Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today.
I'm going to be going over what's new in
the Mixed Reality Toolkit for Unity.
The agenda for today,
I'll start with some quick announcements.
I'll do an overview of the Mixed Reality Toolkit for
those of you who might be hearing about it for the first time.
I'll talk about what's new in the 2.5 version, what's coming next.
I'll highlight some resources for you and then, we'll do a Q&A.
Starting off with these announcements,
if you haven't heard already,
there's a new app in
the Microsoft Store called Designing Holograms.
This app will teach you how to do just that,
how to design holograms using your HoloLens device.
If you haven't downloaded it already,
get your HoloLens on and check it out today.
It's a really cool app.
Also, on the Microsoft store
is the Mixed Reality Toolkit Examples Hub.
This is an app with various scenes that let you try out
different features and components of the Mixed Reality Toolkit.
You can download this from Microsoft Store
onto your HoloLens device and get started today.
Now, if you don't have a HoloLens yet,
you can also check out
the MRTK GitHub page for instructions on how to
download this to your computer so you can
load it into Unity and try it out there.
What is the Mixed Reality Toolkit?
Well, MRTK for Unity is
a Microsoft-driven project that provides the set of
components and features used to accelerate
cross-platform mixed reality app development in Unity.
It offers cross-platform input systems,
building blocks for spatial interactions and UI,
and extensible framework so you can go build on top of it,
and support for a wide range of platforms.
There's Microsoft HoloLens, HoloLens 2,
Windows Mixed Reality headsets,
open VR headsets such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift,
Ultraleap Hand Tracking and
mobile devices such as iOS and Android.
Now, as of version 2.5,
we also support the Oculus Quest.
What's new in MRTK 2.5?
Starting with version 2.5,
the MRTK is available using
the Unity Package Manager or UPM for short,
on Unity version 2019.4 and newer.
We heard from you, our community,
that you wanted a better way to
discover and acquire MRTK packages.
Now, today, there are some manual steps required to get started,
but once a Mixed Reality Toolkit package has
been added to your manifest file,
you can manage the MRTK using the UPM interface.
The scrolling object collection has
graduated from an experimental feature to
a full feature and offers more freedom for
laying out 3D content of different sizes,
with added support for objects that have no clutters attached.
The new option for disabling content masking was also added,
making prototyping even easier.
The scrolling object collection can be combined
with a grid object collection to
lay out content in a grid of
online elements that have uniform size and spacing.
When it comes to input simulation,
you can now use your mouse to simulate eye tracking.
You can also simulate motion controllers,
just like you can simulate hands in the Unity editor play mode.
The "Trigger", "Grab", and "Menu" buttons are currently supported.
If you're using the hand interaction example
in the MRTK Examples Hub I mentioned earlier,
there is now a configurable shortcut to show
a help page for input simulation
when you're using it on a computer.
There is now a package that contains the play mode and
test mode test infrastructure that the MRTK team
uses to create our own end-to-end tests.
That's right. You can create tests just like us.
This infrastructure has been extremely
handy for the MRTK team and we're excited to
have folks like yourselves use it to
add test coverage to your own projects.
Now, you can check out our guidelines on
the MRTK GitHub for how to write and run tests in MRTK.
Bounds Control is another feature that
graduated from experimental to a full feature.
It has a bunch of bug fixes and updates,
things such as properties now being split
into configurations which make it easier to set up bounds.
Configurations can be shared through scriptable objects.
Every property in scriptable property is runtime configurable.
The Bounds Control rig isn't
recreated on property changes anymore.
There is support for translation handles,
there is full constraint support through the Constraint Manager,
and there's also support for the Elastic System Manager.
The old bounding box is now
deprecated and existing GameObjects using
bounding box can be upgraded using
the migration tool or through the bounding box inspector.
Constraints can now be used by both Bounds Control and
Objects Manipulator via this new component,
the Constraint Manager.
Now, if you remember, in MRTK 2.4,
we introduced the object manipulator
to replace the manipulation handler.
Now, this feature is actually one of my favorites out of
MRTK 2.5, the elastic systems.
It's still an experimental.
However, out of the box,
it supports Bounds Control and Object Manipulator.
I'm excited to see what new ways you can introduce
some elastic simulation systems into your projects.
Continuing on with experimental features, there's the joystick.
This is a feature that allows you to control
a large object at a distance using a holographic joystick.
The example in the examples hub shows you how to move,
scale, and rotate a large object at a distance.
Then, there's the color picker.
This is a new way to quickly change
material colors at runtime using this simple interface.
Then, there's the Oculus Quest.
Thanks to Eric Provencher,
one of our community members who had
developed an extension called MRTK Quest,
we were able to work with him and bring his work
into the Mixed Reality Toolkit so that now,
Oculus Quest support is part of the MRTK.
Really excited about how we're able to work with our community and
ensure that the open source nature of
MRTK continues to keep it thriving.
What's coming next? We shipped a lot of things in MRTK 2.5.
This list is just a list of highlights,
but the work is not done.
You might have heard already that Microsoft and
Unity both announced support for OpenXR.
The MRTK team is working hard to make sure
that OpenXR just works for you.
We're also working on improvements to our packaging story.
We've heard feedback that some of
our UX components in the toolkit have
very complex hierarchies and so we're
working on making things easier to use for you,
and they're also working on our developer education,
trying to make it easier for you to
get the most out of the toolkit.
If you want to learn more,
here's some resources for you to check out.
MRTK GitHub, that's where you can give us feedback.
We always love to hear from our community,
whether it's a bug or a feature request, we want to hear from you.
There are MRTK tutorials available so you
can get started quickly with MRTK for Unity.
Check out our MRTK 2.5.1
release notes so you can see what's new in the latest update.
Then there's the MRTK architecture overview.
Thank you so much for joining.
Let's jump into the Q&A.