The first time I joined a cinema room I didn’t know I would be sitting next to people. I turned and looked on my left and a bunch of people were looking at me. I screamed out loud (didn’t know my mic was on also) and everybody laughed. That was magical somewhat.

We have this functionality over at vrland.io as well, and it doesn't require going through FB's walled garden Oculus store.

It's like a web-based VRChat, so it will work on any device with a browser. If Apple ships WebXR when they release their headset next year, it will work by default there too. Universal, decentralized, and free of walled gardens. That's the definition of the metaverse! Our team is on a mission to build a immersive version of the web in 3D and VR.

Check it out here:

https://vrland.io/cinema

This is very reminiscent of Active Worlds[1][2], right down to how you drop-in and interact with the world.

Would have thought after 25-years we would have developed the value proposition better, and not the client.

1. https://activeworlds.com/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

This makes me feel old, thanks for that.

Haha, sorry friend, but still, memories of cranking up that 56k and logging on to Active Worlds night after night. Well, everything is illuminated I guess.

Haha it’s a bit of a party with the hacker news crowd

Is there a way to sit? I got a hang of the controls within a minute which is pretty impressive for touchscreen on mobile, but FYI it was pretty easy to back up to a wall such that my camera was behind the wall while I was still in front of it, so I couldn’t see anything.

I wonder if it would be any easy fix to make the wall surfaces one-sided.

Thanks for trying it out!!!

Yes there is, if you're on mobile. I will join now and walk you through

O, I heard you talking for a minute but I’m having some trouble.

On using Safari on an iPhone SE (v. 2020) I gave access to microphone but it wasn’t clear if it was muted by default, when I tapped to mute, all of the audio cut out, which was unexpected, I was just trying to mute myself to be polite.

And when I open the chat, and click in the text field, it highlights with blue edge and my keyboard opens, but nothing I type is reflected in the text box, and I see no way to submit.

Best of luck, it’s an ambitious project.

Isn’t it like watching potato quality? We had the first oculus rift at our office many years ago and there was an app to play video files in a movie theatre. But the resolution was so bad it was like watching a VHS. I see the potential here but the quality/resolution is going to have to take a huge leap.

It is quite good. I have watched hours of shows and movies on the Quest 2. The resolution of your virtual cinema screen is essentially 1080p, which really is not bad. The main drawback is the quality of the lenses as they can add blur outside the sweet spot, god rays and chromatic aberration. I think these devices are only a few hardware generations away from delivering on the promise of a no compromises cinema in a bag.

My problem with VR is that I wear glasses — I never could get comfortable with a headset over my glasses.

Yeah, me either. They are definitely not designed to be worn over glasses comfortably. I ended up getting custom lenses that clip over the headset lenses because I play Beat Saber enough to justify it.

As a fellow glasses-wearer I can say that I've had a good experience with the Valve Index, which lets me adjust the distance between the lenses and my face enough that my glasses fit comfortably.

I've read that it's also possible, at least for some headsets and levels of correction, to purchase custom lenses such that you don't need glasses at all while wearing the headset.

You can buy prescription lenses from third parties that you insert into the headset. Then, no glasses are needed.

I have a Quest 2, and I 3D printed some inserts from Thingiverse. They were designed to be used with the lenses from a specific set of glasses on Zenni Optical, which I ordered in my prescription (~$20).

Now I can use my Quest 2 without glasses :)

My oculus quest 1 works just fine over my glasses (had to add the little foam insert that came with it). Not sure about the 2, though.

I've used vroptician.com with my Valve Index and it works great.

It seems a lot of people don't know about the jump in quality between the headsets that came out. The original oculus was leapfrogged fairly quickly by the HTC Vive, and then that was eventually superseded by later headsets like the pimax, Valve Index, and Quest. If you haven't tried any of them I definitely recommend testing one out, the difference is very noticeable.

Not only watching videos but even reading text is much easier in the latest headsets. Unfortunately many people have only tried the older or commodity VR solutions and think that's the limit of the technology. This is largely due to the price and physical setup required for some of the better headsets, but already there are some great setups out there.

Maybe? We also tried the same thing with the vive and it still was like looking at a potato IMO. Maybe the very latest devices are much better - I very much look forward to trying these.

It seems the lenses on the quest 2 are a bit of a hit-or-miss and vary in quality between each unit/batch.

My headset had a sweet-spot where the image was clear on maybe 5% of the screen, making it potato-vr for video and text. Others (on reddit) had the same complaints.

If you're considering buying one, make sure you're also able to return it in case the lens-quality of the batch is sub-par.

I had the same experience with Google Daydream (RIP). It's a really neat immersive experience to try out a couple times, but I could never seriously watch anything in there because it was just plain unpleasant.

I like the VHS comparison, but I would argue it's worse than that because you get a weird screen door effect if you're on any kind of angle that tends to distort things weirdly. I think Netflix had a decent tradeoff where the "screen" was rather large, but it feels like sitting in the front row of an IMAX where you're moving your head to see everything.

It should just come down to the source files and the hardware. The Quest 2 is 1832x1920 per eye but with the FOV it probably can only really render 1080p video if you're watching it in something like BigScreen.

I use mine to watch 3D movies and it's pretty great. I missed out on seeing Avatar in theaters so being able to watching it in 3D without waiting for a re-release or anything is convenient.

I don't own one so I can't say for sure, but if you mean the original oculus devkit that thing had terrible resolution compared to the quest 2 and others

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_realit...

Bigscreen VR lets you use local files. You can share them via e-mail with people who only have the headset and no PC, and they can use the occulus browser to download the file to the headset.

This essentially means the quality is up to you. I usually re-encode 1080p+ files to 720p to add volume gain and burn-in subtitles. It looks great, imo.

It's not incredible now, but it's a lot better than it once was. I watched a few movies on an airplane recently and I noticed some fuzziness at first, but stopped noticing it after a while.

This was on quest 1

Rift CV1 was 1080x1200 per eye, Quest 2 is 1832 x 1920 per eye. I haven't used one (have a Quest 1) but I hear it's quite good.

This sounds awesome and I've also thought about a VR headset for regular console games. Can you comment on if that is a good idea and which specs/devices I might compare for that? I have no interest in most actual VR games until there is something "killer".

Steam has a setup that allows you to play regular games in what looks/feels like a large home theater. I haven't used it short of checking it out, but it looked nice.

The Quest 2 might be getting official android app support. You could use that to wirelessly stream through the Xbox app possibly. Future state.

It will indeed. It's frustrating that all of this is going much slower than I thought it would though. I feel like AR and this and the big ML GAN breakthroughs are still like 10-20 years away from now. (From my recollection it's felt like a year away for like 7-9 years now.) My kids are going to have such a fun time with it once its actually here but I'll be near middle age before the next wave is actually mature.

That sounds awesome. I've been ignoring VR, maybe it's time to look into getting a headset.

Not OP, but have had similar experiences with VR. I absolutely LOVE VR. It makes all forms of gaming 10x more exciting / interesting / immersive.

I still think the content isn’t nearly as mature as say, the traditional PC gaming or PS/Xbox games, but it’s slowly getting there. Hopefully as more people adopt VR, bigger and bigger publishers will see it as a profitable domain.

If you’re a Skyrim fan, check out some recent Skyrim VR (with mods) videos… It’s a truly mind blowing experience!

What about motion sickness? Is it possible to play comfortably for longer periods of time?

It depends a lot on the type of game I think. For me and from what I've observed, the motion sickness tends to come from a mismatch between what you're eyes are seeing what what your body is experiencing.

So any game where you're not moving besides when you're actually walking around in meatspace generally doesn't seem to trigger that "oh god you ate the bad mushrooms abort abort" reflex.

The other area this can kind of sneak up on you is if you're trying to use a device/PC that isn't really up to par and the frame rate is dropping. You cross a threshold where it's not quite keeping up with your movements and get the same mismatch between your movement and what your eyes are seeing and it makes you sick.

So to that end, stuff like SUPERHOT VR or Beat Saber you can generally play comfortably for hours. I've thrown my 85 year old grandmother who gets horribly car sick into Job Simulator for an hour without any problems.

It's a pretty short easy leap to any games that provide "blink" movement where you just kinda point at a new spot and suddenly you're there. Literally "blink" and when you open your eyes you're in a different place. A lot of great games support this style of movement and it's usually pretty comfortable--there's no actual motion to the movement. Something like Half Life Alyx has been pretty comfortable and fun (besides being absolutely terrifying waiting for headcrabs or zombies to get me) with this movement method.

Any racing or flight simulators where there's constant motion are generally the stuff that even still get me. I've acclimatized a bit and can actually play them now for an hour or two at a time, but certainly not indefinitely.

EDIT: This is all with an old HTC Vive. I did used to own a Oculus DK2. The extra 15Hz or so refresh rate and a more powerful PC made a _huge_ difference in how sick the simple stuff made me.

I personally don't experience any motion sickness. I have a friend who does.

It seems totally individual. What I have heard is that if you do experience motion sickness, it eventually acclimates. Most games have a plethora of "comfort" settings designed to help reduce motion sickness (snap turning, vignette, teleport motin, etc.)...

You acclimate over time. Always best to stop the moment you feel a hint of motion sickness. I purposefully took it quite slow and played only roomscale games without any artificial movement for the first few weeks. Now I can play for any length of time, until the batteries die or my legs give out.

> It makes all forms of gaming 10x more exciting / interesting / immersive.

Wow, I couldn't disagree more with that statement. I'm very very aware I'm playing a game in VR bacause I have to be constantly aware of the space limitations, which often isn't handled well by games that expect a larger space than I have. Not to mention trying not to trip on the cables (which Quest[0] doesn't have I guess, so there's that), and the relatively uncomfortable headset...

In fact, so far I'd say I've played a total of two games that I thought did well with VR: SUPERHOT and Beat Saber.

[0] Because Facebook is involved, I will never own one.

It’s understandable and defensible to not use it because of Facebook, but I gotta say that Quest (especially Quest 2) is a qualitatively different and better experience than a lot of PCVR.

I had a conversation with an Israeli guy about smart grids and the iron dome while watching old Bond movies. Highly recommend Big Screen. Eye contact, hand gestures and the occasional air drawing go a long way to connect people.

Do you build a 3D avatar using your face or something?

It's pretty dumb, think of building your Mii on the Wii, plus some basic heuristics if you turn your head towards someone past a threshold, your avatar makes eye contact. It works more than enough to trick your brain.

Is there a way to do that while using your surround sound system? Because that would be amazing.

Actually you don't really need it because positional head tracking will pin the sounds to their proper points in space, quite similar to the same feature on the airpods. You can plug in better headphones of course.

You could use the headphone jack and plug it into your stereo.

What tech do you use to do this?

I use an Occulus 2 headset, Bigscreen VR app, headphones, and that's it really. I personally prefer hooking my Occulus 2 up to a PC, but it's not required unless you're doing a room with more than 4 people in it but that's just for the person hosting the room.

Participants only need the headset and app.

BigScreenVR, a Quest 2 and a network share with your video file and an internet connection.

Ah, it supports... ehh, sideloading of liberally licensed media files. Smart move.

and tech in general.. everything is getting more and more goof-around-able and I'm here for it!