Hey everyone!
Over the past year, we’ve been working on a massive new update for Bigscreen with real-time raytracing lighting effects, new environments, new avatars, new VR UI, a Windows audio driver, and more.
Watch the launch trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oNHkUUHMdw
New Cinema environment with amphitheater-style curved seating
Raytraced real-time screen lighting. Light from the big screen shines into the room with realistic raytraced beams. It even works on Mobile VR headsets.
New UI — the brand new Bigscreen Menu is beautifully designed to be powerful and easy to use across all platforms & headsets
Upgraded Avatars with new hairstyles, beards, and hats
- New Room features: change the name, privacy, and settings on the fly
- Oculus Overlay support: improved visuals and clarity when displaying your desktop on the big screen
- New Teleportation. This new feature lets you move around environments, while also making it easier to change your seat. Also added snap rotation.
- Improved Desktop audio streaming with the new Bigscreen Audio Driver for Windows 10 PCs. Desktop audio streaming used to have lots of issues and bugs (ex. 5.1/7.1 headphones). It is now easy and automatic!
- New social Lobby, a place to hangout and meet other people.
- New Bigscreen Accounts. Create and login to your new Bigscreen account. This will be used for the upcoming friend/party system, and “Bigscreen Movie Nights”
- Mobile VR headsets can now create public & private rooms — anyone can join your room, from any PC or mobile VR headset (fully cross-platform)
- Mobile VR headsets have significantly improved performance and battery life, especially in larger rooms with 5–15 people.
Major bugs have been fixed
Many of the worst bugs and problems from the past couple years have now been fixed and improved. Notably if you had the following issues, please try using Bigscreen again. Here are a few of the many bugs we solved:
- fixed support for 5.1 and 7.1 headphones, and SPDIF/USB DAC audio devices
- fixed desktop audio streaming bugs where your audio would stop working, get muted, or stutter when people leave the room
- fixed UI bugs where the UI would become frozen or irresponsive
- fixed crashes when people would join/leave your room
- fixed server bug where people would fail to properly join/leave rooms
What’s NEXT?
We have been working on several significant updates that will launch in the next couple months after the 2019 Update. These updates will include:
- Friend/party system: invite friends into your rooms easily, and get notifications
- Videoplayer: watch videos stored locally on your PC or Mobile VR headset. This videoplayer has an easy-to-use VR UI, making it easier to watch videos, especially 3D movies.
- Streaming & performance improvements: while the performance has improved in the 2019 Update, more significant tech is coming soon that enables much better performance and streaming in larger 12-person rooms
- Bigscreen Movie Nights: last year, we did a few pilot tests of “movie nights” where we hosted a movie. We plan to sell “virtual movie tickets” for our movie nights.
- Oculus Quest: Bigscreen has been a launch title on every major VR headset for the past 3 years — such as Oculus Rift, Oculus Touch, and Oculus Go — and Bigscreen will launch on the Oculus Quest later this year!
- Bigscreen 1.0: by the summer, we expect to leave “beta” and launch 1.0. Expect a whole new level of polish, reliability, and functionality by then.
Let me know if you have bugs, issues, or feedback with this new update.
We have been working so hard on this major overhaul of Bigscreen, and I hope you enjoy it.
- Bigscreen Team