Fragments (video game)

Fragments (video game)
Information
VR/AR	Mixed Reality
Developer	Asobo Studio
Publisher	Microsoft
Platform	Windows Holographic
Device	Microsoft HoloLens (1st gen)
Operating System	Windows 10 version 10586.0 or higher
Type	Game
Genre	Adventure
Play Area	Room-scale
Release Date	30 March 2016 (included with the HoloLens Development Edition, United States and Canada)
Price	Free
App Store	Microsoft Store
Website	https://www.asobostudio.com/node/15

See also: Microsoft HoloLens

Fragments is a mixed reality detective game developed by the French studio Asobo Studio and published by Microsoft for the first-generation Microsoft HoloLens. The player acts as a detective who investigates crimes through memories; the game scans the player's room and stages holographic crime scenes, clues and life-size characters on its floor, walls and furniture. Microsoft announced it on 29 February 2016 as one of the first experiences for the HoloLens Development Edition, and it was included with that hardware when it began shipping in the United States and Canada on 30 March 2016.

To place clues and seat characters in rooms of any layout, Asobo built a room-analysis system on top of the HoloLens spatial mapping mesh. Microsoft and Asobo later released that code as open source; it became the spatial understanding module of the Mixed Reality Toolkit.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Developer, publisher, announcement and launch dates, inclusion with the HoloLens Development Edition, gameplay and room-analysis descriptions, the spatial understanding case study, playtime, current Microsoft Store listing data and the attributed press quotes, each checked against the cited sources. About review dates.

Gameplay

In the Microsoft Store description, a mysterious group asks the player for help, and the player is a detective with the ability to investigate crimes based on memories. The player examines holographic crime scenes, gathers clues "blended into your reality" and uses a personal digital crime lab with forensic tools to solve the case. Asobo Studio describes the game as a first-person crime thriller in which the player's own room becomes the crime scene and clues can be hidden behind furniture. Its feature list names spatial mapping, a "Room Solver AI" that adapts the game to the layout of the room, life-size holographic characters that are aware of the player's presence, and emotional storytelling.

The player appears in the game as themselves: Asobo chief executive and co-founder Sebastian Wloch told UploadVR that "you are actually in the game as yourself", and UploadVR described the role as a futuristic detective solving a crime inside the player's actual home. Characters can sit down on the player's sofa and strike up a conversation, and evidence can be hidden behind real furniture. PCWorld described it as a Sherlock Holmes-style story in which suspects visit the player at home, and noted that the developers' video showed a virtual matchbox hidden behind a coffee table, while room mapping let the game superimpose a valve or safe on a wall.

The store listing says the app uses the microphone and requires permission to "see your current and past surroundings", the HoloLens spatial perception capability.

Development

Asobo Studio developed Fragments and the platform game Young Conker in partnership with Microsoft; the studio also worked on the HoloTour app for the headset. The studio had earlier made Kinect games with Microsoft, and Wloch said in May 2016 that it had started working with HoloLens about four years earlier. Because the technology was entirely new, the developers had to test their changes constantly in a reconstructed apartment living room at the studio, furnished with a sofa, table, television, decorations and plants, and rearranged many times so the games could adapt to different layouts. Clubic reported that Fragments and Young Conker each had a playing time of about seven hours.

Room analysis

The developers could not know in advance what a player's room would look like. Wloch told UploadVR that "we had to design the game in a way so that it could analyze a room and understand what was there." The game scans the room, identifies flat, solid surfaces, measures the distances between them and recognizes shapes such as couches and chairs, so that non-player characters sit on furniture instead of walking through it.

According to a Microsoft case study by Jeff Evertt of Microsoft Studios, Fragments needed to tell surfaces such as the floor and a table apart to put clues in relevant places, and to find surfaces such as a couch or chair where life-size characters could sit. Asobo created technology that extends HoloLens spatial mapping to identify walls, tables, chairs and floors and to choose the best position for holograms against a set of constraints. Microsoft turned Asobo's original code into a library, and the two companies open-sourced it in the Mixed Reality Toolkit as a C++ solver wrapped in a UWP DLL with a Unity prefab. The module was designed around the needs of the two games: a fixed-size playspace, a one-time scan in which the user walks around and "paints" the area to include, and indoor home or office rooms with flat surfaces and right-angled walls. It stores the playspace as a grid of 8 cm voxel cubes and offers topology, shape and object placement queries, including a query for positions where a character can sit. Microsoft's case study notes that HoloLens 2 instead provides a Scene Understanding runtime for structured environment data.

Release

Microsoft vice president Kudo Tsunoda introduced Fragments on 29 February 2016, calling it "a mixed reality crime drama that unfolds in your own environment" and stating that both Fragments and Young Conker "were created in partnership with Asobo Studio." Fortune reported that Fragments, Young Conker and RoboRaid would be included with the hardware.

Date	Event	Notes
29 February 2016	Announcement	Introduced on the Microsoft Devices Blog with the first HoloLens Development Edition experiences
30 March 2016	Launch with hardware	The HoloLens Development Edition (US$3,000) began shipping in the United States and Canada; Fragments was one of the games included with it
By 16 April 2016	Store availability	Clubic reported that Asobo's HoloLens titles were available on Microsoft's store

As of October 2026 the Microsoft Store still lists Fragments as a free app published by Microsoft Corporation, rated ESRB Mature 17+ for blood and violence, in English (United States) only, with an approximate download size of 1.22 GB. Its system requirements list HoloLens, Windows 10 version 10586.0 or higher and the x86 architecture. Microsoft's HoloLens documentation identifies x86 as the first-generation HoloLens and ARM as HoloLens 2, and states that a first-generation app without an ARM package is not available for HoloLens 2 devices.

Reception

In his February 2016 overview of the first HoloLens apps, Mark Hachman of PCWorld wrote that "So far, Fragments looks amazing." In Microsoft's announcement, Tsunoda said the game "blurs the line between the digital world and the real world more than any other experience we built" and that a story set in a player's living room "generates memories for you of what digitally happened in your space like it was real."

In a later hands-on video feature, Zac Bowden of Windows Central called Fragments "the first HoloLens game that genuinely made me think 'wow, I can't wait for holographic gaming to become mainstream'" and wrote that it "might be the most immersive HoloLens experience yet." He praised characters and evidence that are aware of the room's furniture, characters that can sneak up behind the player, and graphics he called "pretty good for a game running on HoloLens".

See also

• Microsoft HoloLens
• Spatial mapping
• Scene understanding
• Mixed Reality Toolkit