Epic Games revealed a video featuring a demo that shows what can be accomplished using Unreal Engine 4 on HoloLens 2 – Apollo 11: Mission AR.
According to a report from Road To VR, Epic claims that the demo features 7 million polygons in a physically-based rendering environment with “fully dynamic lighting and shadows, multi-layered materials, and volumetric effects.” The entire experience, however, isn’t being run on the HoloLens 2 itself. The experiences holographic elements are streamed wirelessly from local, networked PCs running the latest version of Unreal Engine 4, UE 4.23.
Epic’s impressive demo joins others who leveraged extended reality (XR) to celebrate NASA’s historic trip to the moon. USA TODAY’s own 321 Launch app documented the entire mission in conjunction with augmented reality (AR) spaceships, and the JFK Presidential Library developed their own AR documentary app to honor the late president’s vision to getting mankind on the moon.
While impressive in its own right, Epic clarified to Road To VR that streaming holograms like Apollo 11: Mission AR is at its best when being streamed locally, not from cloud-based rendering.
“While it is technically possible to use the HoloLens 2 Remoting over the Internet, we would strongly recommend against it due to significant latency and uncontrollable network conditions,” an Epic Games representative clarified. “When using HoloLens 2 Remoting, you should always aim to use a local network to minimize the latency and ensure there are minimal other devices connected to it to maximize the bandwidth available for the HoloLens 2.”
Though currently not available for the public to view, developers who are interested can download Unreal Engine 4 for free and follow the company’s HoloLens 2 Streaming Guide to make similar experiences.
