Introducing MR Utility Kit: Build Spatially-Aware Apps Faster

Meta’s MR Utility Kit, which we announced at Connect, is now available with utility functions, prefabs, tools, and features like Passthrough Relighting that will help you accelerate your development and enhance the realism of your apps. This is one of many new tools that will make it easier to create high-quality MR experiences for Meta Quest 3. You can find the new package for Unity and Unreal

The MR Utility Kit is an engine-level collection of utility functions, prefabs, tools, and sample scenes that can help you develop faster when building spatially-aware apps. It augments low level MR APIs, reducing the amount of boilerplate code developers have to write so you can free up your time to focus on other ways to make your app stand out.

We are committed to making development faster with MR API using MRUK. We will be extending MRUK to other MR APIs in the future.

Passthrough Relighting (PTRL) in particular is an exciting new addition intended to streamline the development process by making it more straightforward to add shadows and highlights to Passthrough; as simple as adding a material in engine integrations.

There are a variety of MRUK features and use cases worth exploring, and below you’ll find just a few ways you can improve your builds with scene queries, graphical helpers, and other development tools. For a complete list of features, reference the documentation page here.

For building immersive mixed reality experiences, seamless blending of the real and virtual world is paramount. One key aspect enabling this seamless blending is the ability to cast shadows and highlights of virtual objects onto real-world surfaces, enhancing immersion and the overall user experience.

Previously, creating the illusion of shadows and highlights on Passthrough has been a technically complex process requiring computer graphics expertise. Now with the release of Passthrough Relighting, we are offering developers reusable components, samples, comprehensive documentation and design guidelines. Passthrough Relighting demonstrates and simplifies the process to adjust real-world lighting to match elements of the virtual world.

Passthrough Relighting demonstrates developers how to incorporate common shadow rendering techniques and highlights, as seen in the sample images below.

Shadows are important for perceiving depth and spatial relationships between the physical world and virtual objects.

Similarly, Passthrough highlights enhance visual realism by depicting the interaction of light and objects, as shown below.

These reusable components will help save you time and resources by reducing the trial and error associated with crafting these effects from scratch. The package includes comprehensive technical documentation for Unity and Unreal, facilitating quick onboarding. Additionally, we will provide design guidelines to support the development of high-quality user experiences.

Meta’s mixed reality (MR) capabilities present new possibilities for engaging and immersing your audience, and we’re excited to continue offering you a variety of tools to accelerate your development with this technology. We’re always updating our tools to make developing for Meta Quest a more flexible, streamlined, and enjoyable experience.

Find more information on the MR Utility Kit check out the our documentation page, now available as a new package on both Unity and Unreal.

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