Virtual reality let me paint in space, and it was pure magic - CNET

The animated story about a young girl imagining her mother, an actress, unfolds with brushstrokes arcing gracefully through the air, building into a beautiful multi-coloured three-dimensional dragon. You can move around and even through the bubble of luminous lines and swirls, watching the dragon curve around you to envelop you in an ethereal cloud of colour as you tu, move and look around within it.

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As the lines and shapes form around you, you can reveal different elements by walking around within the virtual space, adding a feeling that you control the pace.

"With Quill, I get to make a mark directly in space," Wesley told me. "I can make my world around me, instead of making a drawing."

She donned the headset to show me how she created the story using a new piece of software developed by Oculus called Quill, painting in the air using Oculus Touch wireless hand controls. You draw a line in the air using the triggers on the controller in your right hand, using the controller in your left hand to rotate your 3D drawing. You can then erase a stroke by clicking on it with another button, or change the thickness of the line with a thumbstick. You can draw brushstrokes that stay solid, or trace out lines that become translucent as you move around them.

Then I got to try it.

Wesley had already sketched a 3D shape of a fish in the air, like a sort of painted wireframe. I started trying to colour it in with simple strokes.

I've always loved to draw, and I've always been fascinated by the possibilities of digital art. I remember creating art in Microsoft Paint by tortuously filling in individual pixels. I remember when I first scanned a drawing and was able to digitally colour and manipulate what I had hand-drawn. I remember the joy of discovering layers in Photoshop. Mind-blowing moments all -- and as hard as I tried to maintain my joualistic composure under that Rift headset, this took me back to those moments of pure creative joy.

At first, I found myself drawing on a flat plane in front of me, as if drawing on a wall. I even stepped from side to side to draw on different parts until Wesley encouraged me to rotate the artwork instead. And as I spun the fish in the air, something amazing happened: I started to draw in 3D.

When I pressed the trigger and extended my arm, the line stretched out away from me instead of staying on the flat plane we're used to writing and drawing on. When I tued my wrist as I drew, the brushstroke corkscrewed through the air. When I spun my hand in circles as I reached out my arm, the brushstroke formed an elegant spiral like those ribbons gymnasts twirl around. The spiraling ribbon-like brushstroke hung in the air in front of me, suspended in space as I moved towards it, around it, through it. I couldn't stop grinning.

I know, I know -- it's hard to describe the experience of virtual reality. The only way to understand it is to try it yourself. And after a long three days of VR movies and animations, I'd started to become a little inured to VR.

But being able to create shapes and brushstrokes in space like this, in an environment Oculus compared to a lucid dream, was exhilarating. The folks at Oculus describe Quill as a tool designed specifically to create this kind of 3D VR experience, as opposed to adapting tools that are used in other media, like the movie cameras or the Unreal gaming engine used to create many other VR movies and animations. Interestingly enough it began life as a project knocked together in a hackathon by Oculus engineer Inigo Quilez after he was disgruntled with traditional VR creation tools.