Microsoft seems to have stopped working on Mixed Reality Toolkit

I just read an article that Microsoft has fired the entire Mixed Reality Toolkit team. See also this message on Twitter: Finn Sinclair :us_outlying_islands: op Twitter: “Joining my teammates in sharing some sad news. Yesterday, the entire #MRTK team was eliminated from Microsoft. I can’t express how grateful we are for our open source community and all of the amazing people we’ve collaborated with over the years. 1/x” / Twitter

What does that mean? Is this about the OpenXR Toolkit for developers? We of course now have a fantastic toolkit made by Matthieu (fantastic work!!). Does this replace it?

Am I mistaken? Noting to worry about? I have a G2 and I really can’t go back to pancake mode…

Note that it is not my intend to criticize Microsoft in any way, They (and Asobo) have created this incredible platform. I’m loving every minute of it. Nor am I in the position to question their business decisions. I just want to understand what this could mean for VR going forward.

My understanding is that these are different teams and OXRTK development is continuing.

Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) is a developer framework to create Mixed Reality experiences (mostly AR, think HoloLens and video see-through devices like Quest Pro).

There is no relationship with OpenXR Toolkit (OXRTK), which isn’t developed by Microsoft, and that is focused on performance/quality enhancements for VR games.

It is also not related to OpenXR Tools for WMR (formerly OpenXR Developer Tools for WMR) which is a platform software for tuning the OpenXR behavior on Windows.

8 Likes

I don’t know but when I ask my magic eight ball about WMR is says, ’ the future looks very bleak ', lol! Just kidding, I’m sure it will be supported for quite a while longer. Maybe just don’t expect a lot of further development and improvements. If someone does not come out with another WMR in the near future it’s hard to imagine Microsoft using a lot of resources to basically only service the HP Reverb G1/G2.

As other have said, this post in a mistake. Nothing to do with either Microsoft’s OpenXR Tools or the very popular 3rd party OpenXR Toolkit application created by Matthieu Bucchianeri and Jean-Luc Dupiot.