News Space for HoloLens: Spatial News Headline Visualizer

After publishing my first personal HoloLens project ‘Typography Insight for HoloLens’ last year, I continued experiments on typography in mixed reality space. One of the most fascinating aspects of HoloLens was the rendering quality of the type. Since HoloLens has a higher PPD(Pixels Per Degree) than other AR/VR devices, it renders beautiful sharp text. I wanted to create an app that can leverage text rendering quality as well as the physical environment.

News Space is a spatial news headline visualizer in Mixed Reality space. It fills up your room with the latest news headlines. Since the news headlines are world-locked, you can walk around and view the detailed images and summaries. By air-tapping one of the news provider button, you can load headlines from the provider.

For the news item layout, instead of using a traditional 2D style list on a limited frame, I wanted to use the entire physical environment around the user. Through the series of experiments with different layout shapes such as three-dimensional lists and curved surfaces, I found that the spherical layout is comfortable since it gives me a relatively consistent distance to the news headlines regardless of the viewing angle.

To experiment with a more intensive reading situation, I am planning to add the reading mode and spatial sorting/categorizing for future updates. (Current version only supports headline summary view)