MRTK for Unity

MRTK for Unity

Contributed Leap Motion integration and feature upgrades to Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Toolkit 2.7 release.

MRTK is Microsoft’s open-source toolkit for building XR experiences in Unity. It underpins experiences across HoloLens, Microsoft Mesh, and partner applications.

Scope

  • Cross-platform interaction system that abstracts controllers, articulated hands, and eye tracking into a unified API surface.
  • UI components, spatialization helpers, and performance tooling tuned for both immersive (VR) and mixed reality (AR) runtimes.
  • Large open-source community that depends on predictable releases, documentation, and backward compatibility.

My Contributions

  • Added official Leap Motion hand-tracking support for MRTK 2.7, covering joint poses, gesture events, and hand mesh visualization.
  • Hardened the input system for hybrid 2D/3D apps by profiling performance hotspots and rewriting allocation-heavy sections using C# Jobs.
  • Authored migration guides and sample scenes showing developers how to adopt new capabilities without breaking existing scenes.
  • Coordinated with partner teams to verify the release against Microsoft Mesh and third-party experiences before shipping.

Impact

  • Expanded MRTK’s controller support matrix, helping enterprise developers bring hand tracking to training and design review scenarios without rewriting input code.
  • Reduced regressions in partner builds by contributing automated tests around hand joints and interactable states.
  • Gained insights that fed directly into my day job building avatar customization in Microsoft Mesh.

© made with ❤️ by Jack