Meta already has a solution to watch your personal content material on Quest, though searching via a file system and viewing on a windowed panel is decidedly much less immersive than a correct house theater. Now the corporate says it’s experimenting with the concept.
Mark Rabkin, VP main Horizon OS and Quest, says in a recent X post that Meta is at the moment engaged on a house theater setting for Horizon OS, which isn’t solely Quest’s working system, however the soon-be-the OS used on a number of third-party headsets.
In response to a put up questioning why such a first-party effort doesn’t exist already, Rabkin says the workforce is “[w]orking on all that, experimenting with lighting and different results to see what’s greatest. Additionally attempting to determine superior sound.”
This wouldn’t be the primary time Meta developed its personal theater setting. In 2014, Meta (then Fb/Oculus) launched Oculus Cinema for Samsung Gear VR, which might later morph into Oculus Video for Gear VR and Rift, presenting a extra cohesive solution to watch your personal content material along with renting films for on-device viewing. Launched in late 2015, Oculus Social was one other early try, permitting as much as 5 customers to attach and watch Twitch and Vimeo streams in a wide range of digital theaters.
With out rehashing historic historical past (the checklist of now-defunct house theater apps goes on), Meta’s most up-to-date try was in Horizon Dwelling on Quest, which was up to date in 2021 to permit a number of customers to affix your own home area and do issues like watch movies and launch into VR apps collectively. This nonetheless didn’t embrace lots of the options related to a devoted house theater app, comparable to customized environments or superior playback controls.
And whereas the content material on provide different over time, all of these apps had one factor in widespread: they put sufficient friction in the best way between customers and conventional content material that it basically shunted customers to assist extra open alternate options, like Bigscreen and Skybox, but in addition devoted apps serving up Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, and many others.
That mentioned, Meta’s subsequent try at a devoted theater setting in all probability gained’t unite these fractionalized apps right into a monolithic theater setting, though having a built-in, simply accessible solution to immersively watch your personal content material may simply be sufficient.
