9) Avoid using transparency

Mixed Reality holograms already have a natural opacity to them that can vary in intensity depending on the user’s settings. This means that saved some exceptions, you should largely avoid to use transparent shaders, as there’s no way of telling it how it will look in various hardware configurations. It also causes a noticeable performance bump, so there’s that.

10) Take into account the user’s height

Self-explanatory — when designing interfaces, make sure that your app adapts to the height of a multitude of users.

11) Mixed Reality is inherently social. Always develop with multiplayer at the back of your mind.

Anyone who has experienced a multi-user Hololens app knows that everything changes when there’s a second person present — and that’s also when the medium shines. And even if you don’t have multiple MR devices to develop for, the simple act of asking “ What changes when a second user is a part of the experience?” can yield into design breakthroughs and a more human-centric experience that can be expanded in the future.

In the end, humans are social animals and MR adds a whole new layer of possibility into human interaction — applications that play with this well will be a force to be reckoned with.

12) If you can’t blend in, less is more.

Experiences with too many elements that don’t blend in can easily be overwhelming and disorienting to the user. Objects that don’t blend drag the user’s attention away, causing you to lose control over the desired user experience. In cases like these, working with less can be more, as a smaller and more contained experience with fewer elements can be much easier to orchestrate from a UX standpoint.

13) Performance is everything: use optimized shaders and geometry

When developing applications for Mixed Reality, use shaders and geometry created specifically for the hardware. The Microsoft Holotoolkit has a wide array of useful scripts and shaders designed for performance that are useful in any setting.

14) Sometimes, colors look differently in MR than what you would expect. Be flexible!

Because of the way that the HoloLens renders colors (2 green channels, 1 red and one green), some colors don’t look as striking than their 2D counterparts.

15) Be visual — and magical whenever you can.

Apps that make full use of the visual capabilities of Mixed Reality can create breathtaking moments that are incomparable to anything today in any other medium. Communicate whatever you can visually and creatively, combining all of the tips above to surprise the user in beautiful (and useful!) ways.

It doesn’t matter if your app is designed for productivity or entertainment — if there’s a way you can cause user delight, you should go for it. Mixed Reality is, after all, the science of magic. And if we want this new reality to be beautiful, then perhaps this might be the most important item of this list.