Open Brush (2021), an open source successor to Google’s defunct VR art creation app Tilt Brush (2016), now has a multiplayer mode thanks to a recent update to the free app.
Open Brush developer The Icosa Foundation has already released the update across all supported devices, which includes Quest and SteamVR headsets.
The new update lets users collaborate, chat and create immersive VR art together in real-time, letting artists draw side-by-side, explore each other’s worlds, or showcase their work in a shared space.
For now, the initial multiplayer mode supports core painting tools, however the Icosa Foundation says more features are planned to release in future updates. Like many social VR games, room owners can manage their sessions with tools to mute, kick, or set participants to view-only mode. Notably, Open Brush’s multiplayer mode is available cross-platform, so you can share and interact across both the Quest and SteamVR versions.
“Open Brush is about making creativity free, fun, and accessible to everyone,” said Mike Nisbet of the Icosa Foundation. “Support for live collaboration is our most frequently requested feature and we’re really excited to make it available to our community.”
Once the most popular art creation app on PC VR headsets following its release in 2016, Google eventually pulled back from development in 2021, making Tilt Brush open source. This has allowed studios to reproduce and freely build upon the art app, which not only saw the near-immediate release of Open Brush, but also free iterations like SideSketch and Tilt Brush for WebXR, as well as paid multiplayer apps Multibrush (2022) and MetaBrush (2022).
While the list of Tilt Brush-derived apps is much longer than that, having cross-platform multiplayer as a core part of the app now makes it’s pretty difficult to beat Open Brush in both features and its long-term support.
