Cameron Micka

Microsoft Mesh & Teams Immersive Events (Windows, Web & Meta Quest · Unity)

Across AltspaceVR, Microsoft Mesh, and immersive events in Teams, I’ve combined hands-on graphics engineering and technical design with growing and mentoring multidisciplinary, multinational teams.

I led a team that shipped the Lakehouse environment and Toybox activities, coordinating design, art, and engineering. I also guided Mesh Toolkit tutorials and samples and built reusable asset workflows that made environments easier to create and maintain.

For Teams, I helped transition Mesh from a native app to a WebGL-based experience, partnering on adaptive quality and scalable rendering, guiding environment optimization, and resolving graphics and integration issues.

I also helped shape and prototype the workflow for bringing custom 3D spaces into Teams as glTF files. My team and I improved lighting and visual quality and embedded performance checks into content pipelines, helping teams ship richer environments reliably and efficiently.

Microsoft Mesh Toolkit (Unity)

Managed a five-person team of engineers and designers across the United States and Nigeria that helped build the tutorials and samples in the Mesh Toolkit, including Mesh 101 and 201 and the Pavilion. They gave creators starting points for custom onboarding, training, guided tours, and social gatherings in Microsoft Mesh.

Also integrated the Content Performance Analyzer and Visual Profiler into the toolkit so creators could find and fix performance issues before publishing (more on these tools below).

Performance Tooling (Open Source Toolkit · Unity)

Created and maintain the Visual Profiler, a drop-in Unity profiler that shows frame rate, scene complexity, and memory at a glance. It renders in a single draw call with no per-frame allocations and runs on HoloLens, Meta Quest, OpenXR, and WebGL.

Built Mesh’s Content Performance Analyzer, which flags costly content and suggests fixes so creators can cut download times, improve comfort, and extend battery life.

Graphics Tools for Unity (Open Source Toolkit · Unity)

Lead developer of Mixed Reality Graphics Tools for Unity, the MRTK3 graphics package of shaders, tools, and samples that raise the visual fidelity of mixed reality apps within tight performance budgets.

Origins in MRTK. Created the MRTK Standard shader, a flexible Fluent Design shading system with clipping, proximity and hover lights, and mesh outlines. It became the foundation of Graphics Tools.

Features. Built the canvas shaders behind MRTK3’s UI, acrylic blur, a magnifier, Shader Graph targets, area lights, and editor tools for combining textures, meshes, and lights. Kept it all current through Unity 6 supporting the URP and built in renderer.

MRTK-Unreal (Open Source Toolkit · Unreal Engine)

Sole graphics engineer on Mixed Reality Toolkit for Unreal (MRTK-Unreal), bridging design and engineering. In UX Tools for Unreal, built HoloLens 2–style pressable, toggle, and radio buttons, the finger-tip cursor, bounds control visuals, and near menus.

Championed Unreal on HoloLens 2 by helping release Kippy’s Escape, an open-source sample game built with Framestore, and partnering with Epic Games on a webinar about building for HoloLens 2 in Unreal Engine.

Graphics Tools for Unreal (Open Source Toolkit · Unreal Engine)

Led and maintained Mixed Reality Graphics Tools for Unreal, giving Unreal developers production-ready shaders, blueprints, and examples tuned for the tight performance budgets of mobile mixed reality hardware.

Shipped mixed reality–optimized lighting, proximity lights, clipping primitives, spatial mesh effects, mesh outlines, and in-headset profiling across HoloLens 2, Windows, and Android.

MRTK-Unity (Open Source Toolkit · Unity)

Core graphics contributor to Mixed Reality Toolkit for Unity (MRTK-Unity), Microsoft’s open-source toolkit for building HoloLens apps, spanning rendering, UX controls, and developer tooling.

HoloLens shell parity. Brought the HoloLens 2 shell’s look and feel to developers out of the box with compressible buttons, proximity lighting, and the finger-tip cursor.

Components & tools. Built the Hand Constraint solver for hand-attached UI, MaterialInstance, and the Dependency Window, and improved the in-headset Visual Profiler. Many of these grew directly out of HoloLens 2 partner needs.

HoloLens 2 ISVs (HoloLens 2 · Unity)

Worked hands-on with HoloLens 2 launch partners, including Bentley, Philips, and PTC, to solve graphics and performance challenges so their production apps were ready for the device’s 2019 debut.

Fed those lessons back into MRTK, turning recurring partner needs into reusable features like hand-attached UI and slider controls.

HoloLens POCs (HoloLens · Unity)

Built early HoloLens proof-of-concepts with key Microsoft customers, helping them validate mixed reality ideas before committing to larger investments.

Projects included Boeing and Insitu’s wildfire response demo, which turned ScanEagle drone feeds into shared holographic tactical maps, and Oyanagi Construction’s Holostruction, which brought 3D construction plans onto job sites in Japan.

Virtual Reality Titles

HALP (Oculus Touch & HTC Vive, UE4) — A VR sandbox puzzle game released on Steam in 2016. Stood up a custom Unreal Engine 4 build for prototype Oculus Touch hardware and owned the working relationship with Facebook/Oculus.

Virtually Live: Soccer (HTC Vive, Unity 5 & UE4) — A platform for virtually attending live matches, shown at GDC 2016. Integrated SteamVR, built the camera and input systems designers relied on, and partnered with art and design to hold above 90fps.

Also built a procedural crowd tool that filled stadiums with large, varied audiences, handling texture atlasing, mesh combining, and LODs automatically.

Fat Princess Adventures & DLC (PS4 · C4 Engine)

As Technical Director, led up to 12 engineers to ship Fat Princess Adventures, a four-player co-op action RPG published by Sony for PS4 in December 2015, and its DLC expansion. Ran scheduling, risk management, candidate screening, and the push to hit 60fps at 1080p.

Stayed hands-on, personally owning layered animation, Havok integration and the kinematic character controller, AI pathfinding and scripted behavior, networked gameplay, the character state machine and customization, the camera system, editor and debugging tools, and visual-scripting improvements.

Escape Plan & DLC (PS Vita & PS4 · Unity 3 (Custom Port))

Shipped Escape Plan, a PS Vita launch title built around the system’s front touch, rear touch, and motion controls that became the Vita’s #1 selling downloadable game, plus four DLC expansions.

Helped port portions of Unity to the Vita, implemented platform services (trophies, save data, store entitlements), and scripted most gameplay systems. Built the UI and localization systems, character state machine, root motion, character controller, and editor tools, and moved slow C# scripts to native code.

The Force Unleashed II & DLC (PS3 & X360 · Ronin Engine)

Programmed and scripted gameplay on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (PS3 & Xbox 360, October 2010), focusing on boss battles, and helped land the game under a tight shipping deadline.

After launch, worked with LucasArts Singapore to fix bugs and ship the Endor mission DLC.

Tools & Telemetry (PS3 & X360 · Ronin Engine)

As an intern on The Force Unleashed I, built a networked gameplay data logging system, a heat-map generator, and a gameplay replay system, and tracked down sources of non-determinism in Ronin, LucasArts’ proprietary game engine.

Hairball (iOS · Custom Engine)

One of the very first games on the iPhone App Store, submitted in August 2008, just weeks after the store opened. A tilt-controlled endless arcade game where you guide a hairball down a clogged pipe.

Handled all programming and development, including a proprietary mobile engine written from scratch on OpenGL ES 1.0 (later 2.0), OpenAL, and Box2D.

Hairball for Zune HD (Zune HD · XNA)

After Microsoft reached out to bring Hairball to the Zune HD, ported the game from iOS to XNA, taking it to a second mobile platform.

Snowball (iOS · Custom Engine)

Ported Snowball from PC to iOS, where Apple featured it on the App Store and it sold over 8,000 copies in a month.

Also partnered with Zynga on cross-promotion.

iVenture HD (iOS · Custom Engine)

One of the first universal games for iPad and iPhone.

Wrote every game and engine feature from scratch, including a level editor that shipped in the final game.

Video Game Creation Extreme (Windows · Torque Game Builder)

Taught “Video Game Creation Extreme” to middle and high school students in classes of about six, covering Torque Game Builder and game scripting.

Designed an original curriculum, prepared lesson plans, and guided students through hands-on game-building projects.

Student Game Projects (Windows, Wii & Game Boy Advance · Custom Engine)

Earned a BS in Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation with a minor in Mathematics, studying math, physics, and game design while building a new game engine and game from scratch every year.

Took real-time graphics courses every year, progressing from custom software rasterizers through OpenGL, DirectX, shaders, and a wide range of graphics algorithms.

Corporate Partnerships Intern (Flash & ActionScript)

Interned with DigiPen's Corporate Partnerships group while studying.

Helped implement Flash and ActionScript based applications used for corporate training.

The Sixth Sense

Appeared as an extra in The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s supernatural thriller starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment.

The film was shot on location in Philadelphia and went on to earn six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

Beloved

Appeared as an extra in Beloved, Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover.

Broadway Brawler

Appeared as an extra in Broadway Brawler, a romantic comedy starring Bruce Willis as a retired hockey player, filmed in Wilmington, Delaware.

Production was famously shut down after about 20 days of filming and the movie was never finished. To make up for it, Willis agreed to star in several Disney films at a reduced rate — one of which was The Sixth Sense.

TV Commercials & Print Work

Booked roles in television commercials, learning to hit marks, take direction, and deliver the same scene take after take on a professional set. Also worked as a child print model, posing for photo shoots used in catalogs and print advertising.