Google is becoming the Adobe of VR

I’ll never forget the first time I made a snowman in VR. I was standing in front of three stacked spheres that were just begging for some coal eyes, a carrot nose, and a corn cob pipe. But after I scribbled chunks of carbon and vegetables onto his face, I realized something: All these lines I drew were actually floating a few inches out from his snowy skin, defying gravity in visual nonsense, like a face that just escaped a head.

As amazing as drawing in VR for the first time felt with Google Tiltbrush, it was also severely limited. Scribbling was easy! Creating real 3D objects that I might want to use anywhere else? Borderline impossible. Tiltbrush lacked all the tiny snappy, sticky, shapey algorithms that are so easy to take for granted in the Adobe age. It was a lot more like Microsoft Paint than Adobe Illustrator.

But now, Google is releasing a genuinely exciting Tiltbrush sequel to address just these issues. Called Blocks, it’s out today, free for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive VR headsets. And it allows you to easily create 3D objects inside VR that you can export for any use you’d like.

With a palette in one hand, and a shaping tool in the other, Blocks allows you to snap together 3D models from basic shapes in moments, and then grab corners and surfaces to stretch and extrude your creation to your liking. Once you’re done, you can save these shapes as .obj files, and share them under Creative Commons licensing for anyone else to use, too.

For those keeping count, Blocks means that Google now has two VR creation tools. Adobe technically has none, though it supports motion graphics video. Adobe has been the undisputed leader in 2D graphics for over 20 years, with a Swiss army knife of apps for creative use. Photoshop manipulates real images. Illustrator generates pixel perfect graphics from scratch. Premiere cuts video, and After Effects adds any number of visual trickery. But Adobe has ceded some turf along the way, too. It doesn’t have a rich 3D creation program, nor does it provide any tools for drawing in VR or AR.

The post Google is becoming the Adobe of VR appeared first on Baltimore Tech.

from http://baltimoretech.org/news/google-is-becoming-the-adobe-of-vr/