A group that helped open source a fork of Google’s Tilt Brush is doing the same to 3D modeling platform Blocks.
Open Blocks follows Open Brush from the Icosa Foundation as an open source version of Google’s abandoned VR art tools. Google had acquired Tilt Brush for 3D drawing while also launching Blocks as a 3D modeling tool for VR headsets. As Google reduced its investment in VR technology, Tilt Brush was open sourced by its creators who saw the move as “immortality” for the work.
Now, Blocks will live on forever too as Open Blocks. More than six years after progress on the project stopped, Blocks is to be reborn with the Icosa Foundation working to ready a modernized release for Quest, Pico, and Steam. The original open source files are already available on Github.
“We’ve been working hard with the Google AR & VR team in the last few weeks to bring the codebase to a usable state, so anyone should now be able to download and run the Unity project,” a landing page for Open Blocks explains. “We’ll be switching to use the OpenXR framework and new input system within Unity, enabling us to target Open Blocks for a much wider range of XR devices. At that point, we will be aiming to create a standalone XR port, and bring Open Blocks to the Quest and Pico platforms. Along the way, there will be plenty of opportunity to add immersive XR features such as MR passthrough.”
Support for glTF importing is planned as well as support for the Icosa Gallery, a replacement for Google’s defunct 3D object remixing platform Poly.
Google and Samsung, meanwhile, are expected to reveal their next steps in personal computing for Android XR in October after Meta’s September Connect event.