The odyssey of a Pink Dress in pixels

A shaggy-dog story of a virtual art collaboration in the Metaverse.

The original Pink Dress, in Tilt Brush. Björk-worthy? I hope so.

Some folks are feeling too isolated during lockdown. I’m not feeling isolated enough. I typically work from home in blissful solitude in a forgotten Norfolk town. When COVID-19 hit, all my friends rushed online at once — on the one hand delightful, but on the other, overwhelming for an introvert who counts on 12 hours of alone time a day. So I took shelter from the storm in VR, making myself immersive worlds in Google’s 3D painting app Tilt Brush, using an Oculus Quest headset.

The pieces I created were all about comfort. I made an underwater rock garden with a purple axolotl for company. I made a campfire in a forest. I made a meditation grotto from giant mushrooms and painted my own light body. I’d enlarge these spaces so that I could sit within them, basking in my own creations of glowing light.

A still image taken from Seeds of Space, a series of 3D VR artworks in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I made the Pink Dress as one of the forms embedded as a germ in a Seed.

Tilt Brush comes preloaded with “environments” in which to paint. My favorite of these: space. I wanted to be as far from Earth as possible, for as long as possible. I wanted to be immersed somewhere not only with no walls, but with no beginning and no end…