My girlfriend was incredulous about one of the big announcements coming out of Oculus Connect yesterday: a fully integrated
Admittedly, it's sort of weird. We're not exactly hurting for ways to watch Netflix here in 2015. But there are some basic plusses to putting streaming video on a pair of goggles. First, it allows you to pretend you have a much larger TV than you actually do, no matter where you are. So you could be on an airplane and watching an iMax movie, theoretically. The second major benefit is basically the same thing as all VR: it allows you to pretend that you're not living in your tiny apartment, and instead you're in Jerry Seinfeld's living room (Hulu also has an app). Or a grey void, if that's your thing. The demo Netflix showed whisked the user away to some cozy mountaintop cabin, hardwood floors and a tasteful coffee table. It's almost like being wealthy.
At the end of the day, however, this is the sort of thing that happens with all new technology: we're not quite sure what to do with it, and so we just do the stuff we already knew how to do. Plenty of early movies were just films of plays, one of the earliest ideas of a tablet was the "e-book," which basically just tried to be as close to a book as possible. We're going to see a lot of this with VR. People have been working with flat screens for a very long time, and there's a certain level of comfort operating on both the developer and the consumer side. We see the same things with games: a lot of the demos that I've seen are basically indistinguishable from traditional titles, just with a much larger field of vision.
So that's how we end up with Netflix on VR: it won't change the world, but it will offer a nice little entry point for anyone who's curious about how to actually use this weird new toy. It's a natural step in the evolution of any new technology. What's most interesting, of course, will be what happens next.
