How many times has this happened to you: you’re grinding across the galaxy in Elite Dangerous and the minutes are starting to tick by rather slowly. You sigh and try to remind yourself how amazing it is to be hurtling through the stars in an immersive virtual reality headset. As amazing as this technology is, it would be great if you could just peek outside of your HMD and watch videos of cats befriending animals they would typically be enemies with during this slightly tedious part of the game. Well, now you can.
V is a dashboard for virtual reality that brings some of your favorite entertainment and productivity with you inside of the Oculus Rift. This week it is launching an open beta for consumers that is absolutely free.
With V, a tap on the side of your headset brings up the content hub. From there you can select YouTube, Spotify, Slack, Twitch, Soundcloud and even social media applications like Facebook and Twitter.
Once you’ve made your selection, V opens up a small window inside of any VR experience so that you can watch, browse, listen and explore without ever having to take your eyes off the action. This is perfect for games with some down-time like Elite, but it’s also good for games in which you need a bit of a hint like Chronos.
V was founded by Tyler Andersen and Brian Eppert. The pair recently graduated from the Boost VC accelerator. They are actively seeking investment from interested parties.
According to the pairs official statement accompanying the beta, “Our goal is to broaden the spectrum of what is possible inside virtual reality by creating a platform that empowers third-party developers to create the first metaversal layer of applications and utilities.”
The duo plans to add more apps as V continues to develop and anticipates some tweaks for the UI will be made following user feedback in the beta.
