Meta Explores Home Theater Feature for Quest’s Horizon OS

Meta has always offered a way to view your own content on Quest, but navigating through a file system and peering at a windowed screen feels far from a genuine home theater experience. Now, it seems, the company is looking to change that.

Mark Rabkin, Vice President overseeing Horizon OS and Quest, recently shared on X that Meta is actively developing a home theater experience for Horizon OS. This operating system currently powers Quest and is poised to be the OS for a variety of third-party headsets in the near future.

When questioned about the absence of a dedicated first-party theater app, Rabkin responded by saying the team is “experimenting with lighting and other effects to find what works best” and is “also trying to figure out awesome sound.”

This isn’t Meta’s first foray into virtual theater environments. Back in 2014, when the company was still Facebook/Oculus, they launched Oculus Cinema for the Samsung Gear VR. This evolved into Oculus Video for both Gear VR and Rift, providing users with a unified platform to view their own content or rent movies. Late 2015 saw the release of Oculus Social, a platform allowing up to five users to watch Twitch and Vimeo streams together in various virtual theaters.

Without delving too deeply into the past and its list of now-discontinued theater apps, Meta’s most recent attempt was Horizon Home on Quest, which received a 2021 update permitting multiple users to gather in a home space to watch videos or launch VR apps together. However, this didn’t pack the specialized features of a true home theater app, like bespoke environments or advanced playback controls.

While the available content has changed over time, all these apps shared a common challenge: they added just enough friction between users and standard content, inadvertently pushing users toward more open alternatives like Bigscreen and Skybox, as well as dedicated offerings from Prime Video, YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix.

So, while Meta’s upcoming theater environment might not consolidate these diverse apps into one grand theater ecosystem, simply providing a seamless, built-in option to immerse yourself in your own content could be a substantial step forward.