Meta Explores Home Theater Experience for Quest’s Horizon OS

Meta has long provided the capability to view personal content on the Quest headset, though navigating through a file system to watch on a basic windowed panel hardly delivers the immersive experience synonymous with a home theater. The company is now exploring ways to revamp this aspect.

Mark Rabkin, Vice President overseeing Horizon OS and Quest, recently shared via an X post that Meta is developing a home theater experience for Horizon OS. This system is not only the backbone of Quest’s operating system but is also set to become the standard for a new wave of third-party headsets.

Upon encountering queries about why such a feature hasn’t already been launched, Rabkin explained that the team is hard at work experimenting with various lighting and effects to determine optimal settings. They are also striving to enhance the audio experience.

Meta isn’t new to experimenting with theater environments. Back in 2014, when the company was still known as Facebook/Oculus, it introduced Oculus Cinema for Samsung Gear VR. This would eventually evolve into Oculus Video, providing a unified platform to watch personal content and rent movies for viewing directly on the device. In late 2015, Oculus Social was introduced, enabling up to five users to gather and enjoy Twitch and Vimeo streams together in diverse virtual theater settings.

Fast forward several years, and you’ll find that Meta’s last endeavor in this realm was with Horizon Home on Quest. Introduced in 2021, this update allowed multiple users to join a shared home space, facilitating communal video watching and VR app launches. Despite its promise, it lacked many features found in a dedicated home theater app, such as customizable environments and advanced playback controls.

Over time, the offerings of these apps have fluctuated, yet a common trend has persisted: they have often presented enough obstacles that users have turned to more open options. Third-party apps like Bigscreen and Skybox, as well as streaming giants with native apps such as Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix, have been favored for their accessibility and flexibility.

Looking ahead, Meta’s upcoming venture into a dedicated theater setting might not succeed in unifying all these disparate applications into one superb theater experience. Nevertheless, simply providing a built-in, easily accessible means to view personal content in an immersive environment could prove to be a compelling draw for many users.