Bigscreen, the virtual hotspot that allows family members, friends, and coworkers to hang out, watch movies, collaborate, play games, and more, has just introduced a new update that offers big improvements.
The biggest improvement is the support for Dedicated Servers, which dramatically improve video streaming quality and ensure perfectly synchronized audio when hosting a room and streaming Windows PC desktop.
“Before this update, user-hosted rooms in Bigscreen would sometimes have choppy video, with lots of blocky, low-quality video artifacts. The audio was sometimes delayed and laggy,” explains Darshan Shankar. “This update solves those issues and dramatically improves the experience for watching movies and YouTube or playing PC videogames with friends.”
In addition to improved video and audio quality, the infrastructure behind Bigscreen can now accommodate much larger rooms, allowing up to 15 people to occupy the same virtual space in real-time.
Many Bigscreen users enjoy the Remote Desktop feature, which makes it possible to use any Windows applications in virtual reality in Bigscreen, including games. In the past, however, the feature didn’t perform too well when streaming to a Quest headset. The new update solves streaming latency issues, bringing latency down to sub-20 ms.
One improvement that you won’t see but will definitely hear is the implementation of Spatial Audio for voice chat. Thanks to it, it should be much easier to identify who is speaking because sound should come from their direction—just like it does in real life.
In the near future. Bigscreen developers would like to introduce a friend system, input streaming for Remote Desktop, and a built-in YouTube app that would make it easier to stream online videos with friends. Bigscreen is free, and it works on all major headsets, including Oculus Quest, Valve Index, all Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and all SteamVR headsets.
