Question MRTK team entirely culled?

Hey all

Is this article for real? What alternative platform options are hololens devs considering with unity? Does unity have any suggestions as platform to support continued dev on H2?

Microsoft has also culled the entire team behind the popular MRTK framework. MRTK (opens in new tab) is Microsoft's "Mixed Reality Took Kit," which is a cross-platform framework for spatial anchors in virtual reality spaces. MRTK was built for Unity VR integrations, and works with Meta's headsets with a focus on HoloLens.

https://www.windowscentral.com/micr...ams-behind-virtual-mixed-reality-and-hololens

 

Unfortunately it is all too real. I am really sorry for the people involved in the layoff.
Time will tell what this means for the future of HoloLens development.

 

Thanks @rsmeenk , that's terrible news, we send our best wishes to the MRTK team, it's a bunch of very smart people and we hope they find soon a place to continue making such great software !

At our studio this drop out by MSFT truly affects us. It seems to us irresponsible from MSFT to drop the software platform and not communicate the clients and devs invested in this technology how we're supposed to move forward.

Not only have we invested in the hardware but also invested plenty of time learning/developing for H2. We have been pitching clients and currently in a contract where our pay depends on delivery of milestones. No client will want to invest further without visibility the software will support these apps, we all now how quickly software becomes updated or broken if not patched for either security or features.

What a let down

Any thoughts whether Unity will continue to support the existing MRTK and whether it will consider possible breaking changes for MRTK as Unity evolves?

 

Thanks @andyb-unity and great news, we'll migrate our projects, we used mrtk as recommended

 

MRTK is open source and under MIT license so I imagine that if there is a company big enough out there to have a team manage it they could probably for the repos and take over the MRTK project. As andyb mentioned I do believe the Hololens is still in play (MS still has a contract with the military, though it can't be called a success thusfar), I guess the future of it all is questionable.

 

Thanks @andyb-unity this is good news, indeed. Nevertheless, I think these are different things, because was MRTK was doing was more than support for OpenXR within Unity. It provided a lot of ready to use/modify Features and UX building blocks from where different teams start development of their own products and applications. Plus it has support for a wide variety of VR and MR devices allowing developers to a have, as much as possible, a common look and feel for their applications across devices without being necessary "to reinvent the wheel".

@MikeM42, true MRTK is released under MIT license. Though, personally I don't see another company big enough to take over the MRTK project (especially it was so closed for the release of MRTK 3). Other companies - I don't want to mention names here - are more interested in promoting their own SDKs from which they will make money, even though in many cases these SDKs are built on top of MRTK (which was, BTW, free).
Anyways, let us see what is going to happen and I hope MRTK will still have a life and it will prove I was wrong when doubted that somebody else will take over.

Another chance could be the community to take it over and develop it further. Though these developers will need to have the necessary resources to keep it the development pace.