Advanced HoloLens Emulator and Mixed Reality Simulator input

Most emulator users will only need to use the basic input controls for the HoloLens Emulator or the Windows Mixed Reality simulator. The details below are for advanced users who have found a need to simulate more complex types of input.

Concepts

To get started controlling the virtual input to the HoloLens Emulator and Windows Mixed Reality simulator, you should first understand a few concepts.

Motion refers to controlling and changing the position and orientation of something in the scene. For a targeted controllable object, motion is controlled with both rotation and translation (movement) along three axes.

• Yaw: Turn left or right.
• Pitch: Turn up or down.
• Roll: Roll side-to-side.
• X: Move left or right.
• Y: Move up or down.
• Z: Move forward or backward.

Gesture and motion controller input are mapped closely to physical devices:

• Action: Simulates the action of pressing the forefinger to the thumb or pulling the action button on a controller. For example, the Action input can be used to simulate the air-tap gesture, to scroll through content, and to press-and-hold.
• Bloom/System gesture or Home: The HoloLens bloom/system gesture or a controller's Home button is used to return to the shell and to fire system actions.

Hands have a rich representation in HoloLens 2. In addition to being tracked/not tracked and usable for driving gestures, hands now have an articulated skeleton model fit to them and exposed to the developer. The skeleton model has 26 tracked points on each hand.

• Joint: One of 20 tracked positions for a given tracked hand with an associated point in 3d space.
• Pose: A complete collection of all of the Joints in a tracked hand, 26 Joints in all.

We don't currently expose direct control of individual joint positions through the emulator, but you can set them through the simulation API. We have a set of useful representative poses that the emulator allows you to toggle between.

You can also control the state of simulated sensor input:

• Reset: Returns all simulated sensors to their default values. Starting with the HoloLens 2 Emulator, a reset can be scoped to one or both hands. Engage the desired hand(s) using the modifier key(s) or button(s) (Left and/or Right Alt, or the left and/or right bumper on the gamepad).
• Tracking: Cycles through the positional tracking modes, including:
  • Default: The OS chooses the best tracking mode based upon the requests made of the system.
  • Orientation: Forces Orientation-only tracking, no matter the system requests.
  • Positional: Forces Positional tracking, no matter the system requests.

Types of input

The following table shows how each type of input maps to the keyboard, mouse, and Xbox controller. Each type has a different mapping depending on the input control mode. You can find more information on input control modes later in this document.

Note: The controller buttons can be targeted to one hand/controller or the other using the hand targeting modifiers.

Targeting

Some of the above input concepts stand on their own. Action, Bloom/System, Reset, and Tracking are complete concepts, don't need, and are not affected by, any additional modifiers for targeting. The remaining concepts can be applied to one of multiple targets. We have introduced ways for you to specify which intended target your command should be applied to. In all cases, it's possible to specify through the UI or through keyboard presses, which object to target. In some cases, it's also possible to specify with the xbox controller directly.

The following table describes the options for targeting, and the way to activate each of them.

The following table shows how each target modifier maps each of the core movement input concepts

Controlling an app

The following set of controls is suggested for day-to-day use:

Using a Windows Mixed Reality immersive headset and motion controllers with the HoloLens 2 Emulator

When using a Windows Mixed Reality immersive headset with the HoloLens 2 Emulator, movement and rotation are automatically mapped to headset movement and rotation. Motion controller position and orientation are automatically mapped to hand position and orientation in the emulator. The table below lists additional actions available when using a motion controller.

Perception Simulation Control Panel keyboard shortcuts

You can access the Perception Simulation Control panel and enable or disable PC input devices with the following keyboard shortcuts.

See also

• Install the tools
• Using the HoloLens emulator
• Using the Windows Mixed Reality simulator