Spatial Awareness

The spatial awareness system provides support for visualizing and reasoning over mapping data of the real world. It provides:

1. Notifications for when observations (ex: meshes) have been generated (and a way to get those observations).
2. A mechanism to stop/start observation (i.e. to allow for runtime disabling of mesh visualization and generation).
3. Visualization of the observed environment.

This system only works on platforms that support spatial mapping. Currently MRTK provides in-box support for spatial mapping on the following platforms:

• HoloLens
• HoloLens 2

On platforms that don't support spatial features, this system will fallback gracefully to null/empty collections, no events, etc.

Architecture diagram

Breakdown

The spatial awareness system is composed of multiple parts, which together work to read in and then expose and render underlying spatial data.

System

Similar to the input system, at the root of the spatial awareness system is an object that is responsible for initializing and running the spatial work. It does so by creating and then running its list of spatial observers (which are also referred to as data providers).

Observers

A spatial observer is responsible for interfacing with a specific underlying system (for example, the in-box MRTK spatial observer talks with the Windows Mixed Reality platform to get HoloLens meshes) and then surfacing the platform specific data in a way that is consistent with the larger spatial awareness system.

Usage

For more details on the usage of this system, refer to the feature overview and the usage guide