Google’s VR painting app Tilt Brush is coming to the upcoming Oculus Quest standalone headset. It will be a launch title.
Google have enabled cross-buy for Tilt Brush, so if you own it already on the Oculus Rift store you already own it for Quest.
Tilt Brush was a launch title for the HTC Vive back in April 2016. It pioneered the idea of true spatial art with 6DoF tracked controllers in room scale VR. In early 2017 shortly after the launch of the Oculus Touch controllers Google added Rift support.
Facebook is positioning Quest as a games console. The company has repeatedly told developers that the focus of the device’s content library is gaming. Tilt Brush is one of the few confirmed titles, so far, that diversifies this library to include creation rather than just consumption.
Google says Oculus Quest “will unlock completely new opportunities” for artists. The company expects the lack of restrictive tether to lead to “art that we never could have dreamed up before.”
It will have been a huge technical challenge to bring an app like this to a mobile chipset, but Google claims the result should “look and feel pretty much the same as the Rift version, with a few small tweaks.” Most notably, the notable glow effect (bloom) of Tilt Brush brushes was too performance heavy after more than a few strokes. To solve this problem, bloom is enabled at the start but slowly fades away as the user draws more.
Strangely, Facebook’s own VR art apps aren’t coming to the standalone headset. The team behind Oculus Medium, the popular VR sculpting app, declared that it required “the power and memory of a PC”. Their VR painting app, Quill, is getting a Quest renderer to allow you to view creations, but the app itself doesn’t seem to be coming.
