Logitech has announced its first piece of hardware in the VR space, a stylus that lets you draw and paint in 3D on the Meta Quest 3. The MX Ink Stylus is a familiar-looking sketching tool that works hand in hand with the Quest controller to drastically expand the capabilities of the popular Quest 3 VR headset.
The MX Ink also works with the Quest Pro and Quest 2 and supports several painting and sculpting Quest apps, including Gravity Sketch, PaintingVR, OpenBrush, ShapesXR, GestureVR, Arkio, and Engage XR. If you connect your Quest to a VR-ready PC, you can use the MX Ink Stylus with Adobe’s Substance Modeler and Elucis by Realize Medical.
While you can use a Meta Quest controller for drawing, painting, and sculpting, a stylus makes more sense and should feel much more natural in the hand. Logitech is a leading computer accessory manufacturer, and its Bluetooth keyboards, trackpads, and mice already work with the Meta’s VR headsets, bringing the Quest 3 closer to serving as a laptop replacement.
Logitech gave the MX Ink Stylus a replaceable, pressure-sensitive tip with adjustable pressure curves, allowing for artistic nuance when drawing in 2D. Logitech offers the MX Mat as a nice drawing surface. The stylus includes haptics to provide feedback and simulate drawing on different surfaces.
Unlike a standard digital art stylus, you can also rotate, lift, and move this virtual pencil anywhere in space with 6 degrees of freedom. You can even trace over physical objects in mixed reality to create a virtual representation quickly.
The MX Ink’s buttons are customizable with adjustable activation force and double-tap timing. The MX Ink Well is a charging base that keeps the stylus topped up and ready to use whenever inspiration strikes.
It sounds like a thoughtfully designed solution for a growing number of VR artists and designers, but we can’t know for sure until we’ve tried it out for ourselves later this year.
The Logitech MX Ink Stylus will be available at Meta Connect in September, possibly alongside a new Quest 3s headset, and will cost $130.
