When Microsoft announced pre-order availability for the HoloLens Developer Edition in February, the company made sure to already have a handful of first-class apps.
Among those apps were HoloStudio, Skype for HoloLens, Actiongram and Roboraid, all developed by Microsoft. Three other showcase apps, Young Conker, Fragments and HoloTour had been realized by Asobo Studio, a french game developer from Bordeaux.
We have talked with Asobo Studio co-founder and CEO Sébastien Wloch about this exclusive partnership and what HoloLens-development is all about.
Microsoft & Asobo Studio: Not a Cold Start
When Microsoft got in touch with Asobo Studio for its HoloLens, they were partnering with the company already for several years. Before that, Asobo had worked with the people from Pixar on games like Ratatouille and WALL-E, which earned them a good reputation in the 3D gaming scene. “We did a Kinect game for them, Kinect Rush a Disney Pixar adventure, which was released in 2012. We got this deal mainly because we did a lot of Pixar games before that, we knew Pixar, we knew the people there, we knew the IPs already. We had already done games based on the same IPs, we had an engine working on the Xbox 360, and the risk was pretty low”, says Sébastien Wloch.
So they realized their first Kinect title, Kinect Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventure, which hit the market in 2012. As Wloch points out, they wanted to try something different and not “go the easy way”.
Unlike other games where the player is bound to a rail, track or a fixed position, Kinect Rush offered gameplay in a virtual open-space, which was quite a new thing.
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From Spatial Mapping to the HoloToolkit
For Young Conker and Fragments, the two games Asobo Studio contributed, they did all the software development themselves. As the HoloLens uses mixed reality, they had to come up with new solutions for mixed-reality gameplay.
To fuse and align real and virtual reality, they needed a new set of measurement and modeling tools. That´s why, apart from the classic game development, Asobo Studio also created a bunch of modules that allowed for spatial mapping. (Spatial mapping stands for nothing less than for detecting all the shapes, objects and measurements of the real-life environment around the HoloLens to create a 3D-model.)
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Source: Winbuzzer