VR social productivity app Bigscreen raises $3M with Andreessen Horowitz | Hacker News Reader

VR social productivity app Bigscreen raises $3M with Andreessen Horowitz

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74 pointsfebin24 comments

After wasting money on 2 other VR desktop apps, I was shocked that Bigscreen was free and 10x better than the other ones.

Hope they can put the investment to good use. I'm definitely not opposed to paying them when the final version is released.

Bigscreen founder here. Thanks for the kind words! If you have any bugs or feature requests, please let me know! darshan@bigscreenvr.com

I have never used Bigscreen (just had access to a Rift for a couple weeks) but I'm not surprised by this investment. When I played around with it, despite the several gaming options available, the most compelling experience I had in VR was just a pretty mundane casino game where I played poker. That above all else sold me on the potential of VR. As long as people think about VR just as immersive gaming, the potential is going to be limited. But what the casino VR experience taught me was that even something completely mundane like playing a game of cards could be far more immersive and more entertaining in a VR setting; if I had 5 friends over at home with me, I would've much rather plugged in with them into this beautiful virtual casino then dealt with shuffling cards at home in real life. Can't wait to be able to get the hands on my own VR device to see everything that Bigscreen has to offer!

To be honest that kind of scares me. What will happen when VR is commonplace and we are continually using it to escape reality.

Not to say we don't do that already, but the gradual degradation of reality is truly quite interesting.

You already escaped reality. Your entire life is a video game, in which you erased your memory and went back to live in early twenty-first century earth, the peak of humanity's uncertainty about the future, near the end of scarcity. When you "die," you will wake up on the orbital platform where you were born six hundred years ago. You've already played this game four times.

Hopefully the goggles will become comfortable and we ll be able to take them off easily. We ll get used to the escape. It will become as commonplace and unremarkable as headphones

I can't wait for VR resolution to increase so things like this work really well.

From my experience using the Oculus dev kit 2 there was too much of a "screen door" effect and it was hard to read text on a virtual monitor vs reading text on a real life monitor. It wasn't practical to use a virtual monitor to say, write code or surf the web.

But resolution will only get better! At that point will things get fun and I can see people eschewing monitors for VR "monitors".

The consumer kits that have shipped have much, much better screens than the Oculus DK2. That said, it's still not good enough for comfortable viewing of text at any useful density.

As someone who has used both devkits of the Oculus and now owns a consumer-version Vive, I have to say the jump in resolution after the Oculus devkit 2 was pretty major. The resolution isn't great for reading anything other than big text and you can still make out the pixels when you look for them, but I'd no longer describe the resolution as having the "screen door effect" that was so major in the Oculus devkits.

I've enjoyed using Bigscreen for watching videos and movies, checking a couple headlines, and for vr-chatting with friends. I hope the headset's resolution is better in the future so that I can do more activities while in it, but as it is is pretty cool.

You can absolutely read small text if you supersample at 1.5-2.0x.

This reminded me of a project by Sun Microsystems called Project Wonderland. They created a virtual world in which you could attend meetings and look at slides together with other avatars – although this was not in VR.

Here is a demo video: https://youtu.be/-CFOGDBFKrk

They re doing what secondlife should have done long ago. I wonder if they have a platform for games.

I've used bigscreen before, and while it might be hard to read small text, it is still a really nice app. I don't use the "multiplayer" feature, but what is really nice is to switch up my work environment at home from time to time. It also eliminates a lot of distractions.

I'd love to learn more about how you're using Bigscreen (and how we can make it better for you). Could you email me? darshan@bigscreenvr.com

In a virtual environment wouldn't you want a program like Blender to have a 3D interface?

And are couches and living room environments a skeumorphobic ornament to help the transition to VR?

A lot of us are working on 3D interfaces for design tools, but the difficult part seems to be making it bearable for longer sessions (hours). Some examples:

Medium https://www.oculus.com/medium/

Tilt Brush https://www.tiltbrush.com/

Quill https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/1118609381580656/

MARUI https://www.marui-plugin.com/

Simplex http://www.gradientspace.com/simplexvr/

Gravity Sketch https://www.gravitysketch.com/

Unity EditorVR https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/12/15/editorvr-experimental-b...

Unreal Engine VR Editor https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Editor/VR/

Modbox http://store.steampowered.com/app/414120/

Mindshow http://mindshow.com/

and my own tool Sketchbox http://sketchboxvr.com

So far it seems like the traditional CAD players (Autodesk, Dassault, Adobe) are focused on using VR for visualization, rather than creation.

Man this will be the matrix or definitely Caprica.

You are absolutely correct. I think there's a massive opportunity for "3D programs" (Blender, Maya, AutoCAD, etc.) to become native VR applications.

Bigscreen is instead about the other 99% content that's completely 2D. I wrote a blog post[1] about our founding mission and one example in there is Microsoft Word. Even in VR/AR, the words won't be flying around you in 3D space. Movies and videogames won't disappear and be replaced by 360 and VR games anytime soon.

The question that Bigscreen is tackling is instead: how can VR/AR improve our 2D computing experience?

[1]: https://blog.bigscreenvr.com/3-million-financing-round-led-b...

Does Bigscreen let you view modern web content in VR? If so, what are they using under the hood to do that?

Reading around a bit, it sounds like it's capturing your desktop via some kind of VNC type protocol so I guess it's whatever you're using on your desktop.

Bigscreen lets you view any content in VR that you can currently view on your computer, not just web content.

You can see your entire desktop on floating virtual screens, which enables you to use your any desktop app (including but not limited to your web browser).

Interesting to see a VR company working fully remote

I haven't been able to type in the other screen viewer app I got on the rift. Does BigScreen offer that?

I hope they're working on the street protocol for the metaverse!

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