Stand aside Tilt Brush, there’s a new VR drawing tool in town. And it has spray paint!
I’m standing beneath the underpass, spray paint in hand. I look left, look right. The coast is clear. So I grab my stencil and start to spray.
Of course, there’s no risk of the cops catching me. I’m more worried that the errant swing of an arm will knock down my laptop, or put a hole in one of my wife’s paintings. Because I’m not actually tagging concrete in public. I’m using the HTC Vive rig squeezed into my dining room.
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In my left hand, I can hold pre-made stencils that I can switch through with a flick of my thumb. In the right, I hold the can. If I want to change the color, I simply point at a menu that floats in midair by my side. This two-handed coordination feels just right, so much more physically inspired than the one-armed mouse, or one-handed touch-screen tapping, that most of us use every day as our primary UI.
Crucially, all of the physics feel good. My mind believes the stencil and paint can are both entirely real. I can even tilt the stencil as I spray to subtly tweak the angle of attack, tweaking the final product in subtle ways. It’s like I’m really spray painting–I assume! (Much like airbrushing, I’ve never actually spray-painted, but I have watched Exit Through The Gift Shop.)
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However, GhostPaint lacks the intuitive interface of Tilt Brush. While TiltBrush has you hold a cube-palette in one hand, and your brush in the other, GhostPaint requires that you constantly assign different controls to each hand by tapping on a menu set by your side. A stencil and spray paint. A camera and airbrush. Have you ever tried to tap a button with your hands full of screens and paint? That’s what GhostPaint asks of you constantly.
It’s all complicated further when you want to move. If I want to reposition myself across the very large areas, I can teleport anywhere in the environment by aiming a reticle and warping there. The catch? As I learn early on, you’d better grab that menu first. Otherwise, you just teleported without your controls. (And if there’s a shortcut to get them back, I didn’t find it. UPDATE: The creator wrote me; there is!)
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Source: Fast Company