Designing for Mixed Reality

At nsquared, we are working very closely with Microsoft to build training material to help you build the best Mixed Reality (MR) applications. One of the topics which we cover in our training material, is how to design for MR, and knowing when to optimise your 3D assets.

Designing for MR can be a daunting challenge, but crucial to the successful performance of an application. The main goal of optimisation, is finding a balance between beautiful 3D assets and making sure assets do not hinder the performance of an application. Optimisation can be considered and applied when modelling, UV mapping, texturing and exporting 3D assets, but it is important to understand when to use the correct method.

Generally, when building 3D assets for game engines, such as Unity, it is important to keep the polygon count as low as possible. The lower the polygon count, the more efficiently an application can run, reducing lag. This is even more important when building 3D assets for MR as the performance requirements are higher.

Before reducing the polygon count of your 3D assets, there are a few key questions you need to keep in mind. This ensures that you are creating a well optimised application, while ensuring that the user experience is maintained.

Ask yourself the following questions:

The key is to understand what needs to be detailed, and what does not. Knowing which assets need more detail will help you prioritise the assets that need the greatest number of polygons, so time and effort is not spent on assets of lower importance.