Logitech today announced the launch of the MX Ink pen. This officially supported Quest accessory aims to provide users with a more precise and natural input method for applications like design, drawing, and visualization.
Hand tracking on the Quest is great as a low-barrier input for basic cursor-like input, while controllers are great as a flexible, high-performance input for games and apps that need lots of different inputs, like buttons and sticks. But now the Quest headsets will have a third option: the MX Ink stylus from Logitech.
The MX Ink pen is available starting today, priced at $130 for the pen alone or $170 for the pen and MX Inkwell accessory—a handy place to store and charge the pen. There’s also the MX Max ($50), which offers a premium drawing surface if you’re going to use it for 2D input at a desk. The pen supports the Quest 2 and Quest 3 series headsets.
While the stylus would certainly be a narrower input device for the headset, it does appeal to a subset of VR applications that focus on creation. These would be applications for things like 3D modeling, painting, sculpting, and drawing—the kinds of applications where being able to point a stylus at a very specific point in space feels much more natural than with a controller.
When I tried an early version of the MX Ink stylus earlier this year, I was impressed with the way it integrated into the overall Quest experience. As an official 'Made for Meta' accessory, the headset recognises that you've paired a stylus (rather than a controller) and walks you through the procedure.
Once paired, it works as you'd hope: You'll see a 3D model of the pen in front of you, and you can use it as a basic pointer in the standard Horizon OS interface. The buttons on the pen mimic the buttons on the controller, so you can do things like drag and scroll and press buttons. You'll also see a battery life indicator where you'd normally expect to see it for controllers.
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While the stylus does a pretty good job of emulating the controller, the real reason this thing exists is because of apps built specifically with that in mind. These apps not only display a mockup of the stylus (or their own interpretation of it), but also support a pressure-sensitive tip and pressure-sensitive side button that provide smooth input for parameters like stroke size.
We've reached out to Logitech in hopes of getting the full list (including “much more” at the bottom), but for now, Logitech currently lists the apps that support the MX Ink pen as follows:
- Archio
- Engage
- Gravity Sketch
- Gesture VR
- Picture VR
- Osso VR
- Red
- Blender
- Figmin XR
- Basic VR
- Holo light
- Light Brush
- Ellucis
- ShapesXR
- Vision Clothing
- Needle
- “Much more”