Tilt Brush adds Sketches for non-VR browsing

Tilt Brush [official site] was, hands down, one of the best things in VR last year, but given the VR platform means a smaller potential player-base it's got that challenge of "How do I share any of this cool stuff with people not wearing VR headsets?" That's where the new Sketches gallery comes in, letting you peer at people's creations using a regular browser.

Tilt Brush had various functions for sharing creations already - I remember making gifs of my tree project and then tweeting those, plus you could pluck creations other people had built from the library in-game and watch them play out. But in terms of a more integrated project I think you were limited to exporting things to third-party sites 3D content sharing sites like SketchFab. There are also tools which let you export creations for use as art in games and other projects.

Sketches rolled out yesterday with the note:

"Starting today, you can share Tilt Brush sketches directly to an online gallery. Sketches can be viewed at tiltbrush.com/sketches -- and sketches you 'like' on the web will show up in your sketchbook in Tilt Brush."

You need to be logged in with a Google account to actually utilise the sketch-to-sketchbook flow, by the way, and it's interesting how they have linked liking to using because liking stops being a function of approval and becomes intertwined with usefulness to your own practice. I'm not saying that as a criticism, just an observation that it forces the remixer to acknowledge the original work in a way that isn't enforceable in other types of licensing. It also glosses over the complex reasons you might want to remix something by trading that dialogue for a "like" function. Same issue as with any of the super-popular forms of social media, really. I'm not sure what happens with the work marked as not remixable and you like it, though. Presumably you can only look at it in the app rather than reworking it or incorporating it into your own ideas.

The full release notes are here and detail changes to environmental effects and lighting as well as others.

If you're interested in some of the work people are doing with the toolset or the effects you can achieve I've made some gifs:

Garden by Andrea Zvinakis

The gif doesn't really do it justice (but the embed code won't work and it'll probably make mincemeat out of your browser if you're on a phone anyway) but it shows how some of the colour effects make a painting pulsate in a really interesting way. It has a kind of heartbeat.

Kingfisher and Pond by Peter Shearer

Let's just ignore the fact that this doesn't quite loop (even though you can't because it's so irritatingly close to looping and ARGH) and concentrate on the fact that it's a lovely, lovely kingfisher.

Opera Diva by Olga Nabatova

Olga has a lot of cool stuff on Tilt Brush but this one is so lovely and expressive. It's Adam's favourite, although I'd also suggest checking out her Blue Jay and the Snowdrops. The use of the swirl effects on these Dragonflies is really interesting too.