Smartphone as a Paired Game Input Device: An Application on HoloLens Head Mounted Augmented Reality System

From social media filters to medical applications, AR (augmented reality) is a rapidly growing technology. On the other hand, AR gaming is a popular application of this field of study. Microsoft’s see-through augmented reality headset HoloLens is one of the first and powerful headsets in the market today but it has limited interaction methods especially for gaming. This study deals with enhancing gaming experience in augmented reality devices by creating new interaction methods through a smartphone used as a game-controller an input device. We developed the Remote Input SDK (software development kit) to allow users to share input data between Unity applications to use a smartphone as remote controller while playing a game through HoloLens. This study explains the design and implementation of our SDK, which is available as an open-source component for Unity game development platform.