Oculus quietly released Quill Theater on Quest last month as a way to bring immersive art and animations made in VR to more of its VR userbase. The free app offers up a curated selection of content, including the incredible short film ‘The Remedy’, which shows the incredible potential of VR as a content authoring tool.
Quill is a VR drawing and animation tool which has been around since 2016. The tool allows artists to work in 3D but with the intuitive control of spatial input, creating a powerful combination of the ‘hand-drawn’ feel with the efficiency of computer graphics.
We’ve seen some really impressive artwork and animations created in Quill over the years (eagle-eyed users will spot a Quill cameo in Vader Immortal: Ep. I), but it’s never been very easy for artists to distribute their content, nor for users to find it.
Quill Theater, now available for free on Quest, hopes to fix that. While the app doesn’t allow the creation of Quill content, it has fully functional immersive playback, including pause & play controls, and the ability to toggle between any artist-defined angles.
Quill Theater is integrated into the Oculus TV app on Quest, which makes it a nice, lightweight way to browse for Quill content without loading a separate app first. For now the app only offers a small curated selection of content, but it looks like Oculus intends to broaden the scope of content in Quill Theater over time, hopefully forming it into a place where artists can find a sustaining audience and where incredible Quill artwork can finally shine.
Perhaps no project to date shows the potential of Quill as a complete end-to-end creative tool quite like ‘The Remedy’, a short film which was released recently on Quill Theater. Created by animator Daniel Martin Peixe, ‘The Remedy’ is a roughly 10 minute long story which establishes a very effective comic book-like experience by stringing together various Quill scenes to tell a complete narrative.
The short film is comprised of absolutely beautiful immersive artwork with direction that smartly leverages elements unique to VR (like playing with scale and offering a true first-person perspective). With carefully placed ambient sounds, music, and text bubbles, ‘The Remedy’ shows immersive artwork and animation coming into its own as a medium for rich storytelling.
With any luck, Quill Theater will eventually make it easy enough for artists like Peixe to attract an audience large enough to support sustained creation of such works. We really hope to see Quill Theater integrate closely with new Oculus tools which should make sharing such content with friends much easier.