I actually asked for experiences of people with VR headsets for movie watching. No one said they would recommend it. I was kind of surprised. Do you think they are good for that use case?
They're amazing. You really need to have the right software though.
I've got a Quest 2, and the app to use is Skybox, and I watch stuff over SMB on my local NAS. The key things are being able to adjust the size of the screen and the angle of the screen. I can literally lie on my back on bed and watch TV on the ceiling. And the visual quality tends to be somewhere between 720p and 1080p -- you can make the screen big enough to resolve all 1080p detail, but it's kind of too large at that point. I think I mostly watch around an "850p" level of detail.
I also watch it with my AirPods Pro paired up, and the app lets me manually adjust the audio sync by 100 ms to compensate for the Bluetooth delay.
Watching TV through various specific apps can be more hit or miss, as they won't allow you to adjust the angle of the screen for example, so you can watch comfortably while reclining, or the Bluetooth audio delay. I assume they'll all figure this stuff out eventually.
So the tech is absolutely all there, but the UX can be very app-dependent.
Anecdotally, it's great in VR. It's actually become a regular habit for me; there's nothing quite as cool as watching a 3D movie with a friend who's a country away on a giant screen. This wasn't the case when FOVs were worse, though.
I've done it. It's a gimmick, like many things in VR. It feels neat once or twice to sit in a virtual movie theater, and then you realize that's stupid. If you are spending $1000 on a screen to watch movies, you are much better off with a big, high quality TV.
Well, it's definitely not a gimmick for me -- it's the main way I watch TV now, IF I'm watching it by myself.
It cost $300 not $1000 (at least when I bought it), and there's no big-screen TV that comes even close to the size of the screen in my headset. And there's certainly no room in my bedroom to put a big-screen TV anyways, which is where I'm watching something if somebody's watching something else in the living room.
I prefer my 50” 300$ 4k TV over the Quest for watching things. This is very much a too each his own thing, but I hated watching things in VR as I found it incredibly inconvenient, awkward, and it frankly didn’t look as good to me.
I've got a Quest 2, and the app to use is Skybox, and I watch stuff over SMB on my local NAS. The key things are being able to adjust the size of the screen and the angle of the screen. I can literally lie on my back on bed and watch TV on the ceiling. And the visual quality tends to be somewhere between 720p and 1080p -- you can make the screen big enough to resolve all 1080p detail, but it's kind of too large at that point. I think I mostly watch around an "850p" level of detail.
I also watch it with my AirPods Pro paired up, and the app lets me manually adjust the audio sync by 100 ms to compensate for the Bluetooth delay.
Watching TV through various specific apps can be more hit or miss, as they won't allow you to adjust the angle of the screen for example, so you can watch comfortably while reclining, or the Bluetooth audio delay. I assume they'll all figure this stuff out eventually.
So the tech is absolutely all there, but the UX can be very app-dependent.