- Mihai Dusmanu (Microsoft Research)
- Patrick Misteli (Microsoft Research)
SpatiaList is a HoloLens 2 application designed for spatially persistent digital post-its in a Mixed Reality (MR) environment. This project, in collaboration with Microsoft, is intended to showcase the potential of MR technologies to enable multi-user collaboration scenarios. SpatiaList maintains consistency across sessions, space and users of MR objects, which is not implemented out-of-the-box in current MR devices. The system architecture is designed to support persistence of holographic post-its, the core component being Azure Spatial Anchors (ASA). A GUI was designed (for MR devices) and on the Web (for non-MR devices). A user study with 16 participants has been performed to evaluate the app's performance. Spatial and session consistency was observed. In stable internet conditions, multi-user teamwork scenarios could be effectively performed. The user study shows an overall positive sentiment, with key recommendations to provide more visual cues for the post-it creation step and to enable users to work on the same post-it simultaneously.
This project must be loaded in Unity Editor and compiled for the HoloLens 2.
A valid Azure Spatial Anchors account is required to run the application, and tokens must be provided in the Unity Editor in the Azure Spatial Anchors Manager component.
The backend system must be deployed on a publically acessible machine. The backend code is available on the following repository, which contains deployment instructions as well as documentation for the API. A CosmosDB database is required to run the backend. The database must be configured with the following collections:
spatialist_postitsspatialist_organizationsspatialist_anchorsspatialist_swipes
The public URL must then be added to the Unity Editor in the Network Manager component.
The full report is available here.