Microsoft

HoloLens V1

technical artist & design prototyper jul 2013 - feb 2017

Working on the HoloLens was an opportunity of a lifetime. It was my first big job, which I landed shortly after finishing grad school at School of Visual Arts. I moved from NYC to Seattle and from 2013 to 2017 I worked on an unforgettable project with an amazing team, designing, building and shipping the operating system for the first of its kind mixed reality headset, the original HoloLens.

This was where I first learned about real-time graphics, interaction design, prototyping, spatial technologies and concepts like degrees of freedom, head tracking, hand tracking, eye tracking…etc.

The design team I worked on was tasked with figuring out what the operating system would look and feel like for the HoloLens (then at the time just referred to by its various code names). We developed the interaction models, the UX and the visual design, and closely worked with the engineering team sitting in the same physical space as us to implement it on various levels of prototype hardware all the way up to the final shipped code.

Prototyping

I worked on many interactive prototypes for early versions of HoloLens prototype hardware, from big clunky headsets all the way to the final product. I worked closely with interaction designers on our team, bringing to life ideas around how to move holograms in space, how to rotate them, how to use hands and eyes to navigate a spatial operating system. The primary tool we used was Unity, however in the first year or so there was also heavy usage of Touch Designer as a prototyping tool.

video credit: https://www.youtube.com/@josalt

3D UI

I created many of the final 3D UI assets that became part of the HoloLens V1 OS. Working closely between design and engineering, I worked in Maya, setting up the models, animations and shaders, and then using a custom Python script developed by our team to package and export the assets in the format our internal rendering engine expected.

Then came the difficult process of pushing up assets to the Windows source code repository, which was heavily gated by lots of various checks. If something non obvious broke during this step or in the engine, then it was a matter of heavy back and forth debugging between myself and a developer working on the engine code.

↓ Below are some gifs of the assets I worked on: Cursor, keyboard, resizing boxes, OOBE, cortana ring and the home apps grid ↓