So I got this HoloLens last February

[Doug Frisk]

If you're unaware HoloLens is Microsoft's mixed reality headset. It's really amazing. If you get a chance to play with one, take advantage.

I haven't had as much time to work with it as I'd like, but I did whip up a Windows 10 Universal app version of the FRC field monitor. Last weekend I had a chance to actually use it on the field and record a couple of matches.

View from behind the scoring table.

FTA view

It's hard to see the depth in the videos, but the display is anchored across the field and is about 7 feet high. In the first video you can see the HoloLens try to account for Walt the head ref occluding the virtual display a few times.

So, there you go, a real use case for mixed reality in FRC.

I would have loved to track robots and put their status bar and graphs above the robots but that kind of tracking is, hard. There are some thoughts on how that can be resolved though, so maybe at some point it will be possible.

Another thought I've had is to put the HoloLens on the driver and put a virtual version of the robot over the actual robot. With a good accelerometer/motion tracker on the robot it should be possible to keep the virtual and real robot aligned. That would have let the driver see the robot (or at least it's virtual version) through the drawbridge or other obstacles.

It would also be interesting to use the virtual robot alone for driver practice.

If you're curious about what the field monitor is showing, the bar across the top of each robot section represents the Ethernet status (is the Drivers Station physically plugged into the port), the IP communication status to the Drivers Station, then there's the radio indicator which is green if the DS/FMS can talk to the radio on the robot. Finally there's the indicator for the RoboRIO and the robot code ready status. The graphs are showing robot voltage, radio signal quality and trip time. The voltage goes yellow if it drops below 9.5 volts and red if it drops below 6.5 volts.

I'd be curious to hear what other folks might do with a HoloLens in FRC.

(Oh, and I've already considered that the HoloLens could project a virtual lake onto the field. So yeah, water game.)