Since its launch in January 2016, Microsoft Hololens has proved itself to be a serious game changer. It extends far beyond the world of gaming and AR experiences, as it has proved its worth in an AECO. One of the main features of Hololens is that you could overlay a 3D model of a project over a construction site, showing your crew where doors, walls, pipes, etc will be.

Today you can start working with Augmented Reality by few simple steps:

1. Buy Hololens and a license for a suitable app

2. Export your model in fbx and upload it to Hololens

3. Start presenting your solutions and looking for the collision on your construction site.

This is although an ideal situation, but Hololens is a fully mobile device(no need in any wires or supercomputers) and in most cases exporting in fbx doesn’t automagically result in a good experience once uploaded into Hololens: they will often be unnecessarily detailed or just look ugly. The detail problem comes from, i.e. things like screw threads: if these have been modeled accurately (like they are in Revit), they’ll result in thousands upon thousands of unwanted polygons which will impact both the size of the application and its runtime performance.

(A little about polygons: A polygon mesh is a collection of vertices, edges, and faces that defines the shape of a polyhedral object in 3D computer graphics and solid modeling.)

So most of the time your models will need to be optimized, like this: