GIFs serve so many purposes but they have truly become the voice of a generation on social media. Giphy held a week-long gallery in June called TIME FRAME celebrating the GIF format that featured VR experiments, workshops, and creations from over 30 artists. One of the VR experiments came from Superbright VR and their collaborator Art404, as they took the opportunity to debut a new multi-user VR creative tool called Drawn.
At the event, two visitors at a time were able to play Drawn together as they created in a desert environment for a few minutes. The application wasn’t just introduced at the event with some demos for people to try out though; Professional VR artists took over after an hour and engaged in tag-team artist battles to really show off the platform before giving control back to the public.
Drawn allows for 20 users to create in the same virtual space at once but its also being treated as a social experiment of sorts. In the press release covering the appearance at TIME_FRAME, a few questions were posed related to how users interact with other in applications like Drawn:
How can we learn about other people using only virtual body movement and a drawing tool? How can you guide a shared, interactive experience without verbal interchange?
The release goes on to say that, over time, Superbright VR will be testing out a few features like audio tools and color coding to test some of their “social hypotheses”. There are quite a few creative tools in the VR ecosystem, but the co-op aspect is becoming more and more important as seen with Oculus’ recent addition of co-op to Oculus Medium. Taking co-op and expanding with some experimental interaction options could evolve the genre in pretty cool ways so, hopefully, other developers are paying attention.
