Developers: HoloLens emulator and developer documentation now available

Microsoft today announced that they are taking pre-orders for HoloLens Development Edition and it costs about $3000. Not all developers can afford this device to get hands-on with the HoloLens app development. To solve this problem, Microsoft is releasing the HoloLens emulator that allows developers to test holographic apps on your PC without a physical HoloLens and comes with the HoloLens development toolset.

The emulator uses a Hyper-V virtual machine. The human and environmental inputs that would usually be read by the sensors on the HoloLens are instead simulated using your keyboard, mouse, or Xbox controller. Apps don’t need to be modified to run on the emulator and don’t know that they aren’t running on a real HoloLens.

There is one key difference when testing on the emulator instead of real device, you will only see holograms that you render and you will not see the simulated room behind the holograms. This is in contrast to the real HoloLens where you see both blended together.

Read about HoloLens Emulator here. Microsoft has also released full set of documents for developers to help them in getting started with the Holographic platform.

Developers, visit here to check the documentation.