How One Creator Used Painting VR As the Canvas to Reach Half a Billion Views

Using Painting VR, creator HydraVR has transformed virtual paintings into viral videos watched over 500 million times across social media.

When Belgian studio Oisoi created Painting VR, a virtual reality painting game that gives players their own digital art studio, the idea was simple: let anyone pick up a brush and paint inside a VR headset. What they didn’t expect was for one of their players to turn the game into a social media phenomenon.

His biggest hit? Painting a Minecraft lava bucket. It has more than 81 million views on YouTube alone:

It’s part of Hidde’s “Minecraft vs Realism” series, where he reimagines familiar objects from the game as detailed paintings. He has also painted everything from the Mona Lisa to Meccha Chameleon, one of 2026’s biggest breakout games.

There is an almost ASMR-like quality to the videos: the sound of brush strokes, the gradual reveal, and the satisfaction of watching a blank canvas slowly become a finished painting.

What starts with one person, a headset and a blank canvas can end up being watched half a billion times.