Tilt Brush was developed by Skillman & Hackett, and was in 2014 nominated for four Proto Awards (namely: "Best Interaction Design", "Most Innovative", "Best Overall Virtual Reality Application", and "Best GUI"), of which it won the "Best GUI" award. Google acquired Tilt Brush in 2015, as announced April 16, 2015. Tilt Brush was released for the
HTC Vive at its launch on April 5, 2016, at no cost when pre-ordering the HTC Vive. On February 24, 2017, Tilt VR announced it is now available on both
Oculus Rift and Vive. In the
Fast Company article about Tilt Brush, one of the creators said that the idea of drawing in 3D space came from a chess game prototype: “There was a happy accident. Tilt Brush came out of an experiment with a virtual reality chess prototype, where we accidentally started painting the chess pieces in the air, and it was incredible”. In the earlier versions of Tilt Brush, it was only possible to draw on two-dimensional planes. On January 26, 2021,
Google released the source code of the application under the
Apache 2.0 license on
GitHub. ==Development after Google==