Virtual Reality Netflix? The Future is Now

Netflix oculus virtual reality

Not too long ago, John Carmack, CTO of Oculus stopped by the Netflix HQ when suddenly a brightly lit light bulb appeared over his head.

Today, the Netflix Tech Blog released their plan of attack, with Carmack’s input, on how to create a Netflix App for Oculus, giving people a “Netflix living room” of sorts, where they can enjoy Netflix films through virtual reality headsets.

“The plan of attack was to take the Netflix TV codebase and present it on a virtual TV screen in VR. Ideally, the Netflix code would be getting events and drawing surfaces, not even really aware that it wasn’t showing up on a normal 2D screen.”

This is a pretty technically impressive achievement, as virtual reality likely becomes a larger and larger part of our lives in the future.

But is this necessary right now? Do we need a “virtual living room” with VR devices to watch Netflix? We won’t pretend to have any grasp on what the future may hold better than Carmack, one of the best engineers of our time, but this seems perhaps a little unnecessary for the majority of Netflix subscribers.

However, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook (who also owns Oculus), did recently come out saying that virtual reality is the next major platform, so it makes sense that Netflix would want to join this ecosystem early.

From Clark’s three laws, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Perhaps that’s the case here as well.