Meta is working on a dedicated virtual home theater for Quest
Meta is working to improve the home theater experience on Quest devices.
Meta Quest's operating system, Horizon OS, provides a simple theater view. You can maximize a panel that supports this view, and the panel moves to the center and expands to a floating large screen. In this mode, you can toggle passthrough mode on and off, curve the screen, or dim the virtual or physical environment to your liking.
This theater view is ideal for watching Netflix or Amazon Prime movies without other windows in the way.
VR enthusiast Luna sees this mode as expandable, suggesting a dedicated home theater environment that goes beyond the current virtual environments, with the screen light bouncing off the home theater walls for a more realistic viewing experience.
Metas Quest boss Mark Rabkin reacted to the X post and wrote:
"Working on all that, experimenting with lighting and other effects to see what's best. Also trying to figure out awesome sound."
Working on all that, experimenting with lighting and other effects to see what's best. Also trying to figure out awesome sound. Let us know what you'd want to see from in an environment / mode like that!
- Mark Rabkin (@mrabkin) January 20, 2025
Rabkin didn't elaborate on what he means by "awesome sound", but he could have referred to a feature Meta calls acoustic ray tracing that accurately models reflections and reverberations of sound in a virtual environment, creating a better sense of space and depth.
The idea of an immersive home theater environment with realistic light reflections is not new and has been offered by apps like Virtual Desktop for years.
Another way to improve the home theater experience would be to make the virtual screen more realistic in passthrough mode, with light bouncing off the real environment, using Quest's 3D room scan. An early PC-based experiment shows what a realistic mixed reality screen could look like.
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