Team 7 of the VRLA/Microsoft Los Angeles Hololens Hackathon was invited to demo our “Day At The Museum” app at the 2016 summer VRLA show last weekend, along with two other hackathon teams. VRLA provided a dedicated table to the 3 rotating Hololens Hackathon teams, plus a room upstairs in the convention center. This was a fantastic experience, and we really appreciate VRLA’s invitation to exhibit. The VRLA team did a great job, all things considered, but we both learned a lot about what worked/didn't. They sent out a feedback questionnaire and I want to share a portion of my write-up so others (both conferences and developers) can learn from our experience.

What could have gone better:

1. We did not find out about exact space allocation until a couple of days before the event, so we were not able to sufficiently prepare.

2. The original plan was to move teams between an upstairs demo room and table in the exhibit hall. There was some confusion about who was supposed to be where, and moving added coordination and set-up complications, so I think most teams just demoed on the show floor. Some attendees wanted to try specific apps, but without a public schedule, it was not clear where they should go. It may have helped attendees if all of the Hololens demos had been in the same general area.

3. The provided exhibit hall space was a cloth covered table with no walls or ceilings next to an open space/walkway. This meant that Hololens apps requiring walls (like ours) or ceilings would not work, and there was not much fixed geometry that was visible once the crowd showed up. In addition, some of the apps had space requirements exceeding what was available.

4. The open space adjacent to the demo table had high foot traffic, which meant it was difficult to use and the geometry was constantly in flux, impacting spatial tracking.

5. On the first day of the show, the exhibit hall’s lights were cycling up and down for atmosphere. At the low end of the brightness spectrum, it was too dark for the Hololens’ spatial tracking to work reliably (especially with black cloth draped over the tables).

6. Some attendees seemed incapable of doing the “air tap” gesture needed to click on objects even after seeing us demonstrate. Other people did not initially see the selection cursor and were tapping without putting the cursor over an object.

7. The crowd made it difficult to hear audio from the hololens without earphones or cupped hands. Speech recognition did work if we spoke loudly.

8. People sometimes spent more time than was desirable in the demo, leading to long wait times. Crowd/line management needs more attention from demonstrators.

What Worked

1. Attendees were super interested in getting demos. We got a lot of questions about the hardware and people were generally impressed. There were non-stop lines at the demo locations, and figuring 5 Hololenses going non-stop for 7 hours at 2 minutes/demo suggests we may have demoed to a combined 1,000 people on the second day alone.

2. One of our team members had his own booth next to a wall, with an adjacent open space through which there was minimal foot traffic. On the second day, he brought flood lights to illuminate the wall. This provided us with both enough space and illuminated stable geometry for reliable demos.

3. The upstairs room had sufficient space, geometry, and lighting for great demos. After discovering the upstairs room was empty, one of our team members began to demo his own Hololens application there, rather than in his booth downstairs. He had people line up on one side of the room (and out the door) and the rest of the room could be used for the demo.

4. Large signs outside the demo room door made it clear where to go if people managed to find their way upstairs.

5. Having three separate Hololens demos cut average wait times for the group of people who wanted to try the hardware. The downstairs lines probably fluctuated between 5-30 people.

6. Batteries did eventually run out, though the Hololenses did better than expected. We addressed this two ways: 1, attaching external USB chargers with high-amp ratings and having people put them in their pockets while walking around, and 2, using the Hololens charger with a super long USB cable, which still allowed people to walk around, though in a smaller area. The Microsoft-supplied chargers work fairly fast.

7. Anticipating we might be squished together, we included a special space constrained mode in our app, which we ended up using during the short time we were at the original table. We were able to borrow an easel from VRLA and used this with a 20x30 poster to serve as a wall.

8. Rather than needing to restart the app for every user, we included app functionality that allowed us to easily reset the demo and change configuration if desired between users.

9. We supported both visual menus and spoken commands, so the app was still usable even when it was too loud for speech recognition.

10. We started asking people to do a test “air tap” prior to donning the Hololens and explained about the cursor.

Thanks again to VRLA for throwing an awesome event, and we are looking forward to the next one in March.