A comparison of streaming methods for the Microsoft HoloLens

The Microsoft HoloLens is an Augmented Reality headset that gained wide adoption in various areas during the last years. Many applications face the challenge of bringing complex contents to the HoloLens, which can be problematic given the limited hardware capabilities. In addition to surface rendering with high polygon counts, this also includes advanced volume rendering, which is often used in medical applications. One solution to enable such challenging visualizations on the HoloLens is to render the contents on another, more capable computer and to stream the final images to the HoloLens. In this work, we implement various methods for streaming custom content to the HoloLens and compare their efficiency when being decoded on the HoloLens. This includes the JPG and the DXT1 image compression formats, as well as the popular H.264 video codec and HoloLens Remoting. Our results indicate that the DXT1 and H.264 formats are fast and well-suited for streaming.