videojs-vr - Watch videos in the browser in the Rift

Sean,

This is Awesome :) I think one of the core uses of Oculus (other then playing games) will be watching video content, especially on long road trips or on a plane.

questions;
-how does the full screen panoramic view look/feel?
-does it feel like you are in a movie theater?
-did you experiment with different sized windows with different aspect ratios?
-did you experiment with different resolutions or different video codecs?
-did you disable the positional tracking while watching? or leave the positional tracking enabled?
-how would you play, pause, scrub through videos?

Keep up the good Work!

Thanks!

To answer some of your questions:

-how does the full screen panoramic view look/feel?

Much like it feels in Total Cinema 360 or VR Player.

-does it feel like you are in a movie theater?

The "plane" projection is kind of like looking at the big screen. There are no seats, curtains, surroundings, etc.

-did you experiment with different sized windows with different aspect ratios?

I'm experimenting with different shapes/projections. The video should stretch as a texture over the shape. The plane projection should be the same aspect ratio as the video source.

-did you experiment with different resolutions or different video codecs?

I've only tried mp4 and ogv files. (mp4 files don't work in firefox though, but I like the airpano videos too much!)

-did you disable the positional tracking while watching? or leave the positional tracking enabled?

DK1 doesn't have postional tracking so I didn't worry about it. For DK2 I don't see why a user can't move around a bit :)

-how would you play, pause, scrub through videos?

When you move the mouse the menu comes up - you don't have to take off the Rift to seek, play, pause, etc. Only to switch videos. This does mean you still have to have your hand on the mouse which is not ideal.

BTW I'm realizing now I probably should of posted this in the show case or WIP and not general development. Sorry about that!

To clarify "does it feel like you are in a movie theater?" was to ask if the full screen panaromic view makes it feel like you are watching a video on a really big screen.

Honestly I would just focus on a simple lightweight video player (that plays anything) on the Oculus Rift rather then some complex virtual movie theater gamespace with a virtual movie screen.

Keep in mind most consumer level users would want to just instantly and easily be able to watch their favorite movies on Oculus Rift.

while on that subject...

I challenge you to hack Popcorn Time to work on Oculus Rift :P

Honestly I would just focus on a simple lightweight video player (that plays anything) on the Oculus Rift rather then some complex virtual movie theater gamespace with a virtual movie screen.

Yes that was the goal of this project. I wanted a way to easily stream and watch videos online in the rift without having to explicitly download the video and another application. I imagine there will exist a more seamless way to access the Rift's sensor data in the browser in the future.

I'm not familiar with popcorn time but if it uses html5 video tags it should be easy to integrate.

Yes that was the goal of this project. I wanted a way to easily stream and watch videos online in the rift without having to explicitly download the video and another application. I imagine there will exist a more seamless way to access the Rift's sensor data in the browser in the future.

Awesome :) glad to hear!

I'm not familiar with popcorn time but if it uses html5 video tags it should be easy to integrate.

Im not sure about html5 video tags I think 'Popcorn Time' uses P2P torrent protocols focused specifically on instantly streaming high definition video content from torrent networks and what not. Personally I like they way they combine a background torrent client with a clean lightweight video player to be able to instantly watch popular movies without any knowledge of torrent files clients torrent sites et all. It's open source and you can view the code here: https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app.

Keep up the good work!

In the demo, I can only turn left and right, but why can't I look up or look down?