Facebook is working to put the artwork of its first-party Virtual Reality art tool Quill in the Oculus Quest. The software, Quill, was introduced in December 2016 by Oculus together with Touch Controllers. But Facebook took charge of the development of the application and has been working on it since then. Facebook is now aiming to make the artwork of the application accessible extensively through the upcoming VR set of Oculus.
Presenting the work of the Facebook team at XDRC conference in San Francisco, Pierre-Antoine LaFayette, Facebook’s VR Engineer, there are certain technical complexities that are making it hard to incorporate the enigmatic Quill’s artwork on to the Quest hardware. He also quoted that the most difficult task in adding Quill art to Quest is the optimization of the size of massive files. But with the development of ‘IMMersive Quill Transmission format’ by the team of Facebook, this issue is almost over. The IMM formats will trash out the unnecessary information and can minimize the size of Quill art to almost 10 times, this will help the users hugely as they will not be forced to download huge files just to get a sneak peek of Quill art.
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Rendering the scenes once the data arrives will surely be the next hurdle. Lafayette explained that Facebook team created a custom renderer to fluidly support Quill artwork atop Android. Since Quill allows it’s users to create anything through their minds, almost all the VR is created by the imaginations of the brain. This leads to the next key challenge of finding a technique to modify the displays along with the user’s exact vision.
Lafayette added that their team has gained smooth rendering on Quest of a Quill scene that includes approximately two million artforms while keeping true essence of art.
Although Lafayette said that it is not clarified till now that when Quest will be endowed with Quill’s art, but the optimization work has opened an option for the availability of Quill in VR headsets and other non-VR devices in the future.