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subjonas

macrumors 604
Original poster
Feb 10, 2014
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I’m wondering if the Pencil will have any integration with VP. Not air or 3D drawing (don’t need a physical Pencil for that), but maybe you could draw on an iPad for placement accuracy and pressure sensitivity, and it will show up on a virtual 2D canvas in the VP. Wacom tablets do this for physical monitors, so I guess Wacom integration would be just as good.
The advantage of indirect drawing tablets is it’s great for ergonomics to be able to keep your drawing hand down and your head up (as opposed to when using a direct drawing monitor like a Cintiq). The disadvantage of indirect drawing tablets is it’s not natural and harder to do quick precise drawing (some people are decent but I could never get good at it). But maybe with the VP, it could track your hand holding the Pencil and recreate a digital version of the Pencil hovering over the virtual canvas. If it’s accurate enough, I could see it feeling just like direct drawing, after getting used to it. I think.
The other possible advantage of doing this with the VP is of course the real estate. Canvas/screen size in the real world is always a limitation, so being able to resize huge while also being mobile would be amazing. As long as it scales keeping the same ratio as the iPad, drawing should stay natural and accurate, but not 100% sure about that either.
Thoughts about technical feasibility? Thoughts from other digital artists about UX?
 
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You'd at least need the M2 iPad so you get the hover ability.
I don't think hand tracking would help. Just seeing the cursor position should be good enough.
I used to follow someone who did "plein air" painting in VR. They'd navigate to a place in a VR game like Half-Life: Alyx, and then paint using a tablet. Steam VR lets you bring up any desktop window and place it anywhere within your virtual space, even when running a full-VR experience.
 
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You'd at least need the M2 iPad so you get the hover ability.
I don't think hand tracking would help. Just seeing the cursor position should be good enough.
I used to follow someone who did "plein air" painting in VR. They'd navigate to a place in a VR game like Half-Life: Alyx, and then paint using a tablet. Steam VR lets you bring up any desktop window and place it anywhere within your virtual space, even when running a full-VR experience.
I’m not totally sure if Hover on the iPad is necessary for what I was suggesting, but maybe it could work together with VP hand tracking for better accuracy. Not sure if hand (stylus) tracking would be accurate enough.
For me just seeing the cursor on the screen isn’t good enough. That was why I could never get good with a Wacom tablet and had to switch to Cintiq. I need to see exactly where the tip of my stylus meets the screen/canvas. That’s why I’m hoping for a virtual stylus that can be accurately controlled.
That’s pretty cool, I’m hoping there will be a lot of good creative apps for the VP with flexible ways to use them in the OS.
 
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