NB: The usual blog disclaimer for this site applies to posts around HoloLens. I am not on the HoloLens team. I have no details on HoloLens other than what is on the public web and so what I post here is just from my own experience experimenting with pieces that are publicly available and you should always check out the official developer site for the product documentation.

I hadn’t realised until very recently that as part of the Windows 10 April 2018 Update it was now possible to have apps and/or websites add models to the ‘shell’ in Windows Mixed Reality whether on HoloLens or on an immersive headset.

The details are given in the document up here;

Enable placement of 3D models in the mixed reality home

and I wanted to try it out at least at the most basic level and so I went off and ran Paint3D and found myself a nice low-poly model of a tortoise;

and then I exported that model as a .GLB file;

and then there are a whole bunch of requirements about how these models are to be produced in order to be compatible with the ‘shell’ in Mixed Reality which you can find here;

Create 3D models for use in the home

but, given that I’m working in Paint3D here, I didn’t want to get into a tonne of details so all I did was to run it through the supplied converter tool;

Asset Conversion Tool

as below;

and that gave me a new GLB file which I uploaded to a web server along with an HTML page with an image contained within it, here it is viewed in the browser below;

which then let me open that up in a browser on my HoloLens;

and then clicking on the hyperlink’d image in the webpage begins a downloading process…

and then I have the 3D model living inside of the shell/home environment;

and the key piece that makes it work is the URI scheme of the hyperlink;

and that works from websites and from apps running on the device – i.e. a UWP app can invoke this ms-mixedreality:addModel scheme in order to add models into the ‘shell’ which seems to suggest that it’s possible to replicate what the ‘Holograms’ app does.

In the picture below, I used the ‘Holograms’ app to insert the famous ballerina into the scene and placed her dancing on the back of the tortoise that came from my website (or app);

I haven’t experimented with animations and so on but it’s great to see that this is a pretty easy thing to do in the April Update