Sharing

To better understand how to share holograms using HoloLens, please first read the Coordinate Systems documentation.

Using Spatial Anchors you can create common points of reference which help orient your shared experience across multiple users and devices.

Spatial anchors you create in your application WILL PERSIST when:

1. Users bloom out of your app and re-launch the app.
2. Restart the HoloLens.

Spatial anchors WILL NOT PERSIST when:

1. You uninstall your app from the HoloLens.
2. Across different applications. Application Foo's spatial anchor cannot be used by application Bar.

Networking:

When creating a shared experience, you will share data across your application instance running on multiple devices. You can choose to create these experiences across the device spectrum. There are several networking solutions which you can use to add networking to your applications. The HoloToolkit exposes the Sharing prefab for a few key reasons:

1. It works great for rapid prototyping. You can get setup and running very quickly.
2. It works cross platform. Windows devices and non-Windows devices.
3. It lets you store multiple anchors if you so decide to.

Using HoloLens we can create a variety of Shared Experiences. These can be a real differentiator for your application on HoloLens. Some of the most powerful, productive and fun experiences are infact social and shared.

But how do we define a Shared Experience? Any experience in which more than one user collaborates in some manner could be called a Shared Experience. Some categories are:

1. First person perspective shared experience: This could be something like a Skype experience where user the other person can see what I see and perhaps help me solve problems in my real world space.

2. Viewing experiences locally or remotely: These could be experiences where multiple users are viewing the same series of steps, demonstrations or videos. These users could be sharing this experience locally (in the same room/location and network) or remotely (in a different room/location and network).

3. Collaborate locally or remotely: These could be more like productivity or multiplayer like scenarios where you work together to achieve a common goal. Users could collaborate real time or even asynchronously when in different time zones.

As we learn together, we will come up with more categories of Shared Experiences being built.