Open Brush: Painting Immersion in Virtual Reality
Open Brush, a promising venture of the Icosa Foundation, is an open-source project aimed at significant immersion in the world of painting by leveraging the power of Virtual Reality (VR). The project, originated from Google's VR painting app Tilt Brush which was launched into open source early in 2021, is curated and maintained under Icosa Foundation's watchful guidance and intends to take digital painting to a whole new level. The significance of such an initiative lies in its ability to democratize the VR landscape and give artists, developers, and enthusiasts a creative outlet to explore and enhance.
Project Overview:
The primary envisagement of Open Brush is to equip users with a plethora of painting tools that can elevate their artistic capabilities in a virtual 3D environment. The objective here is to impart a seamless and immersive painting experience that transcends the traditional boundaries of creativity. Targeting a vast expanse of users, Open Brush invites painters, developers, VR enthusiasts, and hobbyists to come, create, and collaborate.
Project Features:
Open Brush embodies multiple features that enhance user interactivity and creativity. A key feature is the variety of dynamic brushes that allows users to make custom creations in three-dimensional VR space. Advanced settings enable artists to control the room scale, teleportation, and comfort modes. It also supports a builtin screenshot and recording feature which makes sharing of artwork effortless. The tool even renders support for a variety of file formats, including .tilt, .glb, and .usdz to name a few.
Technology Stack:
The Open Brush project has leveraged Unity's robust framework, taking advantage of its rendering capabilities and compatibility with VR platforms. C# is used as the main programming language, pairing perfectly with Unity's environment setup. Libraries like SteamVR and legacy Oculus Integration have also been used to support various VR hardware.
Project Structure and Architecture:
Open Brush's structure is predominantly modular, accommodating distinct features within different modules. The interaction of these modules is seamlessly orchestrated to give users a smooth and intuitive interface, making the leap between physical and virtual environments feel effortless and natural.
Contribution Guidelines:
To foster community contribution, Open Brush has laid out comprehensive guidelines for bug reporting, feature requests, and code contribution. The maintainers welcome any constructive feedback or ideas to enhance the project further. Encouraging an open and inclusive community, Open Brush values the efforts of every contributor in shaping and growing this open-source project.
