Open Sourcing Tilt Brush
Tilt Brush, Google's virtual reality painting application, has collaborated with amazing creators over the years, many of whom were part of our Artist in Residence Program. We have tremendous pride for all those collaborations, and the best part has been watching our community learn from each other and develop their abilities over the years.
As we continue to build helpful and immersive AR experiences, we want to continue supporting the artists using Tilt Brush by putting it in your hands. This means open sourcing Tilt Brush, allowing everyone to learn how we built the project, and encouraging them to take it in directions that are near and dear to them.
Tilt Brush launched on the SteamVR platform for the HTC Vive VR headset in April 2016. It went on to help users create their artwork on every major VR platform, including the Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality, Valve Index, PlayStation VR, and Oculus Quest VR headsets. Tilt Brush won dozens of awards, including the Unity Awards 2015: Best VR Experience, the Cannes Lions 2017 Gold Lion in Innovation, and the Oculus Quest award for Best of 2019: VR Creativity Tool of the Year, and was often featured on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. As we look back on Tilt Brush, we’re proud of what this creative application has achieved, and excited for where the community will take it.
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What’s Included
The open source archive of the Tilt Brush code can be found at: https://github.com/googlevr/tilt-brush
Please note that it is not an actively developed product, and no pull requests will be accepted. You can use, distribute, and modify the Tilt Brush code in accordance with the Apache 2.0 License under which it is released.
In order to be able to release the Tilt Brush code as open source, there were a few things we had to change or remove due to licensing restrictions. In almost all cases, we documented the process for adding those features back in our comprehensive build guide. ‘Out of the box’, the code in the archive will compile a working version of Tilt Brush, requiring you only to add the SteamVR Unity SDK.
The currently published version of Tilt Brush will always remain available in digital stores for users with supported VR headsets. If you're interested in creating your own Tilt Brush experience, please review the build guide and visit our github repo to access the source code.
Cheers, and happy painting from the Tilt Brush team!
By Tim Aidley, Software Engineer, and Jon Corralejo, Program Manager – Tilt Brush
