Can Virtual Reality Save the Movie Theater?
Here’s how Oculus Venues works: You strap on your Oculus VR headset, which you can do at home or school or anywhere with a solid internet connection. You create a little avatar—mine is a cowboy with a giant handlebar mustache—and log onto the Oculus Venues live-stream. You’ll appear in a pretty impressive facsimile of a movie theater, with a big screen in front of everybody (though, much like real life, you can look around anywhere you like).
When you arrive, you’ll be slotted into the best available seat in the "theater," but you can teleport around as much as you like. What you can’t do is take a seat someone else is already occupying. (The 7 p.m. Van Wilder live-stream hovered between 30 and 40 people—an unusually high number, according to several of my fellow moviegoers.) And most importantly: Unless you choose to disable it, your microphone will be on the entire time, which allows you—and anybody else!—to broadcast anything you want to say to the rest of the theater.
As far as I can tell, the community is self-policing.
See the full story here: https://www.gq.com/story/can-virtual-reality-save-the-movie-theater