480nm HoloViewer for Microsoft's HoloLens®

The 480nm HoloViewer app is a general purpose viewer for 3D objects and scenes. While it is designed and optimized for scenes that are created in 480nm Studio, the viewer also provides additional support for multiple of the most popular exchange file formats: FBX, JT, OBJ and STL. OBJ is useful for simple static geometry, FBX can be used to exchange complete scenes, and JT is the CAD industry standard for data sharing across the product lifecycle. The 480nm HoloViewer app is free and ad free.

Availability

The app is currently available in the Microsoft’s Store on your HoloLens® device.

Features

Tools

We provided intuitive “pinch and move” set of tools to allow movement, rotation and scaling of models or complete scenes.

Voice commands

When using HoloLens®, voice commands are more intuitive than ever and the viewer can take full advantage of the voice recognition system available on your HoloLens®.

OneDrive

We support loading your models or scenes from your OneDrive account to intuitively and quickly place the files on your desktop or other devices where you have instant access of those files on your HoloLens®. There is no need for wires or specialized upload procedures.

Complex shading

We developed an advanced shader, capable of spherical harmonics, reflections and Fresnel effect that are applied at the pixel level which provides a realistic representations of true materials. An intuitive interface allows you to swiftly narrow down the exact combination of the properties at run time. You can also specify the exact color of the material just as easily.

HDR Environments

We included 10 high dynamic range environment maps to provide the most realistic illumination of your model or scene. These images are courtesy of Christian Bloch (Blochi) who provides an amazing collection of free HDR images at http://www.hdrlabs.com

Spatial surfaces

One of the more powerful features of HoloLens® is its ability to map the local environments, and we provided build-in visualization of these spatial surfaces as you navigate around your scene.

Physical sky

The viewer is capable of creating a procedurally generated HDR environment that is based on user specified location, date and time to create accurately looking sky and sun.

360° Panoramas

Besides 3D geometry, environmental panoramas in the equirectangular panorama format (2:1) are also supported.

Beta notes

The app is currently in beta. While we have spent a significant amount of time to make it stable and bug free, only true user testing can bring it to a level that we could comfortably call a stable release. Please report any issues at our forum and we will make every effort to fix them and improve our app.

The app is based on our primary desktop 480nm Studio software with high accuracy and modeling features being its main objective. Thus the app is not as memory efficient as we would like it to be, which is especially an issue on 32-bit systems. We believe that 100K polygons is the current threshold for our viewer for the most comfortable experience.

Questions

Missing features?

If you’d like to see new features, let us know. We are a small development group and there are always more ideas than time. Your suggestions will greatly help us to focus on what matters. Please visit our forum to give us your feedback.

Like it?

We provide the viewer as a free app as we believe it is impossible to correctly price any software. What could be too expensive for some may be insignificant for others. If you are enjoying this app, please consider making a donation to our project in the amount that you believe it’s worth. Thank you.