Meta already has a technique to watch your individual content material on Quest, though looking by means of 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 thought.
Mark Rabkin, VP main Horizon OS and Quest, says in a latest X put up that Meta is presently engaged on a house theater surroundings 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 staff is “[w]orking on all that, experimenting with lighting and different results to see what’s finest. Additionally attempting to determine superior sound.”
This wouldn’t be the primary time Meta developed its personal theater surroundings. 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 technique to watch your individual content material along with renting motion pictures 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 quite a lot of digital theaters.
With out rehashing historic historical past (the listing 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 embody lots of the options related to a devoted house theater app, equivalent to customized environments or superior playback controls.
And whereas the content material on supply diverse over time, all of these apps had one factor in frequent: they put sufficient friction in the best way between customers and conventional content material that it primarily shunted customers to help extra open options, like Bigscreen and Skybox, but in addition devoted apps serving up Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, and so on.
That mentioned, Meta’s subsequent try at a devoted theater surroundings most likely received’t unite these fractionalized apps right into a monolithic theater surroundings, though having a built-in, simply accessible technique to immersively watch your individual content material would possibly simply be sufficient.
