Virtual Reality: a new paradigm for creation
Consumer VR has been here for less than a year. We got dev kits early on at the office, and started downloading a lot of apps to play with. To be honest I didn’t try any VR game: I only tried creation tools, pretty much all of them. First was Tilt Brush, really loved it. Then GravitySketch, Medium, Quill, SculptrVR, and a few others…
I didn’t have much bandwidth over the past 6 months to really spend the time I wanted to discover them. But with the Christmas break, I decided to bring the office Oculus back home. I don’t have a spare room, so I turned a closet into a VR closet :) And everyday I spent a few hours sculpting or painting in VR. Within 7 days, I went from this shitty dino to this bull:
This medium is amazingly powerful. The learning curve for me was incredibly fast. It would have taken me months to be able to get to similar results with a traditional 3D software. But VR is a new paradigm of creation, where you don’t have to think too much on how you draw things, you just draw them. There is no mouse, the mouse is your hand.
We live in a 3D world, and until now we’ve mostly expressed ourselves with 2D mediums (drawing, photography, video…) except for sculpture or 3D software, which both require advanced skills and training. With the new VR creation tool, anybody can express themselves in a 3D space, which is the natural way to convey a concept or an emotion.
For artists and designers, it will allow much more creativity freedom as well as a faster execution — but this goes much beyond art and design. What blows my mind is to see 5 year-old kids posting 3D drawings on Sketchfab. When you think about it, drawing a house in 3D is even more intuitive than on a 2D sheet of paper, first because the house is in 3D in the real world, and second because in 2D you have to think about perspective, proportions etc, whereas when drawing in VR in 3D space you don’t have to think about those.
Creating in VR is highly addictive. Once I start a piece, I just want to stay in VR until it’s done. Next step is to print my best pieces!
If you create in VR, I’d love to see some of your work on Sketchfab. If you don’t create in VR yet, I wish you’ll get a chance to give it a try soon. And if you want to see more, here is a collection of my best VR work.
Alban
