Oculus’ annual event is becoming kind of a big deal for the fast-growing world of virtual reality. Mark Zuckerberg descended from his Illuminati pyramid to make an appearance at Oculus Connect, Microsoft announced that next year you will literally be able to sleep inside your squalid Minecraft hovel, and now VR apps are coming to Netflix and Hulu, according to Mashable.
Perhaps sensing that we’ll all soon be feeling pretty stupid for selling a kidney to pay for that 60-inch TV, Netflix is first out of the gate with an app already on sale in Samsung’s Gear VR store. No, it won’t let you climb into Gustavo Fring’s superlab and cook meth alongside Heisenberg, but it will let you access your Netflix account directly from your Samsung goggles, sparing you from having to interact with the drab Samsung pixel monolith gathering dust in your “VR room.” And you’ll be able to VR-stream those Orange Is The Black episodes as early as late November when the Gear VR goes on sale. Samsung has tweaked the goggles’ design to make them more convenient and comfortable to use with the company’s complete 2015 smartphone line.
Hulu, perhaps still recovering from the cash aneurysm it suffered as a result of purchasing Seinfeld’s immortal soul, is pushing out app availability to sometime later this fall. In its announcement, the streaming provider boasted new original content, but it’s not clear if that content will be available to all Hulu subscribers, or just the dorks who already bought first-generation VR goggles.
Oculus also announced apps from Twitch, Vimeo, TiVo, and parent company Facebook—the latter promising a hot-trending tidal wave of bloodshot, sleepless-eyeball selfies. Collectively, the approaching availability of affordable VR goggles, coupled with content-streaming apps, promises to fundamentally transform how we work and live. Once impossible to conceive, a utopian future of weekends defined by binge-watching Game Of Thrones in our filthy Hello Kitty bathrobes, consuming warm beer and cold pizza, is finally within our grasp.