Oculus Medium lets you sculpt virtual models in VR, but until now you’ve had to do it all alone. A new update to the program brings multiplayer functionality, allowing you and a friend to create and collaborate together.
Version 1.2 of Medium, now available, adds the Studio Share feature which lets you connect with a friend so that you can talk and see each other’s creations as you work on them. As far as we can tell, the multiplayer functionality is limited to two users at a time, and you can’t sculpt the same model together, but you can at least sculpt your own models separately. Still, each user is able to see the other user’s model and see the sculpting happening in real-time, as well as communicate as you build.
The update makes Medium the first of the major VR art tools (Quill, Tilt Brush, and Blocks being the others) to offer multiplayer functionality; Tilt Brush had teased the feature many months ago but we’ve yet to see it launch as an update to the program.
Medium version 1.2 also comes with set of new tools to make artist’s lives easier:
Move Tool—Grab and adjust parts of your sculpt without sacrificing fine detail
Reference Meshes—Import 3D meshes for reference or use our preloaded samples
Color Picker Eyedropper and Palettes—Use the eyedropper to select the exact color you want from a reference image, and explore our new color palettes
Manipulators—Rotate and scale objects and layers precisely along axes
Sculpt Origin—Set your sculpt’s position, orientation, and size for consistent exporting
Oculus Medium is a creative platform that enables users to create amazingly detailed digital sculptures using the power of VR with their Oculus Rift and Touch controllers. It launched with the Touch controllers back in December of 2016 but the platform has since evolved and is now getting a big, new feature that lets you bring along a buddy for some creative expression: Studio Share.
The Oculus team took to their official blog to share the news that Studio Share is on the way and currently in beta. With Studio Share, you and a friend can share the same creative space in Oculus Medium. It offers an opportunity for creative collaboration, but that’s not all.
Studio Share can be used as a means to receive real-time feedback on your creation or exchange feedback as you and a friend work on two separate projects. That added friend gives an extra pair of eyes in a creative platform where you have to execute from every angle. Better yet, it can be used as a tool for efficient education as the teacher instructs the student on better practices during the creation process rather than after the fact.
The blog details a handful of other features introduced in the latest update such as a move tool that lets you maneuver the sculpture without messing up any features on it, a featured artist section that’s being added to the Oculus Medium homepage, and more tools to make the creation and export process easier.
For many emerging new technologies, the introduction of a permanent exhibit for that technology at the Tech Museum in Silicon Valley is a sign that the technology in question has ‘made it’. Though by most metrics virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are still in their infancy, they too have received the honour of a permanent exhibit at the Tech Museum showing off many of the cutting-edge technologies available right now.
The new exhibit was built using help from industry partners who provided much of the hardware on display. The exhibit opened on 26th March, 2017 and features a host of software and hardware from the AR and VR industries, which the museum has grouped under the label of XR.
Most of the VR experiences at the exhibit are limited to visitors ages 13 and over. Among the experiences available are Birdly, an immersive experience that includes laying on a wing-like board while wind from a strong fan blows in your face to more accurately simulate what is is like to be a bird.
Also available is Google’s TiltBrush, a popular room-scale VR experience that allows users to paint using VR motion controllers. In a similar vein isMedium on the Oculus Rift, which allows users to create ornate sculptures in VR without the need to buy expensive materials, or worry too much about making a mistake. 360-degree videos are also included, with a 360-degree walkthrough of the new Nvidia corporate headquarters. AR is covered in a display that shows how various area of the internet are connected and users can see how ‘close’ each area is, such as Facebook relative to Twitter.
The exhibit has been titled Reboot Reality and can be found at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, which is open daily from 10am until 5pm.
VRFocus will continue to report on developments in VR and AR technology.
On April 12th, Oculus Medium received the 1.1 ‘Large’ update, which added several highly-requested features, including the ability to import reference images. Medium is Oculus’ flagship creative tool for the Touch motion controllers, recognised for its intuitive sculpting and modelling features.
Debuted at Oculus Connect 2 in September 2015, and bundled free with Oculus Touch controllers at the hardware launch in December 2016, Medium achieved its goal of delivering an accessible 3D modelling tool for the masses by emulating real-world clay sculpting, being more intuitive and approachable than professional software like ZBrush. But Medium also appealed to the pros, keen to integrate the tool with their workflow, resulting in a long list of feature requests.
The Oculus Medium “Large Update” is here! Dive in for reference images, Home screen redesign, 2D video, mesh reduction, Oculus avatar integration, and new tutorials!
Since the December release, the Medium team has addressed bugs and improved features in several smaller updates, such as the sharing functionality and the layer UI, but 1.1 represents the most substantial changes. The software now includes a collection of common reference images, with shapes, anatomy, guides and stickers, and you can import your own images easily. You can surround yourself with images or set them to ‘move with sculpt’, ideal for tracing and filling out basic proportions of a model. This feature alone is seen as a game-changer, making the tool much more practical for many creators.
In addition, the homescreen has been re-designed, with asset support on the Medium Newsfeed, allowing users to view and download sculpts within the headset. Improved menus allow for easier file browsing, feature discoverability, and usability, and new tutorials running within VR demonstrate sculpting techniques and tool use, with more planned in the future.
2D videos can now be recorded without having to leave VR, which show your movements represented by your Oculus Avatar, which has now been integrated. There are also new stamp collections, including bones, household objects, fruits and traditional clay tools. Other improvements include mesh reduction (the ability to export a reduced-poly-count mesh with the colours in a texture map), layer naming, and revised smoothing tools that provide more granular control beyond the analogue trigger.
On April 6th, renowned artist Steve Lord previewed the 1.1 update during a Facebook livestream, which remains one of the best demonstrations of the changes. During the stream, the team responded to questions and requests from the live chat, indicating that many more improvements are planned.
In July, I was invited to give a talk about virtual reality at the bi-annual Illustration Conference with indie VR developer Ashley Pinnick, who studied as an artist and illustrator. On today’s Voices of VR podcast, we talk about the process of moving from 2D illustration to 3D VR art, some potential strategies for artists to get more involved in the process of virtual reality development, and the role of artists in creating digital avatars on the safe side of the Uncanny Valley.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
One of the big contributions that artists can make is to create stylized VR avatars that feel comfortably outside of the Uncanny Valley. Studies have shown that people prefer some level of stylization in their avatars, and so illustrators are particularly well-suited to help people construct their digital identities in VR and AR.
I expect to see a lot more breakout art VR experiences created by trained artists in 2017, and that Sketchfab will likely play a large role in helping to discover 3D artist talent just as YouTube has helped independent video creators be discovered.
Creating art in VR is turning out to be one of the big cultural contributions of virtual reality, and I told the artists at the Illustration Conference that I’m really interested to see what type of worlds and characters they build and stories they tell.
Here’s a video of some of the major points that I made at the 2016 Illustration Conference:
Everyone feels, but it takes practice to translate those emotions into coherent words, and even more practice to do it on the spot. Conversely, while most people can think in 3D, not everyone can convert those thoughts onto a 2D page. But with the rise of virtual reality art, we won’t have to translate as much anymore. Five months ago I decided to make my art completely in VR, and now I can stand inside of these vast environments I’m building faster than I imagined. My audience no longer needs to guess how my sci-fi worlds would feel if they were real. I can just transport them there.
I often hear the phrase, “Sorry, I’m not an artist,” at group meetings which involve a whiteboard and stick figures, and that doesn’t surprise me. Art of any kind is hard to produce without practice, you either have to know how to manipulate matter while physics works against you, or you have to understand the technical details about perspective and shading. Digital applications like Maya, Zbrush, and Photoshop have made the job easier, but their interfaces are too complicated for a regular consumer to pick up quickly. We will always have master-level creatives, but new virtual reality apps are making it more intuitive for anyone to make art with a level of professionalism that just wasn’t possible without hours of training.
This guide is to help you understand which apps work best for certain projects, and how they could work together in order to create experiences that we haven’t imagined yet.
If you’re interested in joining the VR art community, I want to help. Google, Oculus, and Adobe are without a doubt anticipating 2017 to be a big year for VR art, and probably have a few surprises in store for us. But what’s available now, and what can those applications achieve? Better yet, how can these apps work together? I’ve been importing Gravity Sketch sculpts into Tilt Brush to add atmospherics and effects, while other artists like Steve Teeple have been building workflows between between Oculus Medium and Tilt Brush. There’s a lot of room for innovation right now, what could you come up with?
These are the top design apps. Let’s look at what they excel at, what they’re lacking, and what they could learn from each other.
Tilt Brush
Tilt Brush, created by Skillman & Hackett then acquired by Google, is a virtual reality drawing application where you use your whole body to paint in three dimensions. It’s designed to be accessible by everyone, and yet it’s feature set has enabled me to create self contained worlds for companies like Marvel. It is available on both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift through Steam. This is a breakdown of it.
THE PROS
A Sense of Environment and Presence
When you first launch into Tilt Brush, you’ll find yourself standing on a floor in a dark environment. You always have the option to switch to a blank canvas, but the floor helps ground your understanding of scale and world location. While you can scale your scene like other applications, the world’s vertical rotation is locked, so you’ll always have an intuitive understanding of what is up and down. This locked rotation feature is the main thing I find myself needing with the other design apps. That said, I wish Tilt Brush included an option to unlock rotation so drawing on the underside of things would be easier.
The shadows created by the shaded brushes help to initially sketch out a scene without being confused about the way a stroke is facing, or how far away it is from you. I prefer to use flat brushes to create my own shading, although it’s critical for beginners to have access to shaded brushes so they don’t need to worry about creating their own shadows. This extra worry is one of the biggest problems people have when attempting to make 2D art. Here’s a pre-production comparison between Tilt Brush’s shaded brushes and Quill’s shadeless counterpart.
Teleportation
Tilt Brush is currently the only professional design application that grants you the ability to teleport, so if you’re designing a game level or movie set, you can easily preview your world from multiple perspectives without losing your prefered world scale or rotation. This also allows you to make your Tilt Brush creation a self-contained VR experience, like Stu Campbell, Steve Teeple, and I did for Marvel’s Dr. Strange.
Guides, Symmetry, and 2D Drawing
Guides are like 3D rulers which allow you to draw on a two-dimensional plane. You have the option of using a square, sphere, or capsule guide that can scale non-uniformly, and then place them anywhere in your scene. This makes it much easier to add details on walls, create textured floors, or to just create any kind of 2D art. Here’s an example of a wooden bridge I made for a mixed reality video by using the square guide.
When it comes to angular precision, you can also snap straight lines to a 90 or 45 degree angle relative to the world, which makes creating buildings and maps easier when coupled with guides. Tilt Brush also comes with a symmetry tool that you can grab and place anywhere around you, which makes creating characters and vehicles a lot easier. The experience of seeing a ghost brush copying your arms movement is pretty mind blowing as well.
Special Effect Brushes
Tilt Brush comes pre-loaded with 36 brushes that can really make your scene pop. For example, there’s a particles brush that emulates snow falling, a light brush that can symbolize what aspects of your scene will be glowing, and a fire brush that could represent explosions. While I personally only use about 10 brushes for most of my art, it’s extremely convenient to have the options available.
Overall, the brush selection just makes Tilt Brush fun. It’s a great way to get people into making art. You can start with the silly brushes, and then work your way up to using the program more seriously. Sometimes I just want to play and create a lot of effects to see what happens.
As the launch of Oculus Touch nears, the company is lifting embargos on a number of Touch titles, including the hotly anticipated Oculus Medium.
Oculus Medium is a digital sculpting tool which leverages Touch’s high quality motion tracking to allow free-form creation that focuses on manipulation of mass, rather than the production of brush strokes (like we find with titles like Tilt Brush and Quill). Medium is very much a tool rather than a game, but its ease of use means even the non-artistic can toy around with it, and maybe discover they’re a little more creative than once thought.
Medium will be available for free at the launch of Touch on December 6th, and to the best of our knowledge it will not work without the controllers.
Functionality
Art by Goro Fujita
Medium is all about adding, subtracting, and manipulating digital mass, much like a clay sculptor. Clay is known as a welcoming medium even for non-artists, hence the popularity of Play-Doh amongst youngsters. But Medium strives to be a tool for serious artists and has a range of advanced functions which, when used in conjunction, make the program surprisingly powerful.
Tools
While Photoshop has ‘brushes’, Medium’s basic element is ‘tools’, which allow you to add or manipulate digital mass in the scene with the pull of the Touch controller’s trigger and a swipe of your arm. Presently, there’s eight tools available:
Clay, the default tool, allows you to add and carve clay in your scene, using brushes of various sizes and shapes.
Paint allows you to spray paint or brush color onto your clay.
Swirl whirls your clay like a whisk, in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.
Cut slices your sculpt into pieces you can move around and merge back together.
Inflate lets you inject or extract clay from your sculpt, causing it to expand or contract around your hand.
Flatten helps you trim areas of your sculpt to get fat planes and sharp creases.
Smudge smears the clay in the direction you move your hand, like smudging clay with your thumb.
Smooth polishes your object, softening sharp points and filling in creases
With the ‘Clay’ tool, you can hold down your trigger to draw out an area of mass continuously. Unlike Tilt Brush, these strokes are real volumetric geometry that you can cut, deform, and continue to mold.
The pedestal of this impressive piece was likely created in part with the Swirl tool. | Art by Goro Fujita
Once you have mass in the scene, you can use the other tools to shape it in various ways. You’ll find the tool menu on your main-hand, and find that each works very differently from the basic Clay tool. Swirl will twist the clay like an electric mixer. Smooth will soften and flatten rough places on the clay. Paint will let you spray paint the clay different colors. And still there’s more, each of which has a series of options that can be toggled on your off-hand; such as subtracting mass instead of adding it, locking the placement of new clay to a single plane, or increasing the size of the clay being added. (By the way, there’s a simple menu to switch handedness in Medium).
Stamps
Tools are great for organic shapes, but you’ll want to take advantage of Stamps to quickly achieve a sharper ‘manufactured’ look. | Art by Goro Fujita
While the basic Clay tool draws out a sphere of mass, Stamps allows you to easily paste predefined shapes like numbers, letters, and structural pieces (columns, curves, buttons, plates, etc.). There’s a huge selection of stamps to choose from, and each stamp is virtual clay that’s moldable just like everything else. Stamps can really speed up the creative process by giving you tons of pre-made shapes to incorporate into your work instead of needing to draw and shape each one yourself. You can create and save your own stamps too (which could be a combination of pre-made stamps). For instance I could make a neat signature out of my name and then save it as a stamp to easily paste the design into any of my scenes to sign my work.
You can also use stamps as shapes for continuous strokes. This works much like being able to make your own brush tips in Photoshop, which opens up a range of powerful functions. For instance, I could choose an ‘O’ shape stamp and hold my trigger down to draw out a continuous line, which would give me a hollow tube-like structure instead of just a letter shape.
Stamps are great for repeating patterns. Instead of making 100 individual suction cups on this octopus, just design one and then stamp out the rest in varying sizes. | Art by Goro Fujita
Stamps can be as complex as entire scenes if you want and they’re also a great tool for quickly populating a scene with repeating details (like windows on a building).
If you have a very complex stamp consisting of lots of intricate geometry and try to draw it continuously through the air as a stroke, Medium will gracefully slow down the rendering of the mass (if needed) while maintaining tracking on your head and hands, and will continuously work until it catches up to where you left the end of the stroke. Within reason this slowdown didn’t seem to be a regular issue when sculpting, except when trying to use a complex stamp as a stroke instead of a single placement.
Now, that’s all well and good and makes for a fun bit of playing around with the ability to create and manipulate digital clay in real-time, but if you aren’t an artist you may find yourself wanting some instruction. Luckily, the application has a number of built-in immersive tutorials which walk you through the basics and more advanced parts of Medium. During each tutorial you’ll find an avatar standing next to you in the actual workspace; you’ll be able to see a representation of their head (wearing a Rift) and hands (holding controllers), and hear their voice as they guide you through the ins and outs of Medium with step by step guidance. This is a great way to learn the program, and also a great way to demonstrate and share work, as you have access to capture the same sort of action+voice recording to be played back and shared with others. That means you can record yourself showing off a new technique, or narrate your sculpt as you create it, allowing someone to hear your thoughts as they play back the sculpt after the fact. I’m sure people will find creative uses for this too, perhaps to tell a story based on their work as it unfolds.
Art by Goro Fujita
All of these capabilities start to add up to a fairly powerful toolset, but it’s the ability to use layers in Medium which really opens the door to advanced creations. Layers let you divvy up your work into discrete groups that can be adjusted independently from one another, but still show up in the same scene (layers are one of the most powerful functions of photo manipulation and vector design software). So I could draw the eyes of a smiley face on one layer, and then the mouth on another layer. I would see an entire smiley face together, but then I can go back and manipulate the layers separately; I can temporarily disable a layer from being visible, or I can change the position and scale at any time. For instance, I might want to flip my smiley’s mouth upside down and make it larger so that it turns into a big sad-face instead. You can also toggle the type of material on a per-layer basis, letting you switch between the default matte, a shiny metallic, and a glowing light.
When you’re all done crafting a sculpt, there’s an option to export your creation in a format which Oculus says can be used for 3D printing, or import into other 3D modeling tools or game engines. Oculus also says that the Medium website will be a hub for hosting and sharing content like sculpts, stamps, and screenshots and for sharing to places like Facebook, though we haven’t seen this functionality in action yet.
As someone who isn’t much of a visual artist, it’s hard for me to say for certain how great Medium is or isn’t for artists. However, as someone who is something of a designer (who regularly uses Photoshop and Illustrator), I can definitely appreciate the tools that Medium equips users with, and how those tools interact together to create surprisingly advanced capabilities. Even moreso, the tools present thus far are easy to use while still being powerful; maintaining ease of use will be key going forward as Medium (hopefully) continues to enhance its toolbox.
Medium is an incredibly easy way to make real 3D content in VR, even for people who have never used any 3D modeling tools. Being able to ‘sketch’ in 3D to convey ideas is going to be awesomely helpful in the right contexts; I could easily see concept artists and level designers flocking to the tool to rough out concepts and collaborate on design.
For the artist’s perspective we can look to what serious artists have been able to achieve with the tool, which is nothing short of impressive.
Immersion
Being able to draw out clay right in front of you is satisfying and simple. Each tool that you’ll use has its own unique sound which implies its function. The Clay tool sounds like you’re spraying foam, while the Swirl tool sounds like a whirling electric mixer, and the Cut tool sounds like a buzzing electric wire. Most tools also change sound when you’re drawing in open space compared to inside a volume of mass. The Clay tool for instance will have a muffled foam spraying sound when your tool is inside a mass vs. outside. It’s an effective touch which helps you understand what your tool is doing and where it’s being used audibly in addition to visually.
While at first you’ll probably make random doodles, you might find the urge to spend time making something more detailed. To do so you’ll find that the ability to manipulate your scene is key. Using Touch’s hand-trigger, you can easily reach out and rotate your scene as well as scale it to work on macro and micro details quickly and easily. It’s an easy way to get the right angle and add just the right detail before flipping the scene upright again to its intended viewing position.
While you’re working, a virtual speaker will pump out any audio that’s playing on your desktop. This is great if you like to jam out while you get your creative juices flowing. There’s a special mode you can enter in Medium to adjust the position of the virtual speaker, which is a neat touch because it feels like the sound is actually coming from wherever you put the speaker rather than just having the sound source seem like it’s attached to your head. This makes Medium feel more like a real workspace rather than an abstract canvas.
Medium’s menus feel highly utilitarian, mostly utilizing a look-and-point approach to clicking buttons and selecting tools, but it’s clear that its creators were focusing on usability over polish at this stage. Most menus appear close to you and are easily interactable with a laser cursor on your primary hand, and will disappear automatically when you look away from them, letting you quickly get back to your work without repeatedly closing menus. This takes a while to get used to, since few other VR applications take this approach, but it works well to keep you creating as efficiently as possible.
Medium could do for a visual overhaul across the board to make tools and menus look visually better, but it’s a good idea that its creators chose to get the base functionality right in the first place before spending too much time on polish. Still, we hope Medium will continue to evolve here into something that looks as good as it functions.
Needless to say, we’re already missing a multiplayer function in Medium. Social makes everything better in VR, especially when it comes to being able to collaboratively create and feed off of each other’s ideas in real time. We know for a fact that a multiplayer function in Medium is awesome before Oculus had demo’d it many months ago in an earlier build of the application. We hope that demo may have laid the groundwork for a future multiplayer update to Medium, but for now it seems Oculus wasn’t keen on making it part of the initial release, which is a shame.
Comfort
Medium carefully adheres to VR best practices, and I can’t think of one instance while using the program that I felt a sense of motion sickness. In Medium you’ll always have a grid-like floor at your feet which keeps you visually grounded. If you were to paint and entire scene around you that obscured the floor entirely, and then grabbed the scene and spun it around you, I suppose you could probably make yourself a little dizzy, but it would probably have to be on purpose.
The only critique here for Medium is the interface which feels like it’s branched off a bit on its own evolutionary track compared to other (more game-centric) Touch applications. That makes sense because Medium is designed to be usable for long stretches of time, but it takes some getting used to before you understand the slightly different control paradigm.
One specific quibble (which applies to many VR apps), is that Medium uses a laser-pointer menu approach which asks you to pull the trigger as a selection action. Personally I feel that pressing a button, rather than pulling a trigger, is the better action to indicate a selection, because pulling a trigger requires more movement and often causes the rest of your hand to move slightly (which can easily throw off your laser pointer, especially at longer distances from the menu). Instead, a button press achieves the same input input with much less movement of your finger (and residual movement of the controller), keeping the laser-pointer more accurate.
This isn’t a huge deal in Medium because the menus are kept pretty close to you and their buttons and toggles are fairly large and clickable, but I think a chance from trigger selection to button selection could still improve things (and maybe make the application slightly more intuitive).
Disclosure: Oculus provided Road to VR with Touch controllers for review.
Oculus Medium may be the first professional 3D modeling creation tool for the Oculus Touch controllers. It was created with the goal to democratize the process of creating 3D art and prototyping 3D-printed objects. The Medium developers didn’t set out to build a high-end industrial art tool, but early beta testers have been starting to integrate Medium within their professional 3D graphics pipelines.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
There have been a TON of improvements and UI developments to Medium over the last year, and it’s in the process of final improvements before being released with the Oculus Touch Controllers on December 6th. I had a chance to talk with Oculus Medium lead Brian Sharp about some of the design intentions behind Medium as well as some of the surprising ways that it’s already being used by professional artist like Goro Fujita. We talk about the evolution of the 3DUI, and how they wanted to stick to physical metaphors that anyone could understand rather than abstract concepts that only graphics professionals can grok. Medium is a great example of a VR program that demonstrates the power of immersive computing and how it can be much more intuitive and easy learn than previous 2D methods.
In July, I was invited to give a talk about virtual reality at the bi-annual 
