With Netflix making huge strides in the market on the daily – slowly helping to dwindle online piracy in Australia; pinpointing the exact moment we get hooked to the crack known as quality longform television – it only makes sense for the VoD platform to branch out, embrace ~the future~ and step it up a level.
Squarely conquering the TV market already, that next lev comes in the form of a media change-up: optimising Netflix for virtual reality, and launching as an app for Oculus Rift. It’s the most promising virtual reality experiment since the Yard Work Simulator, tbh.
Netflix have been toying with virtual reality for a while; overnight, however, Netflix’s Chief Technology Officer John Carmack announced the launch of Netflix’s Oculus Rift app, and detailed the process behind the “Netflix Living Room” feature. Carmack writes:
“Despite all the talk of hardcore gamers and abstract metaverses, a lot of people want to watch movies and shows in virtual reality. In fact, during the development of Gear VR, Samsung internally referred to it as the HMT, for “Head Mounted Theater.”
Current VR headsets can’t match a high end real world home theater, but in many conditions the “best seat in the house” may be in the Gear VR that you pull out of your backpack. Some of us from Oculus had a meeting at Netflix HQ last month, and when things seemed to be going well, I blurted out “Grab an engineer, let’s do this tomorrow!”
Along with Netflix now being available in VR, Minecraft is also set to take the immersive plunge: debuting on Oculus Rift in 2016.
A preview of the “living room” simulation that carries the VR can be seen below.
What a time to be alive.
Via Quartz.
