Gravity Sketch, a concepting & design tool made for VR, has raised $1.7 million in venture capital.

Gravity Sketch, which allows VR users to quickly and easily sketch out 3D industrial design concepts, today announced that the company has raised a $1.7 million seed investment, according to UKTN. The seed round was led by VC firm Forward Partners, with participation by Super Ventures and Wacom.

Wacom is a leading provider of digital design hardware, best known for its high-precision graphics tablets and similar touch & stylus input technology; it’s a big name in the design space, and a strong vote of confidence for Gravity Sketch.

The Gravity Sketch app launched in Early Access on Steam back in August of 2017. While not tremendously well rated by the Steam audience at present, I’ve spoken with one veteran industrial designer who said that the program is a revelation for sketching out 3D designs and rapidly iterating upon them.

Matthew Bradley from Forward Partners, who has joined the Gravity Sketch board as part of the deal, told UKTN that he believes the company’s solution fills a niche not served by CAD tools.

Designing anything that is physical which is at all massive—whether it’s a car, a shoe, a building—is a complicated and old fashioned process. CAD is great but fussy and extremely detailed. What the team at Gravity Sketch has achieved is complementary to existing top-class CAD software yet will achieve huge efficiencies and improvements in the design process. It’s the best use of VR in the enterprise that I’ve ever seen.

The company has also offers a Gravity Sketch design app for the iPad.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."

  • This looks neat, nice to see more devs creating design Apps using VR from the ground up and not trying to mod a regular Mouse/Keyboard app in a VR world. Along with the social ability of being able to invite others into your VR design space too and with

    Wacom being involved too is interesting, are they producing a new VR based high res input device?

    Leading software manufactures are also moving in this direction e.g. https://www.autodesk.com/solutions/virtual-reality

  • Jean-Sebastien Perron

    I would like to see a VR raytracer. One day it will happen when we get quantum computers.

    • Lucidfeuer

      It’ll happen way before, I’d say in 5/6 years down the line.

      Quantum computing isn’t what most people think, it is a way more complicated, specific and instable technology. When Moore’s law completely stalls we will switch to other solutions, probably GPCPU/CPGPUs.

      • Jean-Sebastien Perron

        I know that quantum computing is not exactly what people makes of it. But mathematically, I see it as a perfect fit for raytracing. The polygon lobby (videocard) is slowing the development of raytracing with has a much more optimized geometry (infinitely precise, fast and light in memory).

    • “Path tracing” is available:
      https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/

  • Lucidfeuer

    Great for sketching as the name implies, but still not there for precise drawing or design. Mainly as to do with the controllers, I’m surprised nobody figured out how to track a keyboard and a pen in vr, but if Wacom is in on it then it might be on the horizon.

    • Raphael

      I bought Masterpiece VR last year. Created a test object and imported it into Cinema4d for texturing and lighting. Gravity sketch has an insanely priced pro monthly subscription.

      • Lucidfeuer

        I found most of these tools (Quill, Tilt Brush, Masterpiece…) to be to unprecise to be as usable as Zbrush, Blender, Onshape or any CAD.

  • Routb3d

    Interesting to see that Wacom invested in a VR application. A Wacom tablet could be a Cintiq in VR.

    • Nathanael Mooth

      Yeah, I’ve done this a couple times and am excited to see if this gets official support in the future.

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  • Maybe it has not great reviews because it is a professional product and not a consumer one…

    • Jack Liddon

      I think the negativity towards the app has everything to do with the monthly subscription fees. It looks like an amazing design too, but I’m already spending $49 a month for Creative Cloud, Renting software kinda sucks.

      • Everybody I know hates renting software. Quality of software releases are lower because developers do not have to get it right first time like a perpetual license. CC 2018 has its fair share of bugs, ones that certainly would not be acceptable if the software was not subscription based.