You’ve got your headset, now don’t forget your No. 2 pencil for art lessons.
Pencil! is a new app in early development that offers art lessons for Meta Quest headsets using a regular piece of paper.
You’ll use a Quest with tracked Touch Plus or Touch Pro controller as a paperweight then draw in passthrough on the thin piece of paper it holds in place. In headset, you’ll see an outline on the paper to trace, an idea which won PencilXR a recent Meta Presence Platform Hackathon.
Quest Apps Can Now Use Hands & Some Controllers Simultaneously
Quest Store & App Lab apps can now use hand tracking + Quest 3 or Quest Pro controllers simultaneously, a feature called Multimodal.
Developers of the app tell UploadVR they see it as aimed at helping people learn to draw with physical paper and pencil. The aim of the app’s art lessons point toward helping people who might be intimidated by the idea of drawing find “a fun space to learn the fundamentals.”
I asked Don Hopper to take a quick look at it on his Quest 3.
The video embedded above shows Don going through the first few minutes of the app as it appears at the time of this writing. It is likely to change quite a bit in upcoming releases and there are some bug fixes planned to go out shortly after publication of this post.
To try out the demo in early access, there’s an active Discord group you should join. People are already sharing creations they’ve made with the app in there. Pencil! should work with the Quest 2 and Touch Pro controllers, but it’s “not the ideal”.
While we’re waiting to see if Apple connects the new Pencil Pro to Vision Pro, we’ll be curious to see if more interesting ideas like this pop up for more traditional art creation and education in VR and AR.
