Bigscreen, the social VR app that lets you mirror your monitor in virtual reality, is about to release one of its biggest updates yet. Starting today, select Bigscreen users will have access to what the company calls ‘Big Rooms’, a space that lets a room’s creator broadcast whatever they want to “dozens” of users, essentially creating a giant viewing party. The update will roll out to regular users in the next few days.
Since its 2016 launch, Bigscreen has supported up to 4 people per room, making the experiences decidedly more intimate than some of its social VR contemporaries. Still, the app is so far unique in its ability to let up to 4 users stream their own monitors to each other, allowing for smaller shared viewing sessions and “virtual LAN parties,” as the company puts it.
While the app has improved its ease-of-use, avatar builder, and has been overhauled to bring streaming video quality to a max of 1080p 30 fps, the number of users allowed in a single room has remained the same.
These regular 4-person rooms will still exist moving forward, but now you have the choice of creating a normal room, or a ‘Big Room’, which will give the room’s creator sole access to the main viewing screen, letting you stream a movie, create a virtual meetup or conference, or watch a livestream of an eSports tournament with a much larger number of users.
Although the official announcement doesn’t specify the exact max number of users allowed in one room, the Big Rooms update is said to support “dozens” of people in the same shared space.
Founder and CEO of Bigscreen Darshan Shankar says that all rooms are peer-to-peer encrypted, meaning both voice chat and desktop screens “stream directly to friends in the room. Your data doesn’t stream through our servers, which is great for privacy. You can invite many friends into your Big Room, depending on your Internet speed (upload bandwidth).”
You can download Bigscreen for free on Steam for Vive and Rift, or Oculus Home for Rift.
Below: a ‘Big Room’ hosted on the penthouse roof, image courtesy Bigscreen
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Source: Road To VR