Create a Real-World Masterpiece with Paint Space AR

One of my all-time favorite tech demos is Tilt Brush, a VR painting experience where you can create art in 3D on the HTC Vive. Immediately, you begin seeing the potential of VR artistry, allowing artists to utilize tools not available in the real world. By creating free-floating structures with unique brushes, Tilt Brush was my first exposure to what the future of digital art could look like.

Paint Space AR is Tilt Brush for the AR world, enabling you to create interesting pieces of art right where you are. With AR, though, Paint Space has a unique advantage: instead of having to create something in a simulated space, you’re able to paint on objects right in front of you.

To start, Paint Space uses the camera to determine your position in the environment. Once that’s done, you can begin painting by picking a brush, color, and drawing on your screen. This creates a digital stroke, the size, type, and color of which you can change to add more detail and further bits of creativity. As you draw more in your space, you can walk around and see everything from different angles, which helps for adding more to your piece of art.

You can also drop photos and videos into the space from the Photos app, as well as built-in effects like fire and snow. With the right amount of time and patience, you can create really neat stuff in Paint Space.

That patience part, though, is important, because the app is more like a demo than a fleshed-out product. The tracking can be rough, painting can be difficult while holding the device, and to get more brushes, you’ll have to pay $0.99 (which, to be fair, is probably worth it). Whereas Tilt Brush was a full-fledged VR experience on a technologically advanced platform, Paint Space was running on a newly added API on my iPhone 7.

Still, Paint Space is worth checking out for anyone who wants to try an AR app. It’s a cool piece of software that’s sure to get better with improving technology. To grab it, head on over to the App Store here.