Behold, the glorious spectacle of playing Super Mario Bros. on Microsoft's HoloLens

Over the last year or so, we've seen Microsoft HoloLens being used in all sorts of interesting scenarios. Volvo has been exploring how the augmented reality headset could be used to transform the experience of buying a car; Japan Airlines has been using it to test improvements to the training process for its fleet engineers; and HoloLens has even ventured to the final frontier, with a stint aboard the International Space Station.

But while these business and science scenarios are undoubtedly awesome, many consumers are far more interested in how HoloLens might be used for gaming. We recently got a sense of how an augmented reality game like Pokémon GO could be an epic experience on Microsoft's headset, but if your tastes are a little more old-school, get a load of this retro goodness.

Developer Andrew Peterson, creator of the N3S emulator, put together a video showing what it's like to play gaming classics such as Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and even Tetris on HoloLens.

N3S is a 3D NES emulator designed for Windows, which is currently in its alpha development phase. The emulator takes the 2D graphics of the classic games, and converts them into 3D objects that are rendered in mixed reality on the headset in real time.

Achieving that wasn't a simple task. As Peterson explains...

...the HoloLens won't run most games full speed, especially when the editor is built-in and people make more complicated 3D meshes for the sprites. I've also had to hand-tune and optimize the app for HoloLens in a way that won't work with many games to get a consistent enough FPS.

But... it is really cool.

An extremely detailed explanation of how N3S works, compared with how the graphics worked on Nintendo's original NES, is available on the developer's site, and the source code is available on GitHub.

But before you head over there to get stuck into the juicy technical details, make sure you marvel at the full glory of Peterson's work in the video below: