HoloLens Far Clipping Plane Distance

[AllanThompson]

Hi All,

I've been asked about developing an experience for HoloLens 2 that would be showing objects at a wide range of distances, from 20 meters up to hundreds of meters, and am trying to see what's possible.

In Studio, you used to be able to control the Near Clipping Plane and Far Clipping Plane distance on the 3D Container widget.  The help files say that the option is there, but not now (Studio 9.2.2.5162):

From my testing, when viewing an experience in View on the HoloLens, the maximum distance I can see something is around 40 meters.  Anything further away doesn't show as it's outside the far clipping distance.  On a tablet experience, I can view an object that is placed 10km away (provided it's big enough to see) and maybe further, but I haven't tried.

I found a reference to the clipping planes in combined-widgets.js that says the default far distance is 200, but there's also a note saying: Properties 'near' and 'far' are hidden as they are currently not supported (as per DT-19506).

So is the 40m limit that I've seen a limitation of the HoloLens in general, or is it something specific to HoloLens experiences in Studio/View?

Many thanks,

Allan

[RolandRaytchev]

Hi @AllanThompson ,

I checked the current information’s available  - the internal articles DT-19522 (mentioned in your post) but there is also DT19502 

"The clipping plane properties are no longer working/supported with ThingView/ or the HoloLens renderer “

So that it results that the  Clipping Plane properties from 3D Container are hidden and the 3D Container widget  does not display any "Near Clipping Plane" or "Far Clipping Plane" property

The build was 8.3.6

Here I will check why still there is info in the help - possibly the help should be updated.

Thank you for sharing your experience with this features! OK 40 m seems to be to small. I remember that there are users using the HoloLens  viewing some models inside the factory with a global coord system – only one thingmark was scanned  but I am not sure if the model size was > 40 m so that this value could be a restriction in this case. This point is something what I could discuss with the dev team (VTS-611) and if there is a feedback I will post it here.

My understanding is that the clipping planes (near and far) are not part of the Engine functionality but it is more than a feature of the render implementation and the mechanism used on specific platform to render geometries on the platform . This possibly now is set automatically from platform and is difficult to reset it with general values.

[RolandRaytchev]

according to VTS-611 received a feedback from dev team:

1.) the documentation will update - the clipping properties are no longer expose.

2.) the current value of the Far Clip Distance  is set to 20m (not 40)

[AllanThompson]

Hi Roland,

I realised that I made a mistake with the experience that I made for testing and I can see that the Far Clip Distance is 20m, not 40 as I originally said.  ☹️

Thanks for looking into this.

Regards,

Allan