This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
Today we’re shipping our third MRTK-Unreal release, UX Tools (UXT) 0.10, with a slew of new features to help developers place their content in their physical world, organize their controls into menus, and interact with existing UI. UX Tools 0.10 is compatible with Unreal Engine 4.25.
You can now add the plugin directly to your project from the Unreal Engine Marketplace! To try out a sample app demonstrating most of UXT's key features, check out this download from our latest release on GitHub. Release highlights are below, and the full details can be found in our release notes.
Going forward, we’ll be releasing plugin updates at a bimonthly cadence, so you can expect to see a new set of features in December. Keep reading for a preview of the features coming next.
Release Highlights
- Distribution via the Unreal Engine Marketplace
- Tap to Place
- Hand Menu
- Near Menu
- Radio Buttons
- Surface Magnetism
- Unreal Motion Graphics support
- UI Elements
- Scrolling Collection (experimental)
- Tooltips (experimental)
- Cursor visual improvements
- Bounds control improvements
- Button, Slider, and TextActor conversion from Blueprints to C++
UX Tools is on the Unreal Engine 4 Marketplace- Add UX Tools to your project by opening the Epic Launcher, navigating to the Unreal Engine Marketplace, and searching for Mixed Reality UX Tools!
Tap to Place- Use either a hand ray or your head gaze to place holograms on the spatial mesh
Hand Menu- Attach UI to a user’s hands for frequently used functions
Near Menu- Create UI that follows the user, and can be pinned to the world
Radio Buttons- Ensure that only one button in a group is checked at a time
Surface Magnetism- Direct holograms to stick to a surface, whether in-game or to real world walls
Unreal Motion Graphics support- Enable Unreal Engine’s built-in widget components to respond to hand interactions, both direct and far
Scrolling Collection (experimental)- Scroll through a collection of 3D objects as if interacting with a touchscreen
Tooltips (experimental)- Annotate objects with labels and anchors
HoloLens 2 Style Bounds Control- Easily resize, rotate, or translate 2D and 3D objects
Visual Logging- Visualize joint positions, proximity, and pointers to aid in debugging hand interactions in the editor
Additional improvements include more polished cursor visuals, as well as conversion of the Button, Slider, and TextActor components from Blueprints to C++.
See the full release notes for more details.
What's coming next?
The focus for our December release will be preparing MRTK-Unreal to scale: adding cross-platform support, putting UX tools, graphics tools, and examples into separate plugins, and building a foundation for OpenXR support. Cross-platform support has been a top ask from developers, and we hope that providing components that work across AR and VR platforms will enable us to expand the audience we're able to reach.
- Cross-platform support with Unreal Engine 4.26: Windows Mixed Reality, Oculus Quest, and more
- Text box + keyboard
- OpenXR support
- UX Tools Examples plugin
- Graphics Tools plugin
Try it out!
UX Tools Game– a HoloLens 2 sample app showcasing all the key features of UX Tools. The latest GitHub release contains a pre-packaged appx.
Additional samples– check out the full list of open source sample apps built by Microsoft and Epic Games using Unreal Engine and UX Tools.
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Ready to grab the latest plugin? Search for Mixed Reality UX Tools on the Unreal Engine Marketplace to add it directly to your project.
To view documentation on Mixed Reality UX Tools, see the source code, or file an issue, please visit our GitHub repository.
Thanks,
The MRTK-Unreal Team