Tilt Brush

» see tiltbrush.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

tilt brush was the htc vive's killer demo. you put on a headset and motion controllers, then started painting a 3d volume around your body. brushes came as star trails, fire, smoke, neon ribbons. you could walk around your own painting. it was the first vr app that made non-gamers say "okay i get it now".

google bought skillman & hackett in april '15, a few months before the vive shipped. tilt brush launched alongside the headset on 5 april '16 and stayed bundled with it for the next two years. by '18 it was on oculus rift and playstation vr too. nbc left field used it for mixed-reality news segments. classroom demos and corporate showrooms ran it on loop.

i did not have a vive. i still do not have a vive. the wave of consumer vr in '16-'17 came through video, mostly, and tilt brush mostly came through other people's footage of other people painting. the part i remember from the press cycle was the demo videos: a person in a headset, with a glowing surface emerging in mid-air around them.

in january '21 google posted the source on github and dropped it from the storefronts. there was no ceremony and no replacement product, just a short blog post. the community renamed the fork open brush and kept going. the better version of tilt brush in '26 is run by volunteers.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

the technical thing it did was draw quads in 3d space along a controller's motion path, with shader brushes for visual effects. that simple core was enough. you painted by waving your hand and the brushes did the rest. unity engine under the hood, mostly.

the cultural thing it did was give vr a creator-tool argument. before tilt brush the vr pitch was "this game will feel different in here". after tilt brush the pitch added "and you can make things in here too". quill from oculus showed up alongside as a more professional artist tool, but tilt brush was the one that demo videos went viral on.

~ the long tail ~

open brush, the community fork, runs on the quest lineup and the steamvr stack. multibrush extends it for multiplayer classroom use. the file format google designed is still readable and the source is still on github. the brand "tilt brush" was the only thing google took back.

the bigger story is the one google's own vr stack told around it. daydream wound down in '19. cardboard (in inventory as google-cardboard) followed in '21. tilt brush sat inside that arc as the one google vr product people actually loved, dying not because nobody used it but because the platform under it was being unwound.

~ the funny part ~

google's product death note for tilt brush was unusually direct. the official line was something like "we will keep tilt brush available, but we have decided to stop active development". which is the same thing as goodbye, said politely. the community took the wording at face value. the open brush fork shipped within months.

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