Facebook’s virtual reality sculpting platform gets a 2.0 upgrade

Eighteen months since its initial release, Oculus is delivering some major updates to its Medium “immersive sculpting tool” in a free 2.0 update that’s being released today.

The artistic tool is one of the company’s few first-party apps on the PC Rift platform. Today’s updates focus primarily on performance bumps, a UI revamp and some features the company says were frequently requested by users, including snapping grids and increased layer limits.

“This is the culmination of a year of listening to our users and not only seeing what they’re creating but how — and learning what tools and features they love and lack,” Oculus’s Jessica Zeta said in a blog post.

While VR art apps like Google’s Tilt Brush have seemed a bit amateurish in vibes, Oculus has been looking to position Medium as a more professional application that’s easy to get going with but hard to master. Alongside the new layer limit of 100 layers, Medium 2.0 will have a new file management system and some UI changes that the company hopes will make navigation a bit quicker.

Speaking of quicker, Oculus says that 2.0 will get a bump in rendering horsepower after a rewrite in Vulkan, which the company says will improve performance handily.

Oculus has devoted quite a few resources in its latest Rift Core 2.0 updates to bringing some customizability to the home environments that users launch experiences from. With Medium 2.0, users will be able to export their creations directly into their Home area.

Oculus has learned quite a bit in the past 18 months about writing rules and leading a trail-blazing platform; Medium’s latest update seems to offer the group an opportunity to learn from users and just give them what they’ve been asking for.