Digitizing the physical world: An intro to Mixed Reality Scene Understanding

Simon Stachniak, Principal Software Engineer Lead, discusses how it's un-intuitive to write mixed reality applications that interact naturally with the real world. To date, our devices have produced accurate but un-structured representations of our environments with the hope that application developers could find ways to create magical experiences. At best this assumption makes development difficult and error prone, at worst it prevents great ideas from coming to life. Scene Understanding is Microsoft's answer to this problem, and it means to invert the problem, converting the unstable analog world into a simple representation. In this talk we will present the Scene Understanding runtime, cover the scenarios and philosophy behind the work, and provide you with all the information you need to get started.