Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company, has partnered with 20th Century Fox to make movies available on its new VR cinema, Oculus Video, Fast Company reports.
About 100 Fox films will be available to either rent or buy through the platform, including Oscar-winning titles like Birdman, Cast Away, and others. The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is expected to be available in early 2016; to kill time until then, the movies will be available to watch through Samsung’s Gear VR. Some Lionsgate movies will be made available as well, including Pulp Fiction and The Hunger Games.
Viewers will be able to choose the size of the movie they want to watch, allowing them to opt for either a more casual, smaller screen or a theater-size experience. The disadvantage of VR is that headsets are fairly heavy, so users might not want to wear it for a two-hour movie viewing.
Jens Christensen, CEO of Jaunt VR, told Fast Company that the headsets need to get much lighter before they can withstand feature-length entertainment, making this first major Hollywood move into virtual reality a gamble for 20th Century Fox.