I see the potential and I experience the need regularly: I want to watch movies with friends remotely in a cool VR environment that feels like we're watching together in a theater.

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- pay to watch "a vast movie selection" of 140 films, the majority of which are anime[1]



- run the buggy (and so aptly named) Bigscreen Beta PC client[2] which will probably crash during weird unlikely edge cases like your screensaver turning on and critically depends on your internet upload speed for a good movie watching experience for everyone. Get ready for frequent "wait is it showing a black screen for you guys?" troubleshooting. It only runs on beefy PCs right now but don't worry: a macOS version is being worked on circa 2019[3].

- send the video file to everyone and get them to download it to a folder of their headset (which involves running Android File Transfer; nontechnical friends will struggle) then start a shared room. Arguably the least painful option with the best overall quality.

When it works though it's so good. Watching a film in Bigscreen feels like watching a film in an actual theater. Their drawing and popcorn throwing features are hilarious and fun. Their spacial audio is a blast. Their selection of virtual theaters is plentiful.

Here's the experience I want to watch a film with friends in Bigscreen:

I understand for that to work Bigscreen would need to make complicated partnerships happen, so in the meanwhile I'd like to be able to:

- see an invite code I can join from my headset and share with other people

Please someone create this experience. You can use WebXR[4] to do the whole thing with the web stack you already know and you could probably just download a ready-made 3D model of a movie theater[5].

I don’t see any anime on that page. Would actually be a plus for me.

That's also why your complaints about the PC side of things don't really make sense to me, as someone who's been using Bigscreen since the literal beginning.

> run the buggy (and so aptly named) Bigscreen Beta PC client[2] which will probably crash during weird unlikely edge cases like your screensaver turning on

A lot of games will do weird things if a screen saver turns on. That's why there are standard APIs to disable the screen saver while they're running, which are also used by media players. Bigscreen, like most games, does this, so if you're even getting the screen saver kicking on something has gone wrong specific to your setup.

> and critically depends on your internet upload speed for a good movie watching experience for everyone.

Yeah, that's the nature of hosting a peer-to-peer stream. The host needs to have the bandwidth. Are you expecting Bigscreen's developers to provide high bandwidth video relaying to their users for free?

> Get ready for frequent "wait is it showing a black screen for you guys?" troubleshooting.

I've watched many movies with friends in Bigscreen and never had this. Plenty of issues getting audio hooked up right thanks to the need to use an awkward virtual soundcard on Windows, especially with surround sources, but video always worked fine.

If by "beefy" you mean literally the original 2016 recommended specs for PC VR, a 4th-gen Intel quad core and a GeForce 970, then sure? A PC that was maybe $1500 including the monitor when it was built in late 2014. Then yeah, sure, "beefy".

It's never going to run on any Intel integrated graphics systems that exist at the time of this post, but there are four generations of dedicated GPUs and eight generations of Intel CPUs that have come out since the first machine I hosted a Bigscreen room on, which is still my secondary gaming PC to this day.

In the end it's still a VR game, if your computer struggles with Minecraft it's never going to run VR anything well, but basically anything that honestly deserved the title "gaming computer" in the better part of the last decade should be able to do it.

> but don't worry: a macOS version is being worked on circa 2019[3].

Apple has basically neglected the idea of gaming on macOS. They were already far behind on OpenGL and then abandoned it entirely for Metal, which is great for portability between Mac and iOS but for titles that will never target phones or tablets it makes the Mac a much more annoying niche to develop for.

Both Valve and Oculus had at least discussed if not announced plans for Mac support for their VR systems initially, but even then basically only the Mac Pro could actually meet the minimum requirements.

You understand why the direct streaming approach isn't going to work out, but that's also why they'll never do what you ask for with regards to being able to upload a video. At that point they'd again be providing bandwidth and also have to deal with piracy issues. P2P streams are not their problem in any way.