Facebook Hands Over VR Painting, Animation App Quill To Creator

Facebook on Friday handed over virtual reality illustration and animation tool Quill to the developer who created the app Iñigo Quilez.

Facebook handed over the company to Quilez after he formed a company called Smoothstep and rebranded the tools as Quill by Smoothstep, which is now on the Oculus Store.

Quill which started as a scrappy internal tool grew into an app used by amateur and professional storytellers alike.

The original Quill app will be removed from the Oculus Store on October 18th. It'll still work for those who downloaded it, but Oculus won't support the app any longer. Users will need to manually upload creators to Oculus Media Studio manually rather than through Quill as well.

Facebook said that Quill content shared on Oculus Media Studio or Oculus TV will still be available on Oculus for now. The Quill Theater app will remain on the store — it will be renamed as VR Animation Player next month. The Oculus team also noted that Smoothstep has open-sourced both Quill Theater’s IMM immersive content distribution file format (IMM) and an IMM player.

Quilez built the first version of Quill during a 2015 hackathon to aid production on Oculus Story Studio's VR short, Dear Angelica. The film was the first to be hand-painted completely inside of a VR environment. Other filmmakers have adopted Quill, with works created using the tool being screened at major film festivals such as Sundance and Venice.