Starting Thursday, you'll be able to enter a virtual room where you can meet up with your friends to chat, watch movies, and play video games. That's what BigScreen, marking the return of LAN parties but in virtual reality.
Darshan Shankar is a software engineer who has been working for the past two years on BigScreen, the first virtual reality desktop. This software lets you access a kind of virtual room with multiple screens, where you can also meet up with your friends connected in the same room, using positional audio so users can communicate with each other inside the virtual room. And what can I do here, you might ask? The answer is simple: interact and entertain yourself with other users. BigScreen is the return of LAN parties but in virtual reality.
BigScreen offers you many options. To start, you can start a conversation with your friends, play video games (including games on Steam) and watch movies or videos from services like Netflix, YouTube, Twitch and even VLC (on an IMAX screen). You can choose, customize and adjust the screen to the height, position and curvature for ergonomic comfort. For now, the party of this software is a bit exclusive since it only allows up to four users connected in the same room. The good thing is that it has cross-platform compatibility for those users who have both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Before the launch of the BigScreen beta, Shankar explained that bandwidth and hardware requirements depend on the resolution users select and on how many people are sharing the same virtual environment. Meanwhile, in the future, it is already planned to charge for improvements such as customizable avatars and environments, and it will add support for the Vive controller. Developed by Darshan Shankar, the BigScreen beta will be available for free download on Steam starting April 28, 2016 for those users who own HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
BigScreen
