Social VR app Bigscreen is teaming up with Paramount Pictures to debut a new virtual cinema inside of Bigscreen. The cinema will operate much like a real movie theater, offering timed screenings of Top Gun (1986) in 3D, free for a limited time. Screenings start today, December 29th and go until December 31st. Players can join friends to watch together.
Update (12/19/17): Bigscreen has just published showtimes for ‘Top Gun’ in 3D. Check out the full schedule at the bottom of this article.
Bigscreen is a social VR app which lets users connect with friends in a virtual environment where everyone can use and share what’s on their own computer screen. One popular activity is to share videos and movies. The app had already introduced a movie theater environment, but now they’re kicking things up several notches with a new offering which will see official, timed movie showings.
Paramount Pictures is the first to team up with Bigscreen to bring content to the new cinema. Starting on December 29th at 6PM ET, the Bigscreen cinema will show free, timed screenings of Top Gun in 3D to Bigscreen users, supporting “a few dozen” users per theater, with the rest of the seats filled out by NPCs to give a sense of a packed house. The screenings are only available for US users and require Windows 10 (though Bigscreen in general is of course international and supports Windows 7, 8, and 10.
“Bigscreen’s virtual reality platform offers a new way for fans to experience films in their homes,” said Bob Buchi, President Worldwide Home Media Distribution, Paramount Pictures. “We’re excited to be a part of this experiment using cutting-edge technology to give fans a new entertainment option.”
Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar says the team has anticipated the potential for trolling during showings, and so Bigscreen’s cinema screenings will include both a ‘Whisper Mode’, which means users outside of a very small radius won’t be able to hear each other, and what he called the ‘Troll Cage’, which makes players disappear if they try to walk too far from their seat.
Shankar also says that the company is building a content lineup to support the new cinema, and aims to offer fresh screenings each week in 2018, during which the company may experiment with monetization models for the official cinema content.
Showtimes (US only)
Starting December 29th at 6:00 PM ET (your local time here), showings will continue until December 31st at 2:00 AM ET.
To enter a screening, all you need to do is look at the top of a cinema entrance and an 8-second timer will count down before teleporting you and your friends automatically into the cinema. Check out Bigscreen’s official post here for more info.