While much of the world moves to cloud streaming media libraries, there remains those of us that like to maintain our own personal local media library. Plex is a popular application for streaming your own library to other devices, and now a developer is creating a VR client that builds on the Plex platform.
Plex lets you take your local media library of videos, photos, and music, and turn it into your own personal cloud that can stream to other devices.
Developer Alex Keybl is creating a VR client for Plex that’s already looking mighty impressive (see video at the top of the article). He calls it Plevr (pretty clevr, eh?) For now it runs on the HTC Vive, but there’s plans to add compatibility for the Rift as well.
Keybl is showing off an early build that only streams video, but it already looks to do so quite well. He showed Plevr’s interface, which consists of a familiar tile-format display TV show covers, but the difference here is that you can reach out and grab the tiles and flip them over to read the description. If you don’t like what you see, just toss it away to remove it from the list. Or if you do like it, keep the tile and, when you’re ready, toss it at the screen to play.
It’s a novel interface, and likely to change as Keybl further develops the client, but we’ll give him a few points for straightforwardness anyway.
Keybl showed Plevr streaming video perfectly on a virtual bigscreen, and also demonstrated basic controls using the Vive controller touchpad: there’s start/stop and skip forward/backward, just the basics for now, but he says he’s got a lot of ideas for further development.
Keybl says that Rift support is planned, but what we’d really love to see is support for mobile headsets like Gear VR and Daydream, since media viewing is a strong area for mobile VR, but getting media onto the devices is a bit more of a pain if you want to use your own library. Plevr could be great for that, especially if it adds support for 360 and 360 3D videos.
