Replace "virtual living room" with "virtual IMAX theater" and you might have your answer.
EDIT:
But the real answer is that the question isn't that different from "why would you want to play a video game on a VR headset?" The answer, of course, is immersiveness. Existing video games (and film/TV) may not be optimized for VR, but future content might be.
Imagine being able to look around 360 degrees in a film. It will be a totally different experience from a traditional film where the director precisely frames every shot, and may or may not be more enjoyable for certain types of content.
It would also require a lot more thought put into scene changes. In VR video games, suddenly moving the player from one location to the other was found to be too disorienting and broke immersion.
A pretty low quality IMAX. I don't disagree with the concept. I love it. But I think we'll need at least a 4k helmet and even then you would probably only be able to watch videos at 1080p or so, with the rest of the pixels being dedicated to the "cinema" or other spaces outside of the "screen".
The resolution cap in the article is due to Netflix's DRM, but current VR movie theater/media playback applications let you load your own media.
When you do this with HD content, it actually looks quite good in spite of the resolution of the actual HMD due to the subtle movements of your POV. The in-game camera tracked by your head is always barely moving, so the pixels you actually see in the source media are always being transposed and blended differently.
What I meant is that you need a certain amount of pixels just to be able to fully represent the 1080p video pixels, and if you see "extra space" in the VR world around the screen, then you need 1080p video + extra space in pixels, so it probably should be at least 4k.
You need a certain amount of pixels to represent the 1080p video in one particular frame. When the next frame comes along, your head has moved enough that you'll be seeing a different subset of those total pixels. At sufficient framerates (and motion capture rates), this actually does a pretty good job of approximating the full resolution of the imagery (especially when this is happening 2 or 3 times per source video frame, as the case might be with NTSC/PAL content).
Even without the DRM resolution cap, you need somewhere greater than 4096x4096 pixels per eye to adequately represent a 1920x1080 display. VR is not going to be as crisp as a normal monitor for quite a long time.
Tons of interesting scenarios. You're sitting on your couch next to your best friend who recently moved to Singapore and he/she's doing the same.
You're sitting on your couch with the MST3K avatars and you can see them laugh as they deliver their Rifftrax.
And tons of other creative possibilities that we couldn't possibly think of today once people start getting used to consuming a movie in a simulated environment.
Not everyone lives in a great movie theater environment.
I saw a demo of the GearVR which was pretty believable, and if this thing is higher resolution, more immersive, etc., I might honestly find myself questioning why I need to decorate my living room if I have VR goggles on all the time at some point in the not to far future.
When VR becomes ubiquitous, and you can have shared experiences, expect that to be a very real thing.
For a while after a bad leg injury, I had to lay in bed, on my back, with my leg elevated. Either I watched tv and got a crick in my neck (from the odd angle) before a 30 minute show was done, or I tried holding a book up and in the air and reading it, but I never made it more than a few pages before my arms started to feel like very, heavy, looming weights. I ended up listening to a lot of podcasts and phoning a lot of friends. I would have loved to be able to watch tv from my back during that recovery period!
You jest, but when I moved three years ago, I watched about three seasons of Burn Notice lying in bed, holding my phone in an awkward position overhead about 8 inches from my face. It was less bad than it sounds, but this product would basically mean that I could do that much more comfortably, without bleeding light over and waking up my wife (or vice-versa).
The article states that most people prefer to have some distance between themselves and the medium that plays the movie. They don't want to be enveloped by the movie. Hence a virtual theatre was created for the Netflix VR app.
I do wonder if they will also add the full-screen experience. That could be interesting ...
Well, if they simulate a movie theater and you burn some extra money to simulate the price of snacks you can almost have the entire theater experience without the risk of being shot by some nutjob
I know you're probably being sarcastic, but that's probably only true if you're a female in an abusive relationship, or particularly if you're a male with suicidal tendencies.
People spend far more time at home than the movies which increases the statistical chance of dying from a gun at home compared to elsewhere. The user was showing that comparing what is more or less likely is usually very irrelevant because the statistics are often misleading. Ignoring "time spent somewhere" makes home one of the most deadly places to be.
