VR Tool Allows Artists to Create With Light
SAN FRANCISCO — In 1949, a Life magazine photographer named Gjon Mili made a pilgrimage to the French Riviera to see Pablo Picasso. Mili had come up with a way to photograph trails of light, and he wanted to shoot Picasso “drawing” in midair with a light pen — a process that would leave no trace except on film. Picasso loved it. The result, published in Life and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was Picasso’s celebrated series of “light drawings” of bulls and centaurs and the like — photographs that captured him in the act of creating the ultimate in ephemeral art.
Picasso is long gone. But some 68 years later, Google has been calling on dozens of artists, animators and illustrators with a high-tech update of Mili’s concept — a virtual reality setup that enables people to paint with light that actually stays where you put it, at least for viewers wearing a VR headset. In place of Gjon Mili are Drew Skillman and Patrick Hackett, a pair of video game developers turned virtual reality enthusiasts who live in San Francisco.
They were trying to build a 3-D chess application one night a couple of years ago when they discovered it had an unexpected side effect: As you moved the chess pieces around in virtual space, they left trails of light behind. The two dropped the chess project immediately and hurled themselves at the light trails, hoping to develop a tool for drawing in three dimensions.
In April 2015, seven months after they had cobbled together a rudimentary system they called Tilt Brush, Google bought their company for an undisclosed sum — which is how Mr. Skillman and Mr. Hackett have come to be in the company’s offices here. With Google’s support, Tilt Brush has attracted a team of developers and evolved into a sophisticated tool for drawing, painting, even sculpting in space. It was released in April as a free add- on to the new HTC Vive, an $800 virtual reality system produced by the Taiwanese manufacturer HTC in partnership with Valve, an American video game developer. (It’s on sale as a $30 software package from Valve’s online store.)
The HTC Vive includes not just a virtual reality headset but also a pair of hand- held controllers and two tracking sensors that map your movement in space.
One controller serves as a palette, with dozens of colors and effects; the other acts as a brush or pen. To watch someone use it is a bit unnerving, since the person appears to be making marks in midair, but you can’t actually see those. But put on a Vive headset and step between the sensors yourself and you suddenly see what has been produced: a phantom creation in three dimensions, something you can walk around, walk through, poke your head inside, do everything except touch.
Over the past year, Google has invited more than 60 artists to try Tilt Brush and offer feedback.
But the first to try it was Glen Keane, a near- legendary figure who in his 37 years at Disney had brought the warmth of hand- drawn animation to such characters as Ariel (in “The Little Mermaid”), Aladdin, Tarzan and Pocahontas.
“When I left Disney in 2012,” Mr. Keane said, “I told them it was because I know there’s something new coming — I don’t know what it is, but I need to leave to find it.”
He met Regina Dugan, then the leader of Google’s secretive Advanced Technology and Products group, which was experimenting with virtual reality. First he partnered with the group to make a hand- drawn virtual reality short called “Duet,” a charming piece released in 2014 about two babies growing up that was shortlisted for an Academy Award. “Duet” broke new ground, since animation in virtual reality had almost exclusively been computer- generated. But though he’d spent a lifetime drawing on paper, Mr. Keane had always dreamed of being able to make the paper disappear. “The goal would be to animate not on paper but in space,” he said.
Enter Tilt Brush. He previewed its capabilities with “Step Into the Page,” a five- minute video. “The edges of the paper are no longer there,” he exclaimed in a voice- over as he did a loose, freehand sketch of Ariel in virtual space. “This is not a flat drawing. This is sculptural drawing.”
What are people going to use it for? Scott McCloud, the graphic artist whose book “Understanding Comics” is considered the ultimate guide to the art form, threw out a few suggestions: performance art, virtual sculpture, industrial prototyping.
“I doodle with it,” said Jonathan Yeo, a British painter. “I describe it as a three- dimensional sketchbook.”