Meta has long provided a way to view your content on Quest, albeit through a somewhat basic system that involves browsing files and watching them on a small panel. It lacks the immersion you’d expect from a home theater experience. However, Meta is now playing with this idea, potentially ramping up the stakes for entertainment in virtual reality.
Mark Rabkin, the VP overseeing Horizon OS and Quest, recently shared on a social media platform that Meta is in the process of developing a home theater environment for Horizon OS. This isn’t just the operating system for Quest but will soon be implemented across various third-party headsets as well.
When someone inquired why Meta hadn’t launched such a feature sooner, Rabkin revealed that the team is knee-deep in “experimenting with lighting and other effects to find the optimal setup.” They’re also “trying to nail the sound experience.”
This isn’t Meta’s first rodeo when it comes to creating a virtual cinema. Back in 2014, when Meta was known as Facebook/Oculus, the company unveiled Oculus Cinema for the Samsung Gear VR. This subsequently evolved into Oculus Video for both Gear VR and Rift, offering a more seamless way to enjoy personal content and rent movies for on-device viewing. Oculus Social, released in late 2015, allowed up to five users to group up and watch Twitch and Vimeo streams within diverse virtual theater settings.
The image accompanying this snippet is a nod to the now-retired Oculus Video app, a product of Meta’s earlier forays into VR theater.
Fast-forward to more recent times, Meta’s attempts continue with the Horizon Home feature on Quest, upgraded in 2021. This update lets multiple users converge in a shared home space, facilitating video watching and joint VR app activities. However, it fell short of a fully-fledged theater app, lacking custom environments and advanced playback controls.
And while the variety of content has shifted over time, these applications all shared a common pitfall: they introduced enough obstacles to make users consider less cumbersome options like Bigscreen and Skybox, as well as dedicated streaming apps like Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix.
Looking ahead, Meta’s next venture into creating a dedicated theater setup may not unify these fragmented applications into a single platform. Still, just providing a built-in, easily accessible option for immersive content viewing could be a significant step forward.
