Google Open Sources More Virtual Reality Tools
The panoramic digital photography and virtual reality arenas have been going through a renaissance for some time now, and on this front, Google recently announced VR View, an open source tool that lets developers embed 360-degree photo and video content into sites and native apps. The images can be viewed on Cardboard viewers or through a single-lens viewer.
Adding on to this offering, Google has now released a free set of tools to help developers transform Tilt Brush sketches into immersive animations.
As ZDNet noted:
"Google has been showing off a number of 3D art and animations created with its Tilt Brush app, such as this undersea clip, and another peeking into a gnome's living room, which Daydream users can immerse themselves in on YouTube.
The company released Tilt Brush 3D sketch program last April and is testing the tech with dozens of established artists via its Tilt artists in residence program."
"Tilt Brush is a tool for creators of all backgrounds and styles to make art in virtual reality. Sketches made in Tilt Brush stand on their own — you can film your sketches, take 2D snapshots, export them as 3D objects. However there hasn't been an easy way to add animation, interactivity, or sequencing to your art. That is, until now.
Today, we're introducing the Tilt Brush Toolkit, an open source library for bringing your Tilt Brush art to other creative projects. With the toolkit, the next generation of artists can create narrative, interactive, and immersive content using Tilt Brush sketches."
Google also has an SDK for the popular Unity VR game engine. The documentation for it offers examples for how it can be used to build out sketches by adding interactive storylines, and more.
Google has been open sourcing a number of other useful tools recently. For example, it recently open sourced TensorFlow, a possibly hugely influential contribution to the field of machine learning. You can read more about it in this post.