Artistic XR App Styly Debuts on Viveport

Styly Viveport

HTC Vive’s virtual reality (VR) store Viveport has grown into a viable, agnostic platform for those VR users looking for Steam alternatives with new titles regularly appearing. The latest comes from Japanese studio Psychic VR Lab, bringing its creative VR platform Styly to the store.

Styly

Styly is a cloud-based, web platform that is used in conjunction with Unity to create immersive works of art and other XR experiences. With the app now available on Viveport, Styly also offers a unique feature, being able to publish works as individual apps on the store. It’s still an experimental idea at the moment which means the Styly team selects the various artworks to be published.

It’s not purely a platform for people to get creative either. A big part of it is Styly Gallery where users can explore over 10,000 VR and AR scenes built by artists around the world over the past few years. These can be viewed on VR headsets, mobile devices and via web browsers. As part of the announcement, Styly has released three new collections to showcase what can be achieved; NEWVIEW Featuring Works Collection, NEWVIEW 2020 Virtual Exhibition, and VR Music World.

NEWVIEW is Physic VR Labs’ annual awards event for Styly artists. NEWVIEW Featuring Works Collection offers collaborative works by 12 artists in one portal, covering fashion, music, video, graphics, illustration and more. NEWVIEW 2020 Virtual Exhibition gives you a chance to see all the finalist works from last years awards. While VR Music World feature five music-themed pieces. One is a music video featuring DECO*27’s song Android Girl and virtual singer “Kokotsuki.”

Styly

Additionally, later this month Psychic VR Lab will hold an online event called Dig Into NEWVIEW 2021 by Styly. This will be live, providing guests with a tour of Styly and its various works, hosted by digital curator and XR evangelist Miriam Arbus and TiltBrush artist Sean Rodrigo. Registration for the event is free, taking place on 17th September at 6 pm BST.

Currently, Psychic VR Lab is looking for new submissions for this years NEWVIEW Awards, with the closing date being 1st November. There are a number of award categories with the main Gold Award netting the winner $20,000 USD.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Styly, reporting back with further updates.

Styly’s Latest Update Adds AR Content Creation Tools

Styly AR App

Towards the end of 2019, Psychic VR Lab launched a new mobile app under its Styly brand which allowed you to view various artworks in augmented reality (AR). At the time the studio also noted plans to enable AR content creation at some point during 2020. That update has now arrived.

Styly AR

To build an AR experience you use Styly Studio, the same web-based software that Psychic VR Lab launched a couple of years ago for virtual reality (VR) content creation. The update allows you to select between AR and VR templates and then go about creating your scene without any programming knowledge to publish on mobiles and tablets.

Designed to be easy to use, Styly features a drag and drop editor to get you started whilst more advanced creators can import content from 3D modeling software such as MAYA or Blender as well as digital material from YouTube, SoundCloud, and Instagram.

Once the AR experience has been created there are a couple of ways it can be published and viewed. The easiest is directly through the Styly mobile app which is compatible with iOS and Android devices where users can search for scenes. The other method is via Styly markers (QR codes). Once your AR content is published, STYLY markers are automatically issued. These can then be scanned by the app to view the content. This is a great way for artists to showcase their work by printing the markers and placing them in locations like a gallery.

Styly Studio

All the software under the Styly banner is free to use, Psychic VR Lab even created the NEWVIEW Awards to help showcase and celebrate artists work.

The studio has also added several other improvements to the software including a non-WebGL screen so users can view and configure scenes quickly.  VRFocus will continue its coverage of Styly, reporting back with the latest app updates.