The Filters Update – Night Mode, CRT screens, and more fun screen filters

We’re excited to release a fun update today, The Filters Update, which adds several screen filters that you can apply to your VR desktop screen.

Night Mode

On average, users spend 1 hour in each Bigscreen VR session. Some people spend 20–30 hours each week in Bigscreen. When used for long durations, VR headsets might cause eye strain due to vergence-accomodation conflict, pupil swim, and other lens/rendering/optical issues.

Scientific research suggests that reducing blue light from the screen can reduce eye strain, improve quality of sleep, and improve attention spans.

Our new Night Mode filter reduces blue light emitted from the virtual screen, and it can make a significant impact on health and comfort during these long VR sessions.

Fun Filters: 8-Bit & CRT

These filters add distortion and special effects. They’re only meant for fun, and aren’t intended to improve text legibility or video quality.

The CRT Filter adds moire and barrel distortion, for an old school twist on modern PC games

The 8-Bit Filter makes PC games look pixelated

Sharpness, Contrast, Brightness, and more Presets

You can also select from presets like Movies, Text, Sports, and Black & White, or make fine tuned adjustments.

Reducing the screen Brightness adjustment reduces distracting lens glares caused by the lenses of your VR headset. This issue is most common on the Rift & Vive.

The brightness slider has been in Bigscreen for a few years, but we’ve also added a few other adjustments: Sharpness and Contrast adjustments can improve text legibility, and Saturation can make movies more vibrant and colorful.

What’s Next

We have been working on our Oculus Quest launch, a Friends System, a Videoplayer, and new environments. We also have been releasing small improvements and bugfixes every few days (release notes posted on Reddit and Steam.)

Download Bigscreen Beta for Free

Bigscreen Beta supports the major PC VR headsets (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, all SteamVR-compatible headsets, including Windows Mixed Reality). Bigscreen also supports the Oculus Go and Samsung GearVR mobile VR headsets. Bigscreen will also be available on Oculus Quest at launch this spring.

You can download Bigscreen for free from the Oculus Store or Steam on the PC, and from the Oculus Store for Oculus Go & Samsung GearVR.

Discord

Join our 5000-person Discord Community, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and subscribe to our newsletter.