This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In MRTK 2.5.0 we launched support for Mixed Reality Toolkit with the Oculus Quest and made several improvements to our teleport pointer, including allowing users to teleport via hand gestures (Only on the Quest for now). Here we’ll be taking a closer look at how these improvements were made as well as how they will improve the user’s experience.
Quest Support:
First and foremost is the support for deploying MRTK on Oculus Quest. In the past few months, Unity has worked towards consolidating all of their XR tools into the XR Plugin Framework. Though Oculus’s current XR-plugin framework provides support for interfacing with their controllers, it does not provide access to the hand tracking capabilities of the Oculus Quest. In the meantime, one of our open source community members, Eric Provencher, had already developed handtracking support by leveraging the Oculus Integration Asset Store package, which directly fetches the data from lower level Oculus APIs. Working closely with him, we were able to bring in those handtracking integrations into MRTK while still coexisting with the larger XR Plugin Framework. Thanks Eric!
Teleport Pointer Improvements:
The other major changes that came from this collaboration were improvements to the teleport pointer. There are four main improvements we’ve made to the teleport pointer.
Improved hand materials:
The materials on the articulated hands for Quest have been adjusted to give a subtle glow when pinching. This visual feedback helps make the pinch action feel more responsive. This improvement is only available on Oculus Quest for the 2.5 release, but we are planning on expanding it to more platforms.
Teleporting with articulated hands:
You can now make a gesture with articulated hands to begin a teleport action! This gives users a whole new way of navigating environments in mixed reality and without the need for physical controllers! This improvement is only available on Oculus Quest for the 2.5 release, but we are planning on expanding it to more platforms.
Teleport Sounds:
A sound now plays when starting and completing a teleport, making the action a lot more responsive to use.
Teleport Animations:
The teleport cursor now has animations when the user is pointing at a valid surface to teleport to. This improves the overall feel and experience of teleporting and should make the tool a bit more fun to use. There is also a subtle proximity light on the cursor, which helps highlight the location the user wants to teleport to.
The cursor’s speed scaling has been adjusted from a linear interpolation to a quadratic one. This makes it much easier to pinpoint a location to teleport to, as the cursor will accelerate less rapidly when transitioning from closer to farther locations.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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