Oculus announced that you can now stream your Gear VR experience to any Chromecast-enabled device.
The Samsung Gear VR is a remarkably robust platform for mobile VR experiences. Oculus directed considerable resources towards the project to grow the Gear VR platform into a leading VR platform, and the company continues to do so to this day. The Gear VR platform offers portability, affordability, and a wide variety of VR experiences to choose from. But mobile VR lacks the social connection that premium PC- and console-connected VR systems offer.
When you put on an Oculus Rift, an HTC Vive, or a PlayStation VR, you effectively shut yourself off from the rest of the people in the room with you, but they aren’t shut off from you. The top three premium VR systems offer preview monitors for spectators to watch what you’re doing (and, in some cases, participate). But with a mobile VR system like the Samsung Gear VR, when you shut yourself off from the world around you, no one case see what you’re playing or watching.
Sometimes shutting yourself off from the rest of the world is desirable. Other times, you may wish to share the excitement with your friends. Some of our favorite VR experiences didn’t involve us having an HMD on our head. We enjoy watching someone else lose their mind in a virtual world for the first time. Before the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive hit the market, we took a Gear VR to our family Christmas and shared it with our aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, and everyone had a blast. We can only imagine the experience being much more exciting if we could all see what was going on—and our poor grandfather wouldn’t have been stuck on the title screen in TheBlu for so long.
Oculus said that you would need the latest version of the Oculus software (which would be automatically updated) and the latest version of Android to use the Chromecast feature. The Oculus software now features a cast button in the UI, which launches Chromecast and lets you select nearby devices to receive the cast.