Hackers and Painters

I went to http://www.paintingvirtualreality.com last weekend.

Billed as the World’s First Virtual Reality Painting Exhibition, it featured:

• artwork one could view individually, using a Head Mounted Display (HMD) with single-camera tracking;
• artists at work wearing HMD with dual lighthouse tracking (and the results displayed live on a big monoscopic screen).

The work was done with http://www.tiltbrush.com, which appears to be a couple of guys who got bought by Google. The project – I’m not sure that its actually available for sale – appears to be evolving along several dimensions:

1. 3d Model Definition: covering stroke capture (including, symmetric stroke duplication), “dry” and “wet” (oil paint-mixing/brushwork effects), texture patterns, volumetric patterns, emmision, particles.
2. Interactive Model Creation: tool pallette in one hand, and brush in the other.
   1.   Videos at tiltbrush.com suggest an additional moveable flat virtual canvas (a “tilt canvas”?) that one can hold and move and paint against. The art on display was clearly made this way, as they all felt like they were a sort of a rotational 2.5D — the brush strokes were thin layers of (sometimes curved) surfaces.
   2. The artists last night appeared to be working directly in 3D, without the tilt canvas.
   3. The site mentions an android app for creation. I don’t know if it is one of these techniques or a third.
3. Viewing: HMD, static snapshots, animated .gifs that oscillate between several rotated viewpoints (like the range of an old-fashioned lenticular display).

  I haven’t seen any “drive around within a 3D scene on your desktop” displays (like standard-desktop/non-HMD versions of High Fidelity).

  The displays were all designed so that you observed from a pretty limited spot. Really more “sitting”/”video game” HMD rather than “standing”/”cave” exploration.

My reactions to the art:

• Emmission and particle effects are fun in the hands of an artist.
• “Fire… Light… It’s so Promethean!”
• With the limited movement during display, mostly the art was “around you” like a sky box, rather than something you wandered around in. In this context, the effect of layering (e.g., a star field) – as if a Russian doll-set of sky boxes (though presumably not implemented that way) – was very appealling.

Tip for using caves: Put down a sculpted rug and go barefoot!