Recently, Plex announced its brand new Plex VR app. Watching movies in VR is nothing new, but Plex also announced a newer, more interesting feature: Watch Together. You and up to three friends, each with your own VR headsets, can sit in a virtual living room and watch movies or TV together—no matter where you are in the world.
While we were impressed with the experience, it leaves us with one question: why does this have to be VR in the first place?Plex VR Is a Genuine Delight to Use
Before I start pining for features that don’t exist, let’s talk about the ones that do. Plex VR is a standalone app built for Google Daydream that gives you a virtual theater and menu where you can watch anything in your Plex library. The default space is a luxury penthouse apartment with a coffee table, covered in cups, popcorn bowls, and plates. You can pick up each of these and throw them around the room. There’s no point to this, but it’s fun, especially if you feel like throwing popcorn at a bad movie.
Whether or not you like the idea of watching a movie in a virtual theater, the Plex VR experience is a polished one.
As you browse through your Plex library, you can grab individual cards floating in front of you and set them down. Say you want to look through your library to find something to watch, you can physically pick out a couple candidates, set them down on the couch, read through the descriptions of each one and, when you’re ready, hit play on one to bring up a floating screen to watch the movie. Once you play a movie, the blinds in your “apartment” even automatically close, dimming the virtual room for a better view.
You can even resize the virtual in-room movie screen to be as big or as small within the virtual space as you want.Virtual reality theaters aren’t necessarily the best way to watch a movie—you’re basically putting a magnifying glass up to your phone’s screen, which results in a very pixelated video—but Plex VR at least manages to make it fun. If you don’t have a fancy home theater, or if you want to watch a movie on an airplane, you could do worse than Plex VR.
Inviting Friends to the Party Is Where the Real Magic Starts
Sitting with a VR headset on your couch watching a movie is still a little too silly to get off the ground if you have another option (like even a modest TV or a laptop with a big screen). That’s presumably why Plex offered something compelling that you can’t do with your normal home theater: watch with friends across the globe.
Plex’s Watch Together feature lets you invite up to three other friends—all with their own Daydream headsets and Plex accounts, naturally—to join you in your virtual theater. Their floating avatars will appear on…
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