Optimising File Size

Learn how to optimise your files for quicker loading times

Jens Bäckvall avatar
Written by Jens Bäckvall
Updated over a week ago

Hololink is built to load your AR experiences quickly and smoothly, but like any web-based service, band-width and end-user device can limit this.

We've added info about the download size fo your Hololink in the upper left hand corner of the storyboard.

This text turns red if the download size exceeds 50 MB.

It is important to note that Hololinks with a download size of more than 50 MB work fine, but that minimising the download size ensures that users with a slower internet connection can still access it relatively quickly.

What you can do to enhance loading speeds

Luckily you can do something about this by optimising your assets when creating the Hololink.

Assets that can be optimised are:

  • Images

  • Image domes for 360 scenes

  • Videos

  • 3D models

Optimising Images

Images are easy to optimise. Go through these steps for each image:

  1. Make sure the image is no larger than 1024 pixels on any side. Larger images won't look better on almost all phones as there is a limit to the pixel density of the phone screen. Most images look great at a width of 256 or 512 pixels. Test different sizes if you are in doubt.

  2. Once you have created your image, run it through an online image compressor. At Hololink we often use tinypng.com which quickly and efficiently minimises your image for you: https://tinypng.com/

Optimising 360 Image Domes

360 domes are often very large, with a width of anywhere between 4000 and 16000 pixels. This is great for large screens or powerful VR headsets, but much too large for smartphones as the number of pixels force the GPU to work harder, while the actual number of pixels shown on screen is much smaller.

Optimise your 360 image dome by opening it in your favourite image editing software and changing the size to 2048 x 1024 pixels. Then export it as a jpg and upload it to your Hololink.

Optimising Video

Videos only become a problem if the file size is too large. We recommend keeping video files below 10 MB.

You can make this happen when creating your video, but there are also quite a lot of free video compression tools online. Simply search for video compression online using your favourite search engine.

Optimising 3D Models

3D Models can be very large. The main culprit here is usually the size of the textures.

If you have a very large model, or your Hololink seems to be loading more slowly than expected, you can extract the textures from your model as jpg files and make sure that none of them are larger than 1024 or 512 pixels on any side.

You can resize the texture files in any image editing software, by opening them and resizing them so that they have a width of 512 pixels. Then export them as jpg files and add them to the model again replacing the original textures, using your favourite 3D software, such as Blender.

Watch this 5 minute video to learn how to optimise the textures on a .GLB 3D model. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mioiB8EkQ9E

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