‘Bigscreen’ Overhaul Brings Big Improvements & New Features to All Supported Platforms

Bigscreen Inc. today launched what the studio calls a “massive” update to Bigscreen Beta, including real-time raytracing lighting effects, new environments, avatars, VR UI, and a few other bits and bobs that should also make mobile VR users happy too.

Bigscreen Beta is a free social VR platform that lets you directly mirror and share your desktop to other user, which includes support for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, all SteamVR-compatible headsets. Bigscreen also supports Oculus Go and Samsung Gear VR mobile VR headsets, albeit with remote desktop streaming done via WiFi.

Today’s update is the result of a year-long development cycle, bringing many user-requested features as well as fixes to “some of the biggest bugs & problems that our users have experienced,” Bigscreen founder and CEO Darshan Shankar says in a blogpost.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most important features coming in today’s update—now live on Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR) and the Oculus Store for both Rift and mobile VR:

Real-time Raytraced Lighting Effects

Previous versions of Bigscreen’s dynamic screen lighting were both graphically demanding and only available on PC VR headsets, leaving mobile VR headsets out entirely.

Now, the studio has included raytracing techniques using stochastic sampling and blue noise dithering, which were created to cast rays of light from the big screen into the environment for a greater touch realism.

Image courtesy Bigscreen

Since the implementation has been deemed less GPU-intensive, mobile VR headsets are getting the raytracing-based light effects too, which ought to make the app’s various cinema environments pop.

We had a chance to go hands-on with the latest build for PC, and while it’s a pretty subtle change, it’s certainly moving into the realm of eerily convincing.

Mobile VR Room Creation

Before now, mobile VR headset users were sort of second class citizens to the platform. Although the screen mirroring functionality works via desktop streaming, users on Oculus Go and Gear VR couldn’t create rooms .

Image courtesy Bigscreen

This has changed with today’s update, now allowing mobile VR users to  set up public or private rooms that anyone can join irrespective of their chosen platform.

On mobile, the studio says the update also comes with “significantly improved performance and battery life, especially in larger rooms with 5–15 people.”

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New Environment & Lobby

Out with the old, in with the new. A new amphitheater-style cinema is now live—and an even more sumptuous and shiny than ever.

Image courtesy Bigscreen

Besides the fresh new visuals, the space also features curved seating designed to make chatting with fellow watchers a little easier—something the studio maintains is especially appealing to mobile VR headset users since the 3DOF limitation doesn’t let you lean forward.

Also, long gone are the days of hopping into rooms blindly, attempting to get a word in edgewise with other users while a movie blares in the background. Bigscreen Beta now has a movie theater-style lobby space where you can pop in and meet new people if that’s your thing.

Image courtesy Bigscreen

Laden with plenty of ‘coming soon’ doors leading to inaccessible theaters, the new lobby appears to be a launching off point for events and movie nights; the studio says they’ll be hosting events and selling virtual movie tickets there.

New Avatars & VR UI

The new avatar creator still retains its cartoony charm, although both masculine and feminine avatar hairstyles now have what the studio calls “a more sculpted art style.” To boot, there’s plenty more facial hair options and hats in the mix so you can create an more personalized look.

Image courtesy Bigscreen

Selecting avatars and everything else in Bigscreen is also a bit easier with the new UI, which allows finger-presses and pointer selection; big buttons, clearly labeled settings and a visual overhaul makes it feel fresh and a little less cumbersome.

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Squashed Bugs

Bigscreen is unique: there’s truly nothing like it out right now that lets you have full control over your computer and let you share it indiscriminately with others. While the app isn’t without its niggles, the studio says they’ve fixed many of the bugs that users have commented on in the past including:

  • support for 5.1 and 7.1 headphones, and SPDIF/USB DAC audio devices
  • desktop audio streaming bugs where your audio would stop working, get muted, or stutter when people leave the room
  • UI bugs where the UI would become frozen or irresponsive
  • crashes when people would join/leave your room
  • server bug where people would fail to properly join/leave rooms

The Near Future

More updates are coming in the next few months, including (yes, you guessed it) support for Oculus Quest, slated for sometime later this year.

The studio says Bigscreen will also likely see its official ‘1.0’ launch out of beta sometime in Summer 2019, which should include a “whole new level of polish, reliability, and functionality,” Shankar says. Other future 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.

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‘Bigscreen’ Overhaul to Bring “massive new features” Over Next 3 Months

The developers behind Bigscreen Beta, the social VR app that lets you stream and share your desktop’s screen in VR, have been pretty quiet over the past year, although that’s about to change in what studio CEO & founder Darshan Shankar calls some “massive new features” coming to the app.

“We have been heads down totally overhauling Bigscreen with some massive new features that will be rolling out in a series of updates in the next 3 months,” Shankar says in a reddit post. “The biggest problems, bugs, frustrations you have had with Bigscreen Beta have been fixed in this update, along with some beautiful new features.”

Bigscreen Beta’s first update of the year is slated to arrive in two weeks to Steam (Rift, Vive, Windows VR), Oculus Store (Rift), and the mobile Oculus Store (Gear VR, Oculus Go).

Image courtesy Bigscreen

The first big reveal: a new avatar system that brings even more choices so you can create a unique you, replete with new hats, hair, and beards. According to the video (linked below), Bigscreen is also getting new environments and “even more features.”

“We plan to spend the next week or two testing this before releasing it to the whole world,” Shankar says, referring to the first update.

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Bigscreen Beta is a free app that lets you mirror your desktop in VR, be it in a social environment for collective viewing or gaming, or alone in your own personal movie theater. The app has seen several updates since it was first released in mid-2016, including support for up to 12 users in bespoke ‘Big Rooms’ and vastly improved streaming quality.

Since all Bigscreen rooms are peer-to-peer encrypted, both voice chat and desktop screens stream directly to people in the room; they aren’t hosted on the company’s servers, meaning only one friend needs a Netflix account to start that all-night viewing party.

Users looking for a preview can help test out the new functions by joining Bigscreen’s Discord channel (invite link). If this is only the first update to an admittedly “massive” overhaul, we can’t wait to see what’s next.

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‘Bigscreen’ Coming to Mobile VR in Q2, Gear VR Alpha Test Starts Today

Bigscreen is a unique social VR application which lets users bring their desktop screens and all the capabilities of their PC into VR with them. That means friends can come together virtually for LAN parties, streaming sessions, and much more. In Q2, Bigscreen will come to mobile VR headsets for the first time, allowing the mobile VR crowd to join their desktop brethren and get in on the fun. Starting today, Gear VR users can sign up for Bigscreen’s mobile alpha test.

Bigscreen is set to come to Gear VR, Oculus Go, and Daydream mobile VR headsets in Q2, the company announced today. In the meantime, if you own a Gear VR you can sign up for the Bigscreen mobile alpha test here.

Bigscreen founder Darshan Shankar says that Bigscreen mobile will have both singleplayer and multiplayer elements. Even though mobile VR headsets don’t have their own desktop to share, other features like a video player, 3D painting tools, and intriguing PC-to-mobile streaming are planned. The company breaks it down on their blog:

  1. Public & private rooms are supported, with 4–12 players per room. Mobile VR users can join rooms to watch videos and hangout together. Mobile VR users will eventually be able to create their own multiplayer rooms, but not during the Alpha Test.
  2. Mobile VR users will also be able to attend our live movie screenings, like our Paramount Pictures’ Top Gun 3D VR movie night and our Stargate movie night with MGM.
  3. The video player will allow you to watch videos stored locally on your device. We plan to eventually support various streaming services within our video player as well.
  4. PC-to-Mobile desktop streaming allows you to stream your Windows PC’s desktop screen into your Mobile VR headset over WiFi without the need to be tethered to your PC. This allows you to sit on your couch, pull up a movie or videogame on your PC, and see it on a huge screen in your headset.

The Bigscreen mobile alpha won’t have any single player features, but players will be able to join rooms hosted by PC VR users, which support up to 12 players per room. In the future, mobile users will be able to host their own multiplayer rooms.

The company also plans to bring Bigscreen to PSVR later this year.

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‘Bigscreen’ Overhaul Brings High-Quality Multiplayer Video Streaming, More Users Per-room to Follow

Bigscreen is a social VR app which lets VR users bring their PC desktops into virtual reality, as if sitting at their computer next to friends or co-workers. Users inside of Bigscreen can see each other’s desktops which means you can watch movies or play games together. With Bigscreen still in beta, the streaming functionality has been hit or miss, but a new update promises to bring “flawless” 1080p streaming at 30 FPS to everyone.

Update (7/25/17): We got a chance to try out Bigscreen’s promised 1080p 30 FPS video streaming. While we can’t profess to have run any type of reliable metric to see empirically if it was working as advertised, visually there was little discernible difference between locally played 1080p 30FPS content (i.e. the verifiable target fidelity) and content streamed between two people. Whether it was watching two other people stream video contemporaneously in split-screen mode on the 100-foot cinema screen, or sharing smaller personal screens while sitting next to each other—it seemed to conform to the level of visual fidelity we expected. That said, minor hiccups did occur once or twice during initial video buffering where locally displayed video was superior to streamed video including a few dropped frames that we estimate dipped into 15-20 FPS territory, but over the course of testing several videos we saw these issues as few and far between. We were also told that there are still outstanding issues regarding global desktop audio, but we didn’t encounter anything during our demo—both with and without the Bigscreen staff—that would suggest anything showstopping. Tests were conducted with users chatting between California and Europe. The patch will be available today for Rift through the Oculus Store and HTC Vive and Rift through Steam.

Update (7/15/17): Bigscreen has confirmed the new update will launch for everyone on July 25th and has teased the update with a new GIF:

 

For those interested in helping to test the update ahead of the launch, Bigscreen invites you to join the Bigscreen Community chat server on Discord and join the private alpha test. The original article continues below.

Original Article (7/7/17): Your computer can do a million things—browse the web, watch YouTube, edit movies, create documents, send email, play games, and on and on—what if you could just bring your PC into virtual reality and join up with friends? Then you’d be in a room with your friends and their PCs, which can also do a million things. That’s the surprisingly simple idea that makes Bigscreen magical.

But, making it happen relies on being able to stream desktops between each user with solid performance. For many users using Bigscreen’s multiplayer mode, streaming screens has been sub-par, making desirable social activities like watching Netflix or playing games with friends impossible due to choppy framerates which could often look more like slideshows than moving video.

That’s all about to change, says Bigscreen founder Darshan Shankar. He and his team have been working on a major overhaul of the app’s streaming tech and a new version will bring smooth, high quality desktop streaming to all users. Shankar explains:

We’ve spent the past year rewriting our media engine and networking stack from scratch. Our new technology takes advantage of Nvidia and AMD graphics cards for hardware accelerated encoding and decoding, enabling flawless 1080p30 streaming for all Bigscreen Multiplayer users. Previously, Bigscreen multiplayer would perform poorly for some users and consume 80-100% of CPU. Our new tech doesn’t use the CPU or GPU resources that games use, and instead uses the dedicated video acceleration chips on the graphics cards. It’s a massive increase in performance and functionality.

The performance enhancements brought by the new streaming tech will do more than just make your friend’s screen smooth, it will also open the door to raising the current limitation of four users per room. Shankar says that another update following the streaming overhaul (in the next one or two months) will enable rooms supporting somewhere between 6 to 10 users at a time, and maybe even more down the road.

Image courtesy Bigscreen

Bigscreen users who use the app in single player as a VR desktop environment also have something to look forward to: optimizations from the overhaul can “reduce CPU usage by 50% and reduce GPU usage in some environments by 60%,” Shankar says.

The update will also come with expanded support for Windows 7 and laptops with Nvidia Optimus graphics, and will bring with it an IMAX-sized cinema environment with “real-time lighting and a new artificial intelligence NPC system.”

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For those wanting to love Bigscreen, but struggling to do so because of streaming problems, the forthcoming update could be a defining moment. Shankar says the new version is in private alpha presently and is due out “in a couple weeks.”

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‘Bigscreen’ Social Computing Space Metrics Show Big Value for VR Power Users

darshan-shankarBigscreen VR announced that they raised $3 million dollars for their “social utility” VR application. Bigscreen gives you access to your computer screen in VR, which is a deceptively simple idea but one that is unlocking new ways of working on your computer and enabling collaborative social environments that range from virtual 2D video game LAN parties to productive work meetings.

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I had a chance to catch up with founder Darshan Shankar at Oculus Connect 3 last October to talk about his founding story, and how he’s designed Bigscreen with privacy in mind through encrypted peer-to-peer networking technology that he developed. It’s a formula that seems to be working since he reports that “power users spend 20–30 hours each week in Bigscreen,” making it what Shankar calls, “one of the most widely used ‘killer apps’ in the industry.”

Those are astounding numbers for any social VR application, and the key to Bigscreen VR’s success is that they’ve been providing a more immersive and social experience of 2D content ranging from games to movies, and pretty much anything else you can do on your home computer.

The latest release of Bigscreen enables you to have up to three monitors in VR, which could provide an even better experience of working on your computer than in real life. You can stream Netflix or YouTube on a giant movie screen while playing a video game, designing an electrical circuit, browsing Reddit, or creating a 3D model in Maya. In Bigscreen, you can basically do anything that you can do on your computer screen, but in VR.

bigscreen-vrThe limited resolution of today’s headsets for comfortably reading text is the biggest constraint for now, but there are plenty of other tasks that people have found are more enjoyable in VR than in real life. It’s not just the immersive nature, improved focus, and unlocking the spatial thinking potential of your brain, but in Bigscreen you can do it with friends.

Adding a social dimension to computing in a private way is one of the keys to Bigscreen’s success. You can use Bigscreen by yourself without anyone else; you can create a private room using peer-to-peer technology such that what you’re actually doing in Bigscreen isn’t even being passed through any servers on Bigscreen’s side. And if you want to have a public cafe experience and connect with hardcore VR enthusiasts from around the world, then create a public room and see who comes through. It’s a wide range of people looking to do everything from connect socially and casually to recreating the cafe experience of increased focus that can come from working in public spaces away from the private context of your home.

Taking that all into account and based upon my own direct experiences of using Bigscreen over the last couple of weeks I can say that Bigscreen VR is definitely the leading contender to becoming one of the first killer applications of VR. It’s a social utility with the potential to connect you to friends, family, romantic, and business partners, as well as complete strangers who spend a considerable amount of time living in the early days of the metaverse.


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‘Bigscreen’ Launches on Oculus Home, Update Brings Custom Avatars and More

Bigscreen, the social VR app which brings you and your computer’s desktop into VR with your friends, is launching on Oculus Home today and getting an update with new features and better performance.

Bigscreen, which launched on Steam back at the end of April, is now available directly through Oculus Home, supporting cross-play with Steam/Vive users (the app had supported the Rift through Steam since launch as well).

bigscreen-vr-multiplayer-lan-party bigscreen-vr-rocket-league

The free title is still in beta, and is receiving regular updates. The latest of which brings enhanced features and better performance.

Perhaps the biggest change to this version is a new character builder for creating custom avatars. In prior versions of Bigscreen, players were represented by a ghostly white head. Still just a disembodied head, please will at least now be able to mix and match various styles and accessories to create their own avatar.

Other enhancements include the much-requested desktop audio streaming, a new user interface, and performance improvements.

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