Rift with movies?

I do see it happening in the future, when PC's get more powerful, that i.e. Pixar creates movies that have to/can be viewed and rendered in realtime where you can actually look around!

I don't know if VR movie theaters will ever take off, people might feel too vulnerable having their face covered amongst strangers. Now that the home theater market has grown, name-recognized studios might be able to target home-based media. So if gaming serves to make VR marketable, eventually someone will have to make a highly-marketed step into streaming environments.

Creating a riftable live-action movie would be difficult unless the viewer is tethered to the camera's position, and filmed similarly to the spherical videos found here. I don't know who can spend two hours tilting their head around before deciding it's all a novelty gimmick. It could be great however for educational or nature features. Or maybe you want a movie from the POV of the hero.

Then again, if you're going to be inside of every scene, perhaps you'll want to interact, or want to wander around in your own way. Then what you have is essentially a plot-driven riftable video game - which already exists. And games can be better than movies.

If you want to make a 2D/3D movie to 3D effect, I can recommend a converter that I am using. It's named Pavtube ByteCopy and which can convert movies to three kinds of 3D. I often use the output movie to play on my 3D TV. Hope it can also help you.

Hi all,

so check this out, haven't seen a post on this yet so wondering if anyone has figured this out. VLC Player can essentially be a stereoscopic movie player. Here is how I did it:

- latest version of VLC player
- start VLC player but do not start a movie - messing around with this while a movie is playing tends to crash the application.
- go into the Adjustments and Effects (where the equalizer is) and click the tab for Video Effects.
- there are a few sub-tabs showing but you will need to scroll all the way to the right in order to see the Advanced tab
- On Advanced you will see a setting for Clone - select this checkbox and leave at number of clones at 2
- now, you can either try to start a movie now - if vlc doesn't crash it should open two DirectX windows with the video playing. if it does crash, do the same steps again but make sure to run as administrator (windows 7) and check the write changes to config box before setting - then close VLC and reopen by right clicking the video file and open with VLC

- hard part - getting the view right
- what i did was clone my TV to the rift and forced it to display 1080p from the resolution on my TV. Then I had to disable the auto window resize thing because it actually makes it harder even though it helps with matching the video size of each output. The best way is to manually resize both to be the exact same size but offset from each other enough to get the steroscopic effect when watching through the rift. Its not that difficult to do but will need to be done each time you open a new video. The trick is to offset them enough where the edges of the video windows are in your blind spots, leaving one window overlapping the other. It can be done with a small amount of loss to the full viewable area, almost like cropping. This kind of sucks, and you will likely see a bit of the desktop background at one side, but with 720 or 1080p video its like having your own personal IMAX. Its damn clear, very nice feeling of depth, especially in scenes where the background and the foreground are moving at different rates. And to be perfectly honest, some of those movies in HD you can clearly see that fake ass green screen effect, the good thing about the crappy resolution on the rift is that it makes this difficult to differentiate from. The special effects actually look more realistic! Already have put on two or three movies just to see what they looked like and ended up watching them all the way through. anyway, give it a try, its worth the trouble once you get the effect right. Rock on rifters!