Take Google Sky Map (which is an open source Android app) and port it to the HoloLens. Allow for basic functions like object-finding and labelling — “Where is Jupiter?” “What is that object?”

It's non-trivial to port an Android app to HoloLens, though similar Unity apps may exist. Also, the built-in cameras (2MP) are unlikely to be good enough to resolve stars (even though one or two would suffice for calibration), so a better method would be needed. Phones do it with a compass, accelerometer/gyroscope, and GPS, and it works reasonably well. We know our coordinates, and compass-esque tracking can be set up by defining points in the environment (i.e. face north, calibrate, face east, calibrate) and detecting orientation relative to those points. I don’t think the HoloLens has an accelerometer/gyroscope, so maybe a Kinect can be used for up/down tracking. This is certainly more complicated than a hackathon project, but it would be insanely cool.

Clearly, we need to use HoloLens with WWT. I know Jonathan Fay, Curtis Wong and others (e.g. me) have talked about this for quite some time, but I'm hoping we can use this forum as a way to figure out which functionality to implement first. Let's discuss! (And, Jonathan, is the 3D imagery in the demo app shipping with HoloLens directly from WWT?)

Take a library like yt and create an interface to datasets (easier than a folder structure, ideally). Take those datasets and create 3D visualizations of the simulations for quick analysis. Support basic transformations to the data with voice commands and precomputed analyses — “Log-scale this data” “Skip to redshift 0.5” “Highlight dark matter halos” “Show only gas” “Apply ____ filter”

This would basically be a dumb interface to a more powerful computer doing the computation. An ideal balance would need to be found between speed (pre-computing potential analyses) and resource use (doing things on-the-fly only as they’re needed). Maybe this can be done by computing popular analyses for a certain scientific domain or datatype. Regardless, being able to get a quick AR visualization and analysis of a simulated galaxy or universe would be fantastic for easily getting a sense of the data.