Probably one of the best art education tools ever made
I’ll start off by saying I am no artist. I’m not terrible at drawing but I’m not great. I would like to be a good artist, but it’s just not in my wheelhouse. So I was delighted when I saw there is a new VR application called Pencil for the Meta Quest 3 that hopes to help me with this.
This application comes from the winners of Metas Hackathon, XRB Apps, and you can see why they won it now.
Pencil has a simple concept, it gives you a selection of different things to draw and then guides you through the entire picture, from start to finish. And it works really well! Within 90 minutes of first booting up Pencil, I completed 3 drawings. One quite bad banana, a decent dog and a good owl.
The results are pretty incredible, it doesn’t matter what skill level you have, you should be able to make some decent art literally within minutes of using Pencil.
You just need a pencil and some paper to get started. It works by employing a genius use of the Quests passthrough cameras, which overlay the steps you need to take on the paper itself. There is also a very helpful screen on your left which shows you different techniques you can utilise to complete that step. It also gives you an impressive 3d render of the object for reference.
However this isn’t simply as shallow as giving you some lines to sketch over. Pencil makes sure you understand the concepts of why you are doing what you are doing, introducing different shading techniques, how 3d dimensions work and how to do different types of lines. It all seems genuinely educational and I felt like I learned something during my short time with the app.
This all goes to show how useful the Quest 3 can be beyond just playing VR games, Pencil’s ingenious concept may be one of the most powerful educational tools for drawing that has ever been created. It makes everybody capable of producing art.
I can’t wait to see more games take advantage of the mixed reality capabilities of the Meta Quest 3 the way Pencil has done. I can already see how it can be used for engineering, cooking and making music.
Pencil does also work with the Quest 2 and the Quest Pro but I wouldn’t recommend it. It is best that you have the passthrough capabilities the Quest 3 offers to take full advantage of it.
There is a free demo available for Pencil that you can download right now by heading over to its Discord. If you are someone who loves art and wants to learn there really is no excuse not to check it out.
The full release date of Pencil is not known at this stage but when we have more news we will let you know.
