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Hey and thanks in advance for any help/pointers

The solution is probably straight forward but i am still a little inexperienced (while creating quite a few different VR unity projects mostly study related, i never really build anything so the editor allowed for some shortcuts. see below).

I am currently developing for Windows mixed reality with unity. I am struggling to figure out how to make a (possibly secondary) application window run on the desktop that can be used during facilitated VR-experiences to change settings and generally provide facilitator input to the application while the participant would just perceive the VR world.

Edit: I have a similar project that is developed with Steam_vr library / Open_VR that works exactly as expected and portrayed by the unity editor; i.e. the desktop will shows the ingame footage + the screenspace overlay UI (which is interactable).Nevertheless quite a few features where implemented with the MixedRealityToolkit so I'd prefer to stick with that. And was wondering if there is a way to achieve the same/similar behavior with it.

Now with MRTK everything works straight forward when running from unity editor just making a canvas screenspace will prevent it from showing in vr while it can still be interacted with. the problem is that the facilitators themselves are a third party and having a build would just make their handling of the solution much easier. Not to mention performance gains from building and cleaning the project(?).

it will probably come down to creating a secondary window that runs on the desktop since my understanding is that uwp with MRTK just runs in the wmr portal rather than a separate app; and that the WMR portal simply copies the Headset render to the desktop. But i am completely blank on how to achieve this and was hoping that someone might have struggled with this before. But i couldn't really find anything. I'd prefer not to have to resolve to Networking, and will attempt to convert to Steam_VR /OpenVR in the meantime..

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  • \$\begingroup\$ If I'm understanding correctly, you want your facilitators to have their own interface which is completely separate from the VR display, but can change the state of your VR world? You might be able to open a socket in your app and have the facilitator app send messages to your VR app -- will this be running in an environment that would allow for that type of setup? \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jun 21, 2019 at 4:07
  • \$\begingroup\$ well, i mainly want the facilitators to have their own interface, with minimum performance impact. So what you are suggesting is simply communicating with the app via local network, I suppose that is possible, but i have limited experience with networking in general and was hoping there would be a simpler solution. I have also edited the question to reflect the fact that when creating a predecessor of the app for steam_VR with openVR the behaviour when running the exe was as expected and portrayed by the unity editor (see the edits for more detail). :/ \$\endgroup\$ Commented Jun 21, 2019 at 9:05

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Sorry to bring this back up but I just had the exact same issue and after hours of digging and testing different things I realized it had to do with a setting on the Event System GO. In short, the Pointer Behavior should be set to "All Pointer As Is" if you're planning on listening to Mice input and VR controllers at the same time. Here is an official link to the options descriptions from the Unity documentation.

Event System - Input System UI Input Module settings

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