Meta Explores Home Theater Experience for Quest’s Horizon OS

Meta has long offered a method to watch your content on the Quest headset, but let’s be honest, scrolling through a file system and viewing it on a small, windowed screen doesn’t exactly scream “home theater experience.” Now, Meta is toying with a more immersive solution.

Mark Rabkin, the Vice President in charge of Horizon OS and Quest, shared in a recent post on X (formerly Twitter) that the company is crafting a home theater environment for Horizon OS. This isn’t just for the Quest—it will be the operating system for many third-party VR headsets soon.

Responding to a query about why this feature isn’t already in place, Rabkin mentioned that the team is actively “[w]orking on that, playing around with lighting effects, and looking for ways to enhance sound quality.”

This isn’t Meta’s first foray into virtual theater spaces. Back in 2014, when Meta was still Facebook’s Oculus, the team launched Oculus Cinema for Samsung Gear VR. This later evolved into Oculus Video for both Gear VR and Rift, allowing users to watch their own content and rent movies directly on the headset. Following that in late 2015, Oculus Social enabled up to five people to stream Twitch and Vimeo content together in different virtual theaters.

Fast forward, and skipping a history lesson of now-discontinued apps, we see Meta’s more recent efforts with Horizon Home on Quest, updated in 2021. This update allowed users to invite friends into their virtual space for activities like watching videos and launching VR apps. However, it didn’t quite match the features you’d expect from a full-blown home theater app, such as customizable environments or sophisticated playback controls.

Meta’s previous apps all shared a similar issue: they created barriers that unintentionally nudged users toward more open and flexible alternatives like Bigscreen and Skybox, or streaming services such as Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix.

So, while Meta’s latest theater venture might not consolidate all those different apps into one grand theater setup, simply having an easy, built-in option to watch your own content immersively might just be what VR needs.