A talk from the Design Track at AWE USA 2018 - the World's #1 XR Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, California May 30- June 1, 2018. Phillip Heckinger (Microsoft): Empowering AR & VR with Tech Art Building the future with Hololens, Windows Mixed Reality and Mixed Reality Toolkit! How Tech Art helped accelerate and amplify products, with behind the scenes examples and learnings from 6 years of Microsoft AR & VR work http://AugmentedWorldExpo.com

1. Empowering AR & VR with Tech Art
Building the future with Hololens, Windows
Mixed Reality and Mixed Reality Toolkit!
How Tech Art helped accelerate and amplify
products, with behind the scenes examples
and learnings from 6 years of Microsoft AR &
VR work.

2. Who is Phillip?
• Sr Technical Art Director at Microsoft
• Fine Arts degree & 3D film degree. (an artist at heart, but I do write code)
• Shipped multiple AAA games on consoles & PCs
• Shipped multiple products in AR & VR plus years of AR & VR prototyping
• Shipped multiple content features and pipeline tools to the world
• Graphics tech research and contributed to patents
• Worked in AR & VR for over 6 years on Hololens & Windows Mixed Reality
• I believe in small groups doing great things and empowering everyone
involved in production to achieve more with less.

3. What is a Tech Artist?
• Often an artist who can code with the eye of an artist.
• Accelerate pipelines
• Content performance & memory
• unique VFX, physics, simulations, shaders, tools, character rigs
• Graphics tech art
• Animation tech art
• Pipeline tech art

4. Hololens - HoloStudio & RoboRaid

5. HoloStudio
• What can the Hololens do and what can we afford?
• Tech Artists Deploy!
• The “200” hundred rule was developed
• 200 dc
• 200k verts
• 200 mb

6. HoloStudio
What can tech art improve?
Ambient Occlusion is expensive, lets make it cheap...er!

7. HoloStudio

8. RoboRaid

9. Hololens – RoboRaid
• Asset Occlusion behind a 6 inch wall
Surface Recognition (SR)

10. Hololens – RoboRaid (UI line and shapes)

11. Hololens – RoboRaid (UI line and shapes)

12. Hololens – RoboRaid (UI line and shapes)

13. Hololens –RoboRaid
Astronauts playing RoboRaid on the ISS

14. WMR – Cliffhouse & Skyloft
(Window Mixed Reality)

15. WMR – Cliffhouse
Goals
• Multi-room
• Performant across multiple quality tiers
• Relaxing, Personal, Productive
• New Engine & Editor
• The “200” hundred rule became the “400” rule
• 400 dc
• 400k verts

16. WMR – Cliffhouse (inside)

17. WMR – Cliffhouse (outside)

18. WMR – Skyloft
Goals
• Multi-room
• Performant across multiple quality tiers
• Personal, Productive, focused on multi-app

19. WMR – Skyloft

20. How did tech art help?
• Planned successful performance metrics across multiple platforms and projects
• Collaborated on unique rendering features
• Created custom Shaders to solve UI problems
• Accelerated asset creation across multiple production levels & engines
• Helped create MRTK... but what's MRTK?!