The Bigscreen Beta “2019 Update” is now live!

Over the past year, we’ve been working on a massive new update for Bigscreen with real-time raytracing lighting effects, new environments, new avatars, new VR UI, a Windows audio driver, and more. This update has many user-requested features and fixes some of the biggest bugs & problems that our users have experienced.

Summary

• Raytraced real-time screen lighting. Light from the big screen shines into the room with realistic raytraced beams. It even works on Mobile VR headsets.
• Upgraded Avatars with new hairstyles, beards, and hats
• New Cinema environment with amphitheater-style curved seating
• New UI — the brand new Bigscreen Menu is beautifully designed to be powerful and easy to use across all platforms & headsets
• New Room features: change the name, privacy, and settings on the fly
• Oculus Overlay support: improved visuals and clarity when displaying your desktop on the big screen
• New Teleportation. This new feature lets you move around environments, while also making it easier to change your seat. Also added snap rotation.
• Improved Desktop audio streaming with the new Bigscreen Audio Driver for Windows 10 PCs. Desktop audio streaming used to have lots of issues and bugs (ex. 5.1/7.1 headphones). It is now easy and automatic!
• New social Lobby, a place to hangout and meet other people.
• New Bigscreen Accounts. Create and login to your new Bigscreen account. This will be used for the upcoming friend/party system, and “Bigscreen Movie Nights”
• Many bugs & problems have been fixed & improved
• Mobile VR headsets can now create public & private rooms — anyone can join your room, from any PC or mobile VR headset (fully cross-platform)
• Mobile VR headsets have significantly improved performance and battery life, especially in larger rooms with 5–15 people.

Details about the new features

New Cinema environment: amphitheater-style curved seating

Our shiny new cinema has curved seating to make it easier to see and chat with people sitting next to you. This is especially nice on 3DOF headsets — like the Oculus Go and Samsung GearVR — where you cannot lean forward.

Real-time raytraced screen lighting effects

Our previous implementation of “dynamic screen lighting” was very GPU expensive and impossible to run on mobile VR headsets.

Our latest implementation uses raytracing techniques such as stochastic sampling and blue noise dithering. This casts rays of light from the big screen realistically into the environment. The performance is so good that we are enabling this on mobile VR headsets too.

New UI: the Bigscreen Menu

We’ve designed a new VR UI to be easy to use across all VR headsets and controllers. Whether you’re using a 3DOF headset like the Oculus Go, or a 6DOF headset like the Oculus Quest, our new VR UI supports easy interaction with both laser pointing and poking.

It’s also easy to use without a controller — with just a keyboard/mouse — which is great when playing non-VR games in VR in Bigscreen

New Avatars: new hairstyles, facial hair (beards), and hats

We’ve upgraded all the masculine and feminine hairs to have a more “sculpted” art style. We’ve also added dozens of facial hairs (beards, goatees, mustaches, etc.) and many hats.

New Lobby: a place to hangout and meet people

Gather in our movie theater lobby to hangout with your friends or meet new people. We will soon sell “virtual movie tickets” and host events in our movie theater lobby

Major Bugs Solved

Many of the worst bugs and problems from the past couple years have now been fixed and improved. Notably if you had the following issues, please try using Bigscreen again. Here are a few of the many bugs we solved:

• fixed support for 5.1 and 7.1 headphones, and SPDIF/USB DAC audio devices
• fixed desktop audio streaming bugs where your audio would stop working, get muted, or stutter when people leave the room
• fixed UI bugs where the UI would become frozen or irresponsive
• fixed crashes when people would join/leave your room
• fixed server bug where people would fail to properly join/leave rooms

Thank you to the Community

Thank you to the following community members for helping us alpha test:

Rayn, Aboba, BountyHunter2k18, Brendan Luu, buckeye1st, Cereal, DannyB9, DARKvoid, dEEPZoNE, dEEPZoNE, Doublechilicheese, DouTatsu, Dragonbait, Dragonslayer182, Ecko, EvB, FioX, Flash4ward, Frostic, Gangsterwumbo, Geo, GLiChXP, Harrison, Hydrox85, Bash, Infraxion, JB, Jtrim, jin, klassystudio, Kyle., Lance_Akiro, LuxIsBored, MacBookProAR, Martel, Moon-Watcher, Ne, Nokkturnal, NyanBlade, PistolTiger, Rejeckted, Ricey, russelldc, Snoopish, StarbitGaming, StartJump&Modernize, stewart, Synergiance, TGRetro, The Boro Fan, TheGhostOfToddHoward, thejustchad, Thibaultmol, ThriceAlmighty, UCPP, Whispery Whale, wisemagick1, XansOffTheWall, Xavierneko, чushírσ

Also, thank you to security researchers Ibrahim Baggili, Peter Casey, Martin Vondráček from the University of New Haven for helping us discover several vulnerabilities with Bigscreen’s servers and streaming systems. These bugs have been fully patched in this update.

What’s NEXT?

We have been working on several significant updates that will launch in the next couple months after the 2019 Update. These updates will include:

• Friend/party system: invite friends into your rooms easily, and get notifications
• Videoplayer: watch videos stored locally on your PC or Mobile VR headset. This videoplayer has an easy-to-use VR UI, making it easier to watch videos, especially 3D movies.
• Streaming & performance improvements: while the performance has improved in the 2019 Update, more significant tech is coming soon that enables much better performance and streaming in larger 12-person rooms
• Bigscreen Movie Nights: last year, we did a few pilot tests of “movie nights” where we hosted a movie. We plan to sell “virtual movie tickets” for our movie nights.
• Oculus Quest: Bigscreen has been a launch title on every major VR headset for the past 3 years — such as Oculus Rift, Oculus Touch, and Oculus Go — and Bigscreen will launch on the Oculus Quest later this year!
• Bigscreen 1.0: by the summer, we expect to leave “beta” and launch 1.0. Expect a whole new level of polish, reliability, and functionality by then.

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.

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.

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