Meta's new Quest app unearths a treasure trove of wonderful VR experiences
Meta has released a VR app with more than 2,400 walk-through VR experiences, animated films and 3D artworks.
The app is called Theater Elsewhere and after a quick hands-on I can say that I love Meta for funding it. I think Theater Elsewhere is one of the best things Meta has done for virtual reality as an art form in the last decade.
The "Youtube" for Quillustrations is here
Theatre Elsewhere is a VR platform for so-called Quillustrations. These are VR illustrations created using the Quill PC VR app. This app allows artists and creatives to hand-draw and animate objects, environments, scenes, and short films in and for virtual reality. Quill has a long history at Meta, and since 2020, Quillustrations have become an art form in their own right. These spatial artworks have received over 30 awards, 20 nominations and 70 festival official selections to date.
Since the end of 2021, Quillustrations can be found and viewed in the VR Animation Player, an app that was not very user-friendly. As a well-hidden component of Meta Quest TV, it also received little visibility.
With Theater Elsewhere, this is changing, as the Quillustrations now have their own VR app and platform and will hopefully get the attention they deserve.
Browsing through the spatial artworks is addictive
I tried Theater Elsewhere and the VR app is beautifully designed. Even the starting environment is a Quillustration, providing a fitting and immersive introduction to the medium. There are six different default environments to choose from, each more beautiful than the last.
A tutorial explains the main features, but the application is so intuitive that you can skip the brief introduction. From the main menu, you can choose from different categories ('Featured', 'Newest', 'Narrative', 'Most viewed') and use a thumbnail overview to quickly jump from Quillustration to Quillustration. If you see something you like, you can bookmark it and come back to it later.
Theatre Elsewhere launches with over 2,400 artworks and 50 times more content than before, including over 50 animated films and remarkable works such as Lustration, A Lifetime Achievement and Namoo.
The great user experience of the VR app makes it addictive to browse, discover and browse through the 3D creations. Check out my article on the best Quillustrations to get an idea of what to expect.
Freely explorable Quillustrations
A great new feature is the Free Fly Mode, which allows you to explore the Quill illustrations from any angle. I just wish I could take screenshots from the perspective I choose. That's not possible at the moment: if you press the Meta button to take a screenshot, the perspective is reset.
What I'm also missing is a way to subscribe to individual artists and be notified when they post new Quillustrations.
With Quill, you can create your own Quill illustrations and upload them to Theater Elsewhere. I hope that one day the VR app will make the leap from the PC to Meta Quest, so that the tool and the playback medium become one. The resulting democratization of the art form will help create even more of this kind of work.
You can find out more about Theater Elsewhere on the Quest blog and download the VR app now from the Horizon Store.
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