quite mad in the beginning that all of my older code is broken after the upgrade. But the relative ease of using the MR Toolkit has shown me why this upgrade was necessary.
In my next post, let’s explore on how to use the new Mixed Reality Toolkit to use voice commands in your Hololens apps.
P.S: If you do have your apps running on older HoloToolkit versions, simply delete it from your Assets folder and import this new MR Toolkit. And make sure you have the rest of the things, which I have listed above, in order too.
