Interact with Your Inventor and Fusion 360 3D Models on the HTC Vive and Microsoft HoloLens

BRENT JACKSON: That may be it. I'll go out and start a little early, because there was a video I wasn't sure if was going to show or not, to kind of give you an idea of what we've been doing. It's only two minutes, but if I start early then it doesn't count.

So this is Interact with your Inventor and Fusion 360 3D on the HTC Vive and the Microsoft HoloLens. I told myself last year I'd try and come up with a catchier name than that, but it really just puts all that information in there, so at least you know what you're in for.

My name is Brent Jackson. I'm an innovation specialist for Bridgestone Americas in the tire operations department. So I work for Bridgestone in America in tires, in manufacturing, in the engineering services support department as an innovation specialist.

It's a large company, so it gets divided up pretty well. Basically, we do some R&D and prototyping for new software and technologies to advance our manufacturing processes. All of my customers are engineers that work for Bridgestone in the tire department. So it's a pretty easy sell to most of them.

A couple of years ago, I started-- I was a mechanical engineer there. So I was doing a reverse engineering project, taking 2D CAD drawings and laser scans and converting some machines that we had had drawn or created for us that weren't working correctly, and reverse engineering that into a 3D model so that we had replaceable parts, and also so that we could make the next one better.

It took me about a year to do it. I never want to do it again, so I came up with a VR solution to help do design reviews on our designs, so that we could make sure they're designed correctly before they get created and delivered to us. This class basically covers the steps so that you guys could do that yourselves.

It's not that bad. I'm not going to go into super high level detail on ultimate model optimization. That gets very granular, but I want to make it something that, if you guys aren't coders-- or Unity experts, but you're using Nvidia Fusion, you can actually do this yourself with free software, as well. So that's kind of nice.

So I will-- what have we got? 9:14. I'll play this video. I was too busy running our show floor last year-- we had a show floor out in the convention hall last year, so I didn't actually get to see it. So this is probably the only other time it'll get seen. Maybe you saw it. So sorry if this is a repeat, but it's only a couple of minutes.

This kind of shows what Bridgestone's doing with our technology and how we got into this.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- --navigate that path. So what does that look like? Let me share an example. Bridgestone has been making tires for over 100 years. In that time, Bridgestone has adopted a lot of new technology. And although tires are still made by mixing rubber, the level of automation and innovation has grown exponentially.

And the Bridgestone team has been charting a course for the future by creating a virtual factory as they renovate older equipment. Many of Bridgestone factories have equipment that is 50 or 60 years old. In fact, one has a 100-year-old machine. Upgrading these valuable assets presents a unique challenge. The company has only 2D drawings for most of its massive, multistory, legacy machinery, and they needed a way to model this in 3D.

With our reality capture technology, ReCap, Bridgestone scanned their equipment and created a 3D model to use as a reference. To retrofit the equipment, they imported these 3D scans into Inventor. They converted the point clouds into accurate models, and then began to design new parts. They used the model to isolate specific parts and to make precise measurements.

As Bridgestone sees it, if designing in 3D is helpful, why not take it further? Why not view it in 3D as well? So, they used augmented reality to view their new designs before installation. The design team invites the maintenance team to view

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

- --the retrofits in advance. Bridgestone wants to ensure that their crews can access the equipment easily and minimize downtime. After renovating a $3 million piece of machinery, you don't want to learn that there's no way for an employee to reach the bearings and grease them. You don't want to learn after a renovation that a factory robot is going to hit a $600,000 pipe rack overhead.

Mixed reality helps the Bridgestone team reveal these issues in advance. From Inventor, to 3ds Max interactive, to holograms, and virtual reality experiences, the data moves seamlessly through the process. They complete their design review on a virtual factory floor.

As exciting as these workflows are, Bridgestone is just getting started. They are moving deliberately to roll this out at every Bridgestone plant. Plus, they also see value in mixed reality for training staff on new equipment. By embracing technology like this, it's no wonder Bridgestone has been in business for over a century. And you can see it all at Bridgestone's immersive exhibit in the Future of Making Things Experience hall.

[END PLAYBACK]

BRENT JACKSON: --which was quite a process to get all that set up, and run that, and then teach two classes last year. I don't suggest it. That's why I'm only teaching one class this year on the show floor.

That covers how we're doing it, and where we're headed with it. It appeared in some talks-- people talking about how these Fortune 50 companies only last 15 years on average now, but we're the leading tire manufacturer-- rubber manufacturer in the world. So we're doing OK. It's not too bad. Let's see.

So today I'm going to cover an Inventor assembly conversion-- creating it and getting it ready for XR interactions-- fusion assembly conversion. I'm actually going to cover-- the first one I'm going to cover is going to be how you can do it for both files, because there's one method that works for both. And then, towards the end of the class, if there's still some time, I'll cover-- there's some simple ways, and also some way more advanced ways you can do it.

But when I was running through this it kind of bled over a little bit. But all those steps for doing the more high level ones, are in my hand-out, and also for the super-simple ones, in the handout, as well. And then I'll show you how to create a really simple HoloLens app in Unity, and also a really simple HTC Vive app in Unity so that if you have a HoloLens and a Vive, and Visual Studio and Unity and 3ds Max then you can do it,

And the reason I'm using 3ds Max is because it comes with a lot of the product design suites, and so you know you might not use it with Inventor, but you probably have it.

Also, this isn't my background music, but it's really nice. I appreciate having it on here. And this is a live demo, so if you really like presentations, and slides, and charts, and stuff, I'm sorry. This is all just technical.

So I guess-- that isn't my music, is it? There's nothing on my laptop playing that music? Nope? Nope. I muted it. It's fine. That's someone else.

So let's start with real passionate like Inventor conversion session. Cue the swell. So this is 3ds Max. Basically what we're going to do is you're going to go to the import-- the import tool has actually been revamped in 2019.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

BRENT JACKSON: Oh yeah, sorry. Thank you. And we're back. OK. I'll start over. So you're going to go just under File, under Import. They they've worked on this tool a lot recently. I've been talking with them, and they've made some modifications. It's a really great import tool.

So you basically go to your master assembly for Inventor, and hit Open. This is the only part that really takes a few seconds to process. So it's not that bad. You want to make sure you're importing it as a mesh, and that you have Import Vendor Materials and Assign Material IDs.

And down here, under mesh resolution-- in a more advanced version, you can import several versions of these. I would end with zero, because if you know anything about level of detail, you can choose different versions. So on the Vive, if it's a huge model, when you get up close to it, you want to see good detail. You can render a zero. It takes forever to do it, so I'm not going to do it live. But I always start at negative 8, because that's pretty good. Especially for what we're looking at, which is form, fit, and function.

And so for a lot of medium-sized assemblies, that'll work out OK. Inventor file, I use the y-axis up, and then you hit OK, and it'll import.

Now, the reason you actually have to convert this stuff is-- there is FPX plug-in exporter for Inventor, but I've never had luck with it, and so I came up with this method. And if you just import it in here, and then export it, your materials aren't going to come through. Occasionally, one might sneak through, and something might show up as blue, but probably not.

And so, I'll just bring it in here. Oh wait, that was the wrong one. This is the Fusion model. But I really want it-- so that's a Fusion model. But there's some other steps in the Inventor I kind of want to show you.

Real quick, just so you know, for you Fusion guys out there, since I'm on there. Inside Fusion, over here-- if it's a simple model, you can honestly just FPX export it from here, and pull it into Unity, which is great. If you want to optimize it some, you can export it as Inventor 2016 model, and then go through the workflow the same as I'm about to.

So from here on, you export it as this. It's going to be the same workflow, but there is an aspect of this that I want to be able to demo when I'm using the Inventor version. Especially since, a lot of you raised your hands for Inventor. Any questions so far?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

BRENT JACKSON: JSON file? I don't know. I haven't tried with it. Where would you pull the JavaScript file from?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

BRENT JACKSON: You convert it into JSON? Wow, that's cool. I haven't messed around with it. I just go from Inventor into here, because we have so many Inventor files. We use Vault, and we have millions of files in the Vault. And so it's easy for me. If someone wants something, I can just like do a pack-and-go from the vault and then pull it right in here and convert it. And in no time, I can put it on a headset for them to check out.

So, the reason I brought this one up-- I used what is it called? I'm blanking right now, but where you make the materials, the I-beams automatically? Anyway, I'll remember in like 10 seconds. But, when I made that, I used Surfaces to align them to. And that way, I could expand and contract some of the lines. It just made it really easy to snap that model so that this was like a parametric conveyor.

But, it pulls the surfaces in, which is kind of a pain. So you have to go up here, and un-group it. And then, you can select any geometry that came in that you weren't really excited about and delete it. That's just something-- that actually took me a longer than I wanted to talk to figure that out.

So once you have it in here normally you'll see everything in this version and you'll see all the parts that you have here. The first thing you have to do, which is fantastic-- because I used to create my own materials in here and then just copy them over-- you can actually just use scene converter, which will convert all the Inventor materials, if they're relatively standard materials. If it's textures, it's a little more complex.

But, this will actually convert them into materials that will pass through and that work really great. So I do convert scene. You'll see done here-- I don't know if you can read it, but there's 93 objects in this scene. A thing with VR and XR in general is the amount of objects you're rendering is going to slow everything down. So every object-- if you're looking at something, it's rendering 93 things.

And so the more you can reduce that, the better performance you're going to get on your model. And so that's kind one of the nice things about this next step, is you can go over here, into-- what's it called again? Oh yeah, sort by layer.

So when I imported it, one of the things that was checked and defaulted is combine materials by layer. And so then you can go through here and find-- that's only two of them. It's not that big of a deal, but when you get up to, like this one, there's a lot of parts here. So you can highlight all of them, and go over here to the utilities. And you go to collapse, and you do collapse selected, and it converts that into just one mesh.

And so this works for Fusion and Inventor. There's a way in Inventor that you can get it down to just a single mesh, and everything moves over. But this still works pretty great. It's going to lower the [INAUDIBLE] down significantly enough.

So then, let's see. Yeah, the bearings, lots of bearings. So I'll just grab those, collapse them. Grab the calendar rolls, collapse them. Now we've got to be careful with this one, because the frame is still a part of this. Collapse those down. Collapse these down.

All right. No, those aren't in there. How do I collapse those? Oh, yeah, those are the old materials. I've already collapsed those. So that's basically it. So there's lot fewer materials there. A lot fewer items in here, now. You can see six items as opposed to 93. So that's going to make a render a lot faster.

So, after that, you can take your model and export it. Call this one view class underscore one. Save that. Then we'll export it over. Now you have to be a little careful. If you're doing [INAUDIBLE] textures, you'll want embed media. Generally I just leave that selected anyway.

[INAUDIBLE] up, because the Z is up in here. And sometimes, depending on how you exported the file initially, what you drew it in, all that, you might have to mess with your units here. It doesn't actually change the units. It just presets some stuff in Unity for you. You do get this error, but it doesn't matter. It's just there. And then, you have your model.

So let's go to-- we'll do the HoloLens one first. So there is this thing called the mixed reality tool kit that's available for free on GitHub, and it's fantastic. It's a ton of tools for developing HoloLens applications, and you don't have to write any code. I wish I had found it earlier. So I just use this-- there's a scene in there called two-hand manipulation test.

I just use this scene because it allows me-- I can import my hologram, just drag a couple scripts over to it, and then I can grab it, move it, scale it, rotate it around with two hands in the HoloLens. It's really convenient, and as you're about see, it doesn't really take much time to do it.

There's a little bit of housekeeping you have to do. So, because this is for mixed reality, not just the HoloLens, it's designed for like a VR headset. So underneath the camera here, you have to change the Skybox over to a solid color. You'll see on the little camera preview on the bottom, there's a gray background.

You do solid color, it turns to black. That way, you're not seeing a gray world in the HoloLens that really lags it out-- you actually see transparency. And then, under scene content-- oh yeah, I've got to import my model now.

So you just go, right click anywhere in the hierarchy where you want to put it. Has anyone here used Unity before? OK, cool. Dig out the export. AU-class one import. And there you have it. So, now I have this model. And there's my conveyor, and the colors came through. They're not super amazing-looking. Sometimes the bearings will lose a little bit of their shine, but you can clean that up if you want. You go over here.

Because I've done this before once in this project, these materials are here. But you can go to extract materials up here, and it'll pull them out of that FBX, and it'll let you edit them. So I can go into this nickel material-- it's interesting that it's pulling it in from the old one-- and change that to be-- is it pulling up the wrong one? Oh, here we go.

Oh, it thinks that's steel blue. That's a cool color. That's interesting. I'm not sure why it pulled it out like that, but I think if I hadn't imported it previously, it probably would have been fine.

Let's see if I can dig into it really quickly. If not, I'll just skip it. Oh, yeah. Oh, sorry. I pulled in the wrong model. This is the one I just exported, and you can see it's got those nice, shiny bearings that I think I just made a little more metallic than they were previously.

So, I usually-- where did I put that? So it's under scene content. I put it under here, just because it's easier to see. These other items, I can copy them, because I want them to have the same controls. There's only two scripts you need. It's called box collider, and two-hand hand manipulatable. Easy-to-pronounce word.

So you go over to add component. Put in your box collider. Usually that snaps around it. Sometimes, you'll have to edit the collider and drag it out. You want it to kind of be the same size as your model, because that's where you're going to be using the select to manipulate the model.

So you can get it close. It doesn't have to be exact. No one will see it. It's just a matter of when you're looking at the model, this is the thing you're clicking on to control your model. And then, the other one was the two-hand manipulatable. You just type in the word two, it's going to pop up. Two-hand manipulatable.

And then, you need to put a bounding box prefab in here. The easiest way to find it is to go over to one of these pre-existing ones, click on bounding box prefab, and it'll pop up down here. you click back over on your model, and pull it over to the prefab. And so, now you've got that set up.

I generally just delete everything in here, because I don't need all that other stuff. And then that's it. As far as setting up, on the Unity side. Now you have your model-- no, there is a-- you have your model at scale, and so, in the manipulation mode, you can change what you want to be able to do. So if you just want to scale it, that's fine. I don't know why you would. Move and scale is pretty great.

Move, rotate, and scale is nice, unless you're doing a design review in a room, and you want to shrink it down and place it on the table, this is really good for that. But, if you want to look at a one-to-one scale, I suggest you just do move and rotate. And then, I also usually do rotation constraint on the y-axis. Only when it's always pointing up. Otherwise, it gets a little funky, and it's kind of hard to get it right back to zero.

So I'll just do-- I'll do move, rotate, and scale on the y-axis, and then, at that point, you go to your build settings. If we hadn't use a preexisting scene, we'd probably need to configure it. You still might. You can just click through these under the mixed reality configure window, and it'll set everything up.

I'll go ahead and cover a little bit of what you need. So when you're doing this, you're going use a universal Windows platform. And you're going to-- target device would be the HoloLens. Build type, D3D. Latest SDK, latest Visual Studio, build, run on the local machine. And then, under Player Settings, the main two things you have to have checked, under XR settings, you have the Windows Mixed reality, and under other settings-- you don't have to do this now, but there deprecating it, and going to it.

In the future, you'll have to use IL2 CPB. It used to be .NET. Honestly .NET usually builds faster, but they said they're moving to that, because it's more stable.

And I'm not going to click build, because it does take a while to build it. So if I built it, then I would have this show up, which is my project. And, I would have created this folder called AppAU. And, inside that folder is the mixed reality Unity .SLN file. And if I open that for the first time, it would take me into Visual Studio, and that's what you use to compile it, and deploy it to the HoloLens. Luckily, that's not that hard either.

So, the only things you really need to know are that you're going to use a release mode. It's going to be for x86. There's a good chance this might just say start, and you're like, what? It's supposed to say device. How do I change it? It took me a while to Google around and figure it out. But you go with your project, and you right-click on it if that's happening to you, and you click set as startup project, and that will allow you to do it.

So then it's on device mode. You click build. All this stuff happens. Actually, this is from the deploy. A lot of stuff down here happens, and 10 minutes goes by, and then you click Deploy, presuming you have your HoloLens plugged in over USB to your laptop, and it'll pop up and ask for a PIN. You go in the HoloLens in Developer Mode, Connect Device. It'll show you a PIN, you type it in, and it'll push it to the HoloLens. And then you can open your HoloLens, click on the app, and view it.

And let's see. I have a video in here of that happening. It's very short. It's not two minutes like the last one. I did do it in my hotel room last night, because I just wanted to make sure you guys could see it.

So there's another thing in here I used in this video that you don't have to use but is pretty cool. You may have seen when I was building it, there were a lot of scenes up here. So there's this one scene in this toolkit called Scene Launcher, and if you just drag your other scenes in there, then Adam and the scene launcher hierarchy-- it'll launch in this selection tool, and you have multiple scenes you can select from.

So, if you want to do this for multiple models, you can just do each scene. It's super easy, you save it as a different-- import it. Drag the scripts on. Save it as a different name, and then put them all in the scene launcher. Then you have a list of all your different models you can click on. Let's see, where's that?

Welcome to Treasure Island. If anyone else is staying there, this will probably look familiar. So this is like the default info from the scene launcher. And so, I just have the model up. So I click that. I didn't really position it well, so it's hanging out in the bathroom for some reason. As you can see, I can just drag it, pull it over, and move it around.

Now, you'll see it's rotating on that corner. That's because that was the origin point for my Inventor model. So that's going to base it from where it rotates, so think about that. If you wanted, you could create a parent object that you attach those scripts to, and have that underneath it, so that then it would rotate based on wherever you put your origin point. But it's a 45-minute class. I just want you guys to get models inside of holograms.

You see way too much detail on those gears, but it seemed like it was fine. I think this is like 70,000 polygons, and it's running OK on the HoloLens. You have about a 100,000 polygon limit on the HoloLens If you're doing only a few draw calls. So just keep that in mind. The Vive is obviously-- you're going to get way more. And, speaking of the Vive-- so that's how you get it on the HoloLens.

Check that box off, and move over to the Vive. Anyone here use the Vive? Cool, awesome. And so in the Vive, it's pretty easy as well. A little more complex of a set-up, because I like to set up teleporting. There's this guy from Unity college, Unity 3D college that made this teleporting walk-through on how to set it up using the toolkit, and it's really great. I'm basically just walking through the same thing, but I asked him and he was like, yeah, please tell everyone that I did that. I really appreciate it. So, shout out to that guy. His name's Jason.

Once you're in here, and you have a new scene, you'll import the steam VR asset, which is-- I'm offline-- available from the asset store. And under the prefabs, there's a camera for steam VR and there is then a steam VR box on there. 9:40? I've got five minutes.

I won't walk you through the teleport script. I have it all written out inside of the thing, because that kind of takes a little while. But basically, you can pull in the camera. You can pull in the steam VR thing. You pull in this. You create a plane, and you set your model on top of it.

You can see-- I believe I already have got a model in here with some LOD on it, so that might actually be helpful to see. So, here's a model I pulled in, same model. You will see on here, though, that there is LOD over here. I go through it in the handout, but basically, you can re-import the model at different polygon levels, so you can get your LOD. And just depending on how you save the file, it's really easy. When you import it, this will just happen automatically.

And you can slide it over, so depending on how close you want to be, you can kind of dial that in. But that's a pretty cool little feature to help optimize your stuff. And then once you get some of that stuff set up, basically you can just hit play if you have your steam VR headset plugged in, and the interaction will work.

I'm going to go ahead and show you a little video. It's not of that conveyor. It's a video I used when I was working with Autodesk to set up everything from last year, but it showcases the toolset. I'm literally just, with my phone, recording my computer screen, because I'm a little under the gun.

This is that also that machine that I painstakingly reverse-engineered. And I was using Max interactive at this point in time too, which I really enjoyed. It's really easy to-- they have a great visual programming language in Max Interactive. I think it was called Stingray when I first did it.

So I had put some visuals on the controllers so that my engineers could have an easier time figuring it out. And there was a baseball bat that has a bug that was still in there from the demo scene I used, but I just left it in there for fun, a little Easter egg.

That's basically it. So you would be able to teleport around. I added some other tools in here, like the ability to grab the world and move around. I won't go into too much detail. It works, like the ship in Futurama travels, If any of you understand what that means. Basically, it stands still, and you move the world around you. That's how I got the inspiration to code that.

I added some marking-up tools in there as well. You just basically pull the trigger, spawning little dots. That basically covers it for the class. I've only got a couple of minutes left. Or does this go till-- it goes to what? It goes until 10:15? Oh I was thinking it was 9:45, sorry. Well never mind then. I'm not going to blast through this fast. I thought time seemed like it moved really quickly.

This is one of the designer views I did to check my work. It's pretty nice. I like the-- we call it ice picking, because it's like you're sticking an ice pick in the world. So you can move around and look at the model.

Especially for people that don't understand CAD-- it's one thing to try and explain something to someone like looking on an Inventor screen at the model. It's another thing when it's like a 2D drawing of a CAD model of a machine that's this size. How do you feel about-- this thing was missing, so how would they have noticed that? This just makes it easy to move around and check it all out.

I'll show you the-- all right, real quick. What would you rather see? How to set up the teleporting, or how to import with a lower draw call for Inventor models? Raise your hands for lower draw call for Inventor models. Raise your hands for teleporting. Raise your hands for just leave early. There's a few more hands for the draw calls, so I'll show that first, and if there's time I will show the teleporting as well.

It's actually pretty interesting, the way this works. So I import my CAD model. I got my low detail here. This also covers the simple version, too. Because basically, if it's not a complex model, you can just import it at whatever scale you think is cool. Especially if you're working on the Vivem you really gotta push it to-- I didn't do any optimization for the one I was just showing you. It was all individual pieces, just at a lower poly rate, and it ran fine.

There's a GTX 1080, but still, it's not that bad. It think was like 3,000 pieces. And so if you're just doing something like that, honestly you can just import this model use the scene converter to change to materials over, and then export it as an FBX, and it'll work fine. Presuming you get rid of frame generator. Frame generator is what it's called. A little more than 10 seconds, but I told you I'd remember.

So, I used frame generator, which sometimes causes problems with materials. That's why I have that little guy in there. So up here in rendering-- you wouldn't know this was here if you weren't looking for it-- convert the scene. It's complete. And if you want, just export it as an FBX, and you're good to go. Or, because it's an Inventor model and this just happens to work, export it as a doo doo doo-- anyone have a guess? It's fine if you don't get it. it's OBJ.

Here it is. So, export as an OBJ. What's interesting is that you just leave all these the same. The OBJ-- and this is where it enhances it-- the OBJ importer is also pretty great. So, now, the exporter is in OBJ, and I just go to import. I want to do a reset scene, import as a single mesh, and re-triangulate polygons, and I click Import.

And there you have it. It is standing up, but when you export it again, it'll flip it back down. And it's just one mesh. It combines all the textures, makes them into one texture. At least one bundle of textures, and makes it just one mesh. I don't know what's under the hood there to make it do that, but it's kind of great that it does it, because then it's pretty easy to convert that down to just a single draw call for any machine.

And if you want, you can-- I was talking about the level of detail earlier-- you can rename this. Try again. I'm going to remove the underscore [INAUDIBLE]. Underscore LOD-- I'd say this is one. And then, let's say you imported another model, and you save that as LOD2, LOD3, LOD4, and then you group all these.

So, if you export this as an FBX, and it has underscore LOD 0, 1, 2, 3, 20 underneath it-- when you import that into Unity, that's how it automatically creates that level of detail file for you. And so, if you're reporting this. I would just say do it at negative eight, do it at negative four, do it at zero. Do it at four if you really want to. It just kind of depends on how much time you have, and what you're really looking to get out of it. But that can be really helpful in the Vive, because you do get some of that polygonal look in here.

There's other stuff you can do with smoothing to help with that, but it gets more hands on, and really, I just want you guys to be able to take anything, quickly convert it and put it into Unity, and be able to kind of showcase it and start using the technology.

So that's the quick version, and the more precise version. I have 165 steps left this hour. I've been standing here for too long. And I've got time to show you the teleporting setup. It's going way faster than it did when I practiced.

And if you are not interested in teleporting, feel free to leave. It's OK, no offense taken. So for teleporting, you go in here under your camera rig-- this is the steam VR camera rig I brought in-- and you create two empty game objects, and you name them left hand and-- the mouse keeps sliding down on this podium and it's throwing it off-- and right hand.

Any questions so far, by the way? I could have asked that as well. No? Cool. Oh, sure.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

BRENT JACKSON: Probably. I would say yes. I haven't experimented with it. You definitely can in Unity. It's a little more-- oh, sorry. So the question was the scene launcher I used on the HoloLens, can you use it on the Vive? And the answer is probably. I don't know of a simple plug-in for it. It's a little more involved to set up, but you can also use the mixed reality tool kit to create programs that'll work on the Vive.

So you could do all this from inside the mixed reality tool kit. All my experience with working on Steam VR has been using the steam VR toolkit. So, it's definitely geared a little more towards the Vive, but you could do it that way. I don't have a mixed reality headset, either, to test that on, unfortunately.

So we have these left hand and right hand scripts. On those, you can select them both at the same time. You want to add this hand script, and then under the camera rig you're going to have to add a script called player. It's really not that complex. It's almost done.

And then, on the hands-- you have two hands, so you say two on the size. You put your left hand in, put your right hand in. And then on your HND transform, that represents your hands for teleporting. I'm teleporting from here to there. And then the HND transform is what am I moving?

So you're going to choose the eyeball from the camera head, and put that under the element there. Back on the hands, if you have left hand selected, grab the right hand and drag it to this other hand. Field starting hand is left. On the right hand, drag the left hand over to the other hand feel, and change this to right.

And then you want to create two planes here. So one plane is-- I think I may have scaled this off a little bit. Yeah I'll just make it huge. That's fine.

So you have one plane that the model is going to be sitting on, and then you want to create another plane underneath it that's a child of that plane. Then on that plane, add component, teleport area. And so, that turns this plane into a teleporting surface.

And so then, at that point, when your headset's clicked in, you hit play. You will be able to just click and teleport around the model and look at it whenever you want. That's the simplest way to like do a designer view is, I'm in a room. Here's the machine. Here's how I can move around it and take a look at it.

Obviously, you can dive way deeper into the stuff you can do with it pulling things off. So if you want make objects interactable, or you can pull them off, and your model isn't too complex, I would actually suggest this doing that super simple import it into through 3ds Max, use the same converter, and export it. And that way, each object remains individual, like the original model that I worked on.

And then, it's a little complex, but you can set everything up as grabbable. And so then, you can go in and pick it up and pull stuff off, if you want to look behind panels and stuff like that. But then also, you have like panels floating in the air and getting them back is kind of a pain.

This usually works for doing a simple design review or trying to convey a machine and how it works to other people. The main use case I use for the HoloLens right now is when we have a new machine and we're augmenting it with something else. I'll put it in the HoloLens, go out to the factory, get multiple people wearing the HoloLens, so they'll be able to see it. Place the model and get it lined up. And then, I have a more complex version, so it's all synced.

But with these, you can just put the goggles on, place it, line it up, hand it to someone, put another set of goggles on, line it up. And then the two of you are looking at the same model in the same area and you can look for form, fit, function.

One of the cool ones we did was this quick quench blow off system. So there's was water spraying on rubber, but the tray underneath it wasn't catching although like splash off. So they were redesigning it, but they had no way to tell if it was going to catch all the water. So I made a hologram of the new design, took it to the factory, and placed it where it was going, and we just looked to see if all the water was hitting the hologram.

And so we're able to determine whether or not it was going to hit it without having to do water simulation or oversizing it for no reason. They were really happy with that, because they couldn't really figure out how else they were going to determine if all the splash was going to hit this new catching device.

It's honestly-- when you're working with VR and XR in general, I've discovered that sometimes, the simpler solutions that are only really available with VR and MR and AR, are sometimes the best ones to get started with, because they're very cost-effective to do.

You guys could do this yourselves now with a free Unity license, and 3ds Max if you have it, and then just whatever the cost of the device is. Whereas like sometimes paying a company to set it all up for you can get really expensive.

It does a lot more stuff, and it's a lot more streamlined and comes with support. But you know when you're trying to figure it out, or pitch to your uppers that you want to experiment with this, it becomes a little difficult.

So the way I sync them-- because this was at a previous time before-- there's some new tools in the toolkit that I haven't experimented with, but they allow for easy syncing between devices. The way I did it-- I used a cube with a bunch of AR Markers on it, and it was of a known size, and so I could place the cube and then put the HoloLens on, and it would look at the cube and see it. It would know how far away I was and set that as an origin point. And then the other people with the HoloLenses would also look at it.

I was running a networking program from inside Unity to share our world space origin, and then I would set them as viewers and I'd be the presenter. So I was the only one with movement control. Because otherwise someone accidentally grabs it and moves it, and it's annoying. Or, two people move it at the same time, and it glitches out. And then from there, I'm able to line it up, and then we all take part in it.

But we also used that method because we had the separate camera with a HoloLens attached to it as well, and that needed a visual recognition system to line up for that origin point.

So that way, three of us were on the factory floor doing the review, and I was also able to stream like a third person bird's eye view of what we're doing to a WebEx conference, so that other stakeholders could take part in that review. Or, even people at the plant that weren't wearing HoloLenses could just come and watch it on the monitor and kind of see what we were talking about.

It's really all about increasing the bandwidth of communication. Any time you take a step up from hand drawings to CAD drawings to 3D modeling drawings to VR to MR, you're just making it easier and more intuitive for people to share an understanding of what you're talking about.

It's the difference between emailing someone and getting coffee with someone. You're going to be able to communicate faster. You can democratize the data. In VR design review I allowed one of the operators of our tire machines to walk through it, and go through the steps, fully animated, and say, all right, this is how we planned this machine to work.

You go through it, and let me know if you see anything we should change now in the design phase before we build it and it's really expensive to change. And he found areas for optimization. We have found a few errors as well in the design-- very small ones, but we were able to change those in a matter of hours as opposed to days and thousands of dollars.

And that guy is going to be using that machine for the next 20 years. And so him knowing that he was able to optimize it-- the rubber comes over this bar and tacks on the bottom. He was like, if you move that bar down like six inches, it's going to stick way better. We don't know that. He knows it, because he's been doing it forever. And so we changed that, and so that's just going to make his job easier for a long time. Which is going to give him a sense of investment-- like he's a part of creating what we're creating.

Sorry, I didn't mean to wax a little too poetic about the glories of VR design reviews, but I really enjoy them. Any other questions?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

BRENT JACKSON: I haven't yet. I want to. So, I'm an innovation specialist. And while my big focus initially was in VR-- we started doing a lot of metrology laser scanning in reverse engineering, and I got pinged to handle that. And so, as I was developing these applications, they became functional enough, and I got moved to doing that. And so, I spent most of my year laser scanning stuff as opposed to playing in VR.