Watching a movie in VR
And how it is not really possible yet.
I wanted to watch a movie in VR. Even though Meta (and oculus before that) has been facilitating great #VR experiences for several years, you still can’t really watch any movie you want on the quest in high quality.
After listening to John Carmack the Joe Rogan podcast (a great episode, even after 3 years), I wanted to watch The Grand Budapest Hotel. I first tried HBOMax in the meta quest browser with passthrough, but it did not work. Same with Netflix.
So I loaded up the Netflix app, hoping to watch at least some other Netflix movie, but damn, it wasn’t great. I couldn’t move the screen, couldn’t use passthrough, and the quality was poor.
I ended up having to purchase the Grand Budapest Hotel as a youtube movie and watch it that way. From that moment on, it was great; I was laying in bed with a massive virtual theatre screen in front of me, just like Mr Carmack said you could.
It was a pretty fun experience. That said, you probably shouldn’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops just to watch a movie in VR, especially when you are subscribed to a bunch of streaming services. Just another thing for the folks at meta to add to the bucket list, I guess (:
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