While HTC Vive owners have Tilt Brush, and Oculus users have Quill, Daydream users have had no equivalent tool at their fingertips – until now. Created by California-based artist Sterling Crispin with Unity, Cyber Paint is a freshly-released painting app for Google’s VR platform. “Anything that happens in the physical act of applying paint to a surface can be simulated realistically,” says Crispin over email. “But it's more interesting to go beyond the edges of what's possible with traditional paint. The app really isn't a painting simulator ... it's a laboratory for algorithmic mark-making.”
It definitely is a space for mark-making, Cyber Paint boasts several ‘scenes’ in which a user can paint. A traditional studio, a desert, outer space – regardless of which setting a user chooses they are dealing with the same rudimentary UI, which fans out across your field of view easy access given their proximity to the central canvas. A painter’s sensibility has definitely been brought to the brush properties interface, which allows the user tune the impact of modifiers linked to each of the Daydream controllers’ possible manipulations with sliders. This coupled with simple tool and material selector, and modifier, allows the user to almost immediately jump into painting when they boot up the app for the first time.
