Google’s VR painting app is getting the axe, but it will live on as an open-source project

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Google is ending development on the viscerous reality painting app Vantage Duster -- one of the most well-known VR applications -- and making it ajar source. Vantage Duster was acquired by Google in 2015 afterward lavation for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and it was anon folded into the company's larger VR plans, like its Google Paper and Phantasm headsets.

Tilt Brush's main heart is three-dimensional painting in VR, except the app received interesting updates over its tutelage at Google, including multiplayer support and an open-source toolkit that offered the dictatorship to consign Vantage Duster drawings for use in animation. With this latest announcement, that development is contentious to an end, and future support of Vantage Duster is in the easily of the corporation that still uses it.

Tilt Brush's cryptograph can be accessed on GitHub now, except Google says some gloss had to be removed from the open-source releasing considering of licensing restrictions. Should you want to try your duke at tinkering with open-source Vantage Brush, the visitor is providing distensible instructions on how to rebuild those missing gloss in the app. Additionally, Vantage Duster will still be close-at-hand to download on all of the overlying VR app stores.

Tilt Duster is just the latest in a series of discontinued Google VR projects. Phantasm VR headsets were discontinued haphazardly the launch of the Pixel 4, Google Paper received a similar open-source send-off in 2019, the Jump camera and video service were 86'ed that same year, and the VR freehold trip software Expeditions rode off into the sunset in 2020. Its surviving projects include VR versions of YouTube and Google Earth, and smart-alecky development tideland Owlchemy Labs.

Google and Alphabet are no strangers to killing off grander darlings and over-and-above people's customary ones. (Look no farther than Loon for an odd and exciting project that was reiteratively ended.) Except streaming things to ajar antecedent seems like a rivaling compromise for the people who still use these products every day. Without Google resources, whatever's abutting for Vantage Duster will still be a means off, except it's nice that the graveyard was spared a new headstone.

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