My Favorite VR Experience: Tilt Brush
My most memorable experience with VR has been with Google’s Tilt Brush. As a 3D graphics creator, Tilt Brush was the tool we all dreamed of in our SciFi fantasies. Stepping into Tilt Brush and being able to walk through and around my creations was enough to motive me to build a PC to support running an HTC Vive.
So what is Tilt Brush?
Tilt Brush is a VR application, exclusively for the HTC Vive, that allows users to paint in a room scale environment. The controllers become the user’s brush and palette. Tilt Brush’s palette UI attached to the contoller in the user’s hand is one of the best examples of VR UI I have seen to date. It is easy to learn and feels as natural as holding a real life painter’s palette.
Why Does this Need to be in VR?
Tilt Brush brings 3D art creation into a more natural environment. Previously, artists were trapped in a 2D simulation of their creations and they were stuck awkwardly trying to navigate different view angles using a mouse or a touch interface. Comparable to real life sculpting, Tilt Brush enables users to walk around all angles of their art and understanding the 3D space and form becomes much more intuitive.
Tilt Brush also opens up new possibilities for virtual art installations and immersive environment creation. It is a pretty cool experience to build an environment in Tilt Brush and then hand over the headset for someone else to explore your creation from their own angles.
Tilt Brush as a tool is evolving as the developers add new features, such as 3D model import and Unity SDK support. This allows artists to begin designs in Tilt Brush and continue refinement on platforms outside of the application.
The Verdict
Tilt Brush begins to fulfill the dreams of 3D artists while also providing wow moments to users new to VR. It is a great use case for VR to provide a space and interface for immersive content creation. At the moment, art created in Tilt Brush tends to be quite stylized, but the developers keep adding new features that expand the toolset and possibilities. There are also similiar applications emerging that show a lot of promise for professional content creation. A few VR creative applications I look forward to trying are Oculus’ Medium and Quill.
