We've got a Vive Pre so I've had the pleasure of being able to use this a bit. It's as fun and amazing as it looks in the promo video there. I'm not an artist so I can hardly put the features to any real use, but I'm always amazed to see what people are capable of creating.
I think this is truly a new form of artistic expression - and I think it has the potential to become very popular in the future. I'm imagining having holograms on display of works done by famous modern artists... being able to walk around them and see them from different perspectives - I'd love that.
> being able to walk around them and see them from different perspectives
Reminds me of something I believe I saw in an art documentary. It was said that sculptures, like Michelangelo's David, were meant to be seen at night by candlelight. Being able to do so allows for a change of perspective while walking around it, in addition to the flickering of the flame making it 'come alive'.
Maybe in the future so much content will be created by so many (eg digital photographs, youtube), that the notion of preservation will lose a lot (but not all) of its former value, with the focus shifting on the next thing rather than enjoying the last thing for 400 years. Humanity as we understand it today, isn't going to exist in hundreds of years, we've already taken over control of our own evolution, and there's a high probability that we'll merge into the machines and never come back out. At the rate all of this is accelerating, long-term preservation is very likely going to be moot.
I have this idea in my head that one of the niche communities in fifty years will be people who trawl through discarded mass storage devices: cobbling together hardware fixes, undeleting files, and scanning them to see whether they contain anything interesting, like cached pages of lost websites, photos containing the faces of celebrities but from decades before they were famous, troves of old corporate emails, and so on.
I experienced TiltBrush over the weekend with the HTC Vive / SteamVR set at a friend's house. It was an amazing experience.
By far the best VR experience I had to date (I have a DK2).
The creative joy and glee you feel when painting in TiltBrush is phenomenal.
Some extremely satisfying micro experiences:
* Painting stars / sparkles above your head that sink down onto you
* Trying to draw a cube in 2D, then leaning forward and realizing that you are in a 3D world and need to draw completely differently - actually walking the cube.
Ordered the HTC Vive and I think it's the "game" that I'll have my kids (age 4 and 7) experience first. They both loved some of the demos and games available on the DK1 and DK2, but I think the creative freedom this seems to encourage will be even better.
Small note here: I have not seen any anecdotal or objective data on it, but I have a feeling this headset may be overly large or slightly too heavy for a 4 year old's face/head, and the controllers may be too big as well... I do hope I'm wrong, though! TiltBrush looks like a child's dream! :)
I wish my friend had taken a video of me as I was frolicking whilst throwing sparkles as high above my head as I could.
Or perhaps as I free-form drew a (wobbly) cube in 3D (should have used the straight line tool!), then stuffed it with flames. Then I taped up the sides of my first cube skeleton to hide the flames. Obviously this makes no sense at all but the experience was incredibly creative.I don't think anything parallels this right now.
Not exactly the same thing but I've actually been sitting on an idea for a mobile app that was inspired by Google: Essentially, you'd be able to look through your phone camera and draw on the world on the screen. Then other people could see your geolocated creations and maybe modify them. (I also considered autodecay for dense areas) I never did figure out the physics of how the projection would work or if the accuracy of GPS made it feasible, but I thought it'd be a good way to blend our real world and allow a sort of "virtual graffiti", a form of augmented virtual reality. As with all interesting ideas though, if you wait too long, someone comes and does it and I saw something similar on HN except with stickers also. As for how Google inspired it, their photo app lets you physically rotate your phone to pan around photospheres.
TiltBrush seems more of a pure creative endeavor meant for artists or anyone just looking to mess around a virtual world. I really much like how you can walk around the creation/space. The fact that it's three dimensional actually makes it more like sculpture than painting, though I"m sure there isn't anything other than parallax errors preventing 2D drawing. The granularity of the brushes seems to be good, so it will all come down to how well the hand controllers will work together with the headset. (hopefully not requiring surgery-like stillness just to get small details right, maybe by allowing adjustable head movement sensitivity)
Thanks for the link! I think their approach of including the real-world is very exciting and has just as much potential as completely virtual applications.
Edit: Just realized you were asking me a question. Well nothing quite as advanced. The user would look through their camera on the phone screen and draw directly on the screen and also be able to see other people's overlays, kinda like snapchat but in 3D and realtime. If I find the implementation I saw on HN I
l link it.
When I last explored this idea, "stickers" are necessary since most surfaces in real life are generic "textures", so there's no way to know which section of a wall you're looking at if you're too close to it.
Interesting how it's in 3D, and pretty interesting considering how early it was done. (back before all the Oculus hype) Oh and sorry what I meant by stickers were colorful cartoon drawings popular in Facebook and LINE. Although what you're saying does make sense in regards to manipulating surfaces.
That's pretty sweet, especially the tracking. Building blocks might be slower but the results look much better and friendlier haha. Kinda like Minecraft for the real world :).
I like how it takes the idea even further into a sort of social bulletin board. (also like snapchat for the real world) Making it text-only is also an interesting choice which makes it seem aimed towards notes.
I've had the same idea on the backburner for a while. It's tough to work out where a person is however. It might work well with things like film posters, shop fronts or even TV. I'd love to be able to comment on those stupid hydro-nano-nonsense cosmetic commercials. It's got a killer revenue model too. Look at me just giving away gold, truth is I'm never going to have the time.
I studied architecture. I can't wait to get my hands on this, it feels very much like the killer app for that niche. What separates the students from the men and women who have developed their "vision" is the ability to go back and forth between how you imagine a space will feel to walk through and the lines on the paper. This shortcuts that completely.
With some snap to line and plane functions, mirroring, copy-paste etc this would be pretty usable for rapid prototypes. Imagine importing the blueprint for a cathedral, drawing a few lines in 3D space to define its verticality then blowing it up to its true scale so you're standing in the pews.
It still feels better to mix and apply real paint to a physical surface with an actual brush held in one's hand. More time spent lashed to an electronic apparatus feels less like relaxation these days.
You just made me imagine how it would be to play a Sim City type of game in VR. I could create a city and then walk in it or drive through it or fly over it. So many different possibilities. I can't wait.
Remember Roller Coaster Tycoon (2 or 3?) where you could ride the coasters you designed in FPV? Can't wait to induce motion sickness without ever leaving my desk.
Oh man, SimCopter was an enormous amount of fun for just that reason. You could even edit cities using SCURK (SimCity Urban Renewal Kit) and build your own ideal place to zoom through. Nothing's ever really captured that fun - some come a bit close, but never with the in-person feel of it.
I've been struggling to "get excited" about VR, but I think this thread (including the roller coaster/sim city comment) puts it into a bit more perspective. I think the initial tech requirements are putting me off, I don't want that headset on my desk or even on my head. I'm getting old, feeling bad about that. Ironically I am excited about AR. The MS HaloLens demos were amazing
My mind is exploding with the possibilities this presents even for existing film and animation production pipelines.
Just one example: A layout artist being able to directly sketch into being the spaces and sets they envision, then being able to storyboard and block character animations by sketching with traditional animation techniques, but directly in the camera space.
Similar kinds of programs could be a revelation for modeling, rigging, and animating characters... it had never occurred to me till seeing this how awesome VR interfaces could be for that kind of artistic work.
Combine this with some kind of haptic feedback device and you will have something really cool. I just skimmed the description, so not sure if it support volumetric 3D objects, i.e. sculpting, or only painting?
The Vive's entire ecosystem is set up for moving around, using your hands, and really being 'VR' like we've all imagined. The oculus is your head as a camera in comparison.
The ability to walk around something makes it seem so much more real. With vive you can duck below and look under a table, lean around, view something from all angles. With oculus you're limited to seated experiences so it doesn't feel much different than sitting at a desk with a 3d monitor.
Also, moving your character with a controller or keyboard can be nauseating. This is why the best oculus games are going to be "cockpit simulators" or they're just going to have a"virtual screen". The vives ability to move yourself with your own legs keeps nausea in check.
When I see interesting exclusives X on Vive, Y on Oculus and Z on Playstation VR, I won't buy all three platforms. I'll just say 'screw you all, I'll pass'.
Valve has developed and supports the OpenVR platform[1], which is designed to allow different hardware on the backend. Rift/Facebook seems to be primarily pushing a closed platform with exclusives. Playstation VR is obviously Playstation-only. Make your purchasing decisions accordingly.
Oculus has exclusives because they partner with developers, offering money and support. Vive has exclusives because there's stuff you can do with the Vive's native VR controllers that you simply can't with the Rift's Xbox One controller.
When Oculus releases its Touch controllers (hopefully before the end of the year?) you might see Vive titles ported over to Rift. Movement in the other direction depends on what terms and conditions are in the contracts studios agreed to sign.
I got a chance to try tiltbrush recently. I drew a little cottage around myself, complete with a table and couch. While I was painting the ceiling, I subconsciously stepped around my couch to avoid tripping on it. That's when VR clicked for me :)
My first time with VR I had a similar experience playing a driving sim on a friend's DK2. When I had finished playing I stood up out of the chair, ducking to miss the door frame
I really hope Google puts aside their differences with Microsoft and tries to get a demo of this running on Hololens. I think it would be SO much cooler to be able to walk around someone's cool 3D art piece using AR rather than VR.
I've used Hololens, and not everything it projects it translucent. It does have a small FoV, but it will get bigger with time, right now it's because of battery tech and chip energy efficiency/power.
Can you walk around, walk away and come back? How much movement is allowed before experience breaks down? This is the major difference between VR devices like Occulus/Cardboard vs Hololens.
Do you happen to know the limitation they are getting around requiring cables? I can only imagine in the future it will be wireless. Not that I think I could wait that long to try VR, just curious :)
Bandwidth, power, weight, cost, combination of all?
All of those things. With current headsets you'd need to losslessly stream 1200p video at 90fps which is a lot of bandwidth and those numbers are only going to increase. It also has to be very low latency and not skip/stutter to avoid motion sickness. Hopefully we'll see it in consumer headsets in the next 5 years.
If the method of viewing these isn't completely proprietary, someone should be setting up a site to distribute free and paid experiences. First or early to market would pay off like it did for early dominant Minecraft forums and the like.
I can see this becoming a thing. As a commenter here notes, people could create graphic novels in 3D space.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadI think this is truly a new form of artistic expression - and I think it has the potential to become very popular in the future. I'm imagining having holograms on display of works done by famous modern artists... being able to walk around them and see them from different perspectives - I'd love that.
Reminds me of something I believe I saw in an art documentary. It was said that sculptures, like Michelangelo's David, were meant to be seen at night by candlelight. Being able to do so allows for a change of perspective while walking around it, in addition to the flickering of the flame making it 'come alive'.
It's strange they chose to host it outside YouTube in this instance.
https://www.tiltbrush.com/
Thank you!
1. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4424
(If you're impatient to skip into 2:30)
By far the best VR experience I had to date (I have a DK2). The creative joy and glee you feel when painting in TiltBrush is phenomenal.
Some extremely satisfying micro experiences:
* Painting stars / sparkles above your head that sink down onto you
* Trying to draw a cube in 2D, then leaning forward and realizing that you are in a 3D world and need to draw completely differently - actually walking the cube.
I wish my friend had taken a video of me as I was frolicking whilst throwing sparkles as high above my head as I could.
Or perhaps as I free-form drew a (wobbly) cube in 3D (should have used the straight line tool!), then stuffed it with flames. Then I taped up the sides of my first cube skeleton to hide the flames. Obviously this makes no sense at all but the experience was incredibly creative.I don't think anything parallels this right now.
TiltBrush seems more of a pure creative endeavor meant for artists or anyone just looking to mess around a virtual world. I really much like how you can walk around the creation/space. The fact that it's three dimensional actually makes it more like sculpture than painting, though I"m sure there isn't anything other than parallax errors preventing 2D drawing. The granularity of the brushes seems to be good, so it will all come down to how well the hand controllers will work together with the headset. (hopefully not requiring surgery-like stillness just to get small details right, maybe by allowing adjustable head movement sensitivity)
[1] https://youtu.be/aThCr0PsyuA?t=1m7s
Edit: Just realized you were asking me a question. Well nothing quite as advanced. The user would look through their camera on the phone screen and draw directly on the screen and also be able to see other people's overlays, kinda like snapchat but in 3D and realtime. If I find the implementation I saw on HN I l link it.
When I last explored this idea, "stickers" are necessary since most surfaces in real life are generic "textures", so there's no way to know which section of a wall you're looking at if you're too close to it.
With some snap to line and plane functions, mirroring, copy-paste etc this would be pretty usable for rapid prototypes. Imagine importing the blueprint for a cathedral, drawing a few lines in 3D space to define its verticality then blowing it up to its true scale so you're standing in the pews.
Maybe that day is finally coming.
Just one example: A layout artist being able to directly sketch into being the spaces and sets they envision, then being able to storyboard and block character animations by sketching with traditional animation techniques, but directly in the camera space.
Similar kinds of programs could be a revelation for modeling, rigging, and animating characters... it had never occurred to me till seeing this how awesome VR interfaces could be for that kind of artistic work.
Also, moving your character with a controller or keyboard can be nauseating. This is why the best oculus games are going to be "cockpit simulators" or they're just going to have a"virtual screen". The vives ability to move yourself with your own legs keeps nausea in check.
When I see interesting exclusives X on Vive, Y on Oculus and Z on Playstation VR, I won't buy all three platforms. I'll just say 'screw you all, I'll pass'.
[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr
When Oculus releases its Touch controllers (hopefully before the end of the year?) you might see Vive titles ported over to Rift. Movement in the other direction depends on what terms and conditions are in the contracts studios agreed to sign.
Bandwidth, power, weight, cost, combination of all?
I can see this becoming a thing. As a commenter here notes, people could create graphic novels in 3D space.