About a year ago now we wrote about PleVR, a fan-made app from Alex Keybl that took movies from your Plex library and brought them into VR for cinematic viewing on a virtual screen. It looked like the stockroom scene in The Matrix, only trading guns for hundreds upon hundreds of films. Today, though, Plex itself is releasing official VR integration.
Over the past year, Plex hired Keybl and got to work on an official Plex VR app, which is now available on Google Daydream for free (no word on other platforms just yet). With it, you can watch Plex Media Server videos not only by yourself but also with friends with full voice chat support. Up to four friends can meet up as personalized virtual avatars inside either an apartment or drive-in setting and then share content on the big screen (in fact, it looks a little like BigScreen for Android).
Check it out in the trailer below.
The app will also support playback of local videos on your phone (including both 3D and panoramic content).
To get the most out of the app, you’ll want to download the Plex Media Server on your PC. The free software scans media stored on your device and then organizes it to appear in one destination for easy streaming from other devices.
Streaming videos in VR via the app is free, but you’ll need a Plex Pass to meet up with friends and access the drive-in environment. You’ll get a free week of ‘co-watching’, as the company calls it, when you first start using the app, though.
