Google has announced that Tilt Brush has now been Open Sourced. As reported by 9to5 this comes after the company decided to cease “active development” of the VR Painting App it acquired in 2015.
A move like this is hardly surprising given Tilt Brush ahs been out of the news for some years in terms of development. In its day though the app was making waves as the premier application for showcasing VR capabilities.
In 2017, games were developed in record time thanks to the use of Tilt Brush and its capabilities. Google made the application available with the Oculus Rift when the VR and the app were at the height of their popularity a few years ago.
Now Google has announced that the company has ceased its development of the app. As such has released Tilt Brush to Open Source to allow “everyone to learn how we built the project”.
Google Open Source Tilt Brush
Google announced the move in a statement where it looked back on the impact Tilt Brush had. The statement pointed out that the app helped “users create their artwork on every major VR platform”.
Google has taken the decision to open source the application in order to open it up to users. The company hopes this move will encourage users “to take it in directions that are near and dear to them”.
Tilt Brush is now available on GitHub where you can use, distribute, and modify the app under Apache 2.0 License. Despite this Google will not take any pull requests. The company has also said that some changes and removals were made “due to licensing restrictions”.
Google appears to have no plans to pull the version of Tilt Brush available in digital stores. Given these were paid purchases and the app remains available on steam for $19.99 this probably will not change.
The open sourcing of Tilt Brush is not wholly surprising given a number of applications have gone this way in recent years. For example, Poly, the 3D model sharing site and the Expeditions App shut down in 2019.
This can, therefore, be seen as another step Google’s expedition into Virtual Reality coming to an end. This mid-2010s experiment from Google appeared to work for a time but now appears to have fizzled out.
The company appears to have more of a focus on augmented reality at the moment with ARCore and web-based approaches currently on offer in search.