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Comment by Pigo | Hacker News Reader

I've built a few HoloLens prototypes for my present company, and a few Occulus ones for my former. I haven't stayed up to date with all of the internal hardware specs, but from my experience building for the HoloLens was easier and a lot more fun. I haven't seen these new headsets yet, but I believe they use the same tools and frameworks. There's some really cool stuff that some Xbox developers have put out that you can build on top of. And the Skype app works amazingly well.

I'm just curious if these headsets are aimed at gaming as opposed to the HoloLens which is geared towards productivity.

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>> And the Skype app works amazingly well.

That's a first. Let the down votes begin but Skype has always sucked. I'm hoping they do a better job with Teams.

I refuse to put Skype on my phone, I'm not a fan. But I've never seen something like the Skype on HoloLens before. It works really well, and the person you're calling can interact with your 3D space from their computer. You can also share files and conference in with other HoloLens.

I'm interested in getting into Hololens development. What languages, frameworks and tools would you recommend? From what I've read it seems like I'd be using Unity and C#.

Unity for 3D applications. You can use UWP to make traditional 2D apps which you can also use in hololens

You can also use C++ and DirectX for 3D applications.

Sorry I didn't get back on yesterday. I have a small blog I started just to help people with initial setup that you can see here http://illuminationworks.blogspot.com (I'm not a blogger and it shows) But basically it's built in Unity, and you use visual studio for deployment to the device. The dependencies can be tricky to setup, but once it's in place it is very easy to deploy. There's a lot of articles about the general concepts, but you need to be on top of the HoloToolkit to really use the advanced features. https://github.com/Microsoft/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity

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