Already own a copy of Google’s VR creation tool Tilt Brush (2016) from the Oculus Store? Then you’ll be able to hop right into the company’s intuitive painting app with Oculus Quest, the upcoming standalone VR headset.
Update (April 18th, 2019): Oculus has confirmed in a blog post announcing ‘Thumper’ as a day-one Quest title.
Original Article (April 17th, 2019): The company announced the news today in a Facebook blog post, outlining some of the changes the team made to get Tilt Brush on Quest’s mobile hardware.
“Most of our work porting Tilt Brush to Quest focused on performance improvements. Luckily, some decisions we made early on set us up for early performance wins,” Google product manager Elisabeth Morant says.
The Quest version is said to levy many optimizations that essentially set it apart from the PC VR version, however Morant says Tilt Brush on Quest “should look and feel pretty much the same as the Rift version, with a few small tweaks.”
These tweaks include easier stroke rendering on the mobile GPU, switching stroke rendering from double-sided to single-sided, using the shader to draw the reverse side of the stroke, and fazing out the ‘bloom’ effect as a sketch becomes more complex.
Google also removed a few features that were unique to the PC VR version, one of which is Audio Reactive mode, something that uses a PC’s system audio to make some stroke types undulate to a user’s own music.
“Trade-offs were made during the course of development, but ultimately having a product that runs smoothly on mobile made it all well worth it,” Morant concludes.
Google hasn’t officially announced whether Tilt Brush will be a launch day title for Quest, although they’ve stated it’s definitely coming in Spring 2019 (see update). The same goes for Quest at the moment too however, as Oculus hasn’t given a firm launch date yet either.
Facebook’s next big opportunity to announce Quest is the company’s F8 developer conference, which takes place April 30th to May 1st in San Jose, California. We’ll have feet on the ground there, so check back soon.
