A First Look at STYLY

The VR-capable virtual worlds marketspace is getting even more crowded! This past week, I heard about another new product called STYLY. They bill themselves as “a platform for creating high quality, beautiful VR spaces without any coding”. They offer a web-based 3D scene editor called the STYLY Editor, which is supposedly drag-and-drop (I haven’t really played much with it yet). Apparently, you can import assets from Sketchfab, 3D Warehouse, the Unity Asset Store, YouTube, SoundCloud, MAYA, Blender, SketchUp and even Google Tilt Brush / Blocks.

Here’s what the default template looks like when you first load up the STYLY Editor:

Clicking on the Insert Asset button in the upper left-hand corner brings up a menu of things you can bring into your scene: models, images, music, videos, even PDF files.

Scenes created in STYLY are published to the STYLY Gallery, and can be viewed using their WebView web browser-based tool (just click the little cube in the bottom right-hand corner of the gallery entry; see the second picture below for an example). You can also visit scenes using your HTC Vive virtual reality headset (support for Oculus Rift, Gear VR, and Google Daydream is promised soon).

There’s some seriously weird and trippy stuff! There are already over 1,000 scenes to explore. Note that the STYLY software is still in beta, and some scenes seem to take a long time to load in the WebView. Here’s an example of an art installation:

And here’s a fairly realistic-looking beach scene, which appears to have moving water:

You can watch more videos on their Vimeo page. There’s also a STYLY User Group on Facebook. I can’t wait for them to add Oculus Rift support so I can try them out!

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