Customizing VR animations in real-time with Shaders & MRTK (2/2)

Written By Sandra Feng

Goal

Gain more hands-on experience creating custom shaders in Unity and linking to C# using MRTK.

How

Designing and prototyping an immersive experience allowing to customize geometry rendering and animations in real time using hand interactions within the constraint of a 3-day project:

  • Day 1 & 2 - prototyping the core logic and shaders on desktop

  • Day 3 - VR prototyping in MRTK

Note: this post is about creating the VR experience using MRTK.

See Customizing VR animations in real-time - Shaders & MRTK (1/2) for shaders, materials, and C# scripts.

Using shaders for environment & custom hand material

Decisions & rationale:

  • radial gradient shader for the environment dome to create depth in VR

  • swtiched blue hand color to more natural skin-toned color to create more immersion

  • changed doted line to gradient line for the raycast to reduce distraction

Customizing MRTK UI

Animating UI panel transition

Linking material properties with UI

End to end demo in VR

Recorded via Oculus Cast

Key Takeaways

Given more time, I would:

  • create custom lighting inside shaders to work around the limitations of the current MRTK version as there is no real-time shadow

  • redesign UI slider to offer more affordance and visual feedback in VR

  • add more material properties to settings for more control

Sandra Feng
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Customizing VR animations in real-time with Shaders & MRTK (1/2)