Ideas
Augmented Reality Sky Map
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.
Answer
Ideally outdoors. Indoors wouldn't be very exciting. Seeing labels and targets on the objects themselves in the sky seems like the better use case to me. This makes environment tracking more difficult, of course. I'm not sure what the capabilities of the sensors are.
Hi Rasmi, this idea is awesome and I found that Hololens did have accelerometer and gyroscope with more info here
But for the current version of HoloLens I have two concerns that:
1. The working style for Hololens is to 'bring the virtual world' for users, which means it needs to know/scan your environment and put/overlap the 3D objects upon the real world. While the outdoors scan is not powerful enough and not very recommended by the #HoloHacks group :(
2. The field of view is also quite limited, which might reduce the user performance for searching the whole sky. But I believe this would be solved in the next version as a lot of users complained about it!
Great news, thanks Penny! All you'd need is proper calibration on one star, and in theory you could highlight any other object in the sky. HoloLens would "know" the environment of the sky map as some sphere based around that point. I suppose this is just fancier VR since it's not totally immersive and interactive with your immediate environment like other HoloLens apps. You're right that this would be better for a future version HoloLens, especially one with a larger FOV. I hope it's done eventually! Bringing sky maps to cell phones was such a big deal and an often-advertised use case, and as far as getting astronomy out to more devices and users, I think this is an ideal application (if it can be done!).
I have the same idea! Have anyone started working on this yet? I would like to have a try. I think we can first start with using IMU sensor. Then try with the 2MP camera for calibration. Let me know if someone wants to work on this together.
Sorry for my slow reply, Caiyi-- we are still very interested in this idea. Please be in touch via agoodman@cfa.harvard.edu. Thanks! Alyssa
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Sorry for my slow reply, Caiyi-- we are still very interested in this idea. Please be in touch via agoodman@cfa.harvard.edu. Thanks! Alyssa