I’ll try to make it this week, I couldn’t last week because of timing, had something else scheduled that ran long and didn’t get home until hours 3 hours after it started.

Ahhh, so all the conversation is through text?

For us it is in VR with digital avatars. In BigScreenVR the avatars are rudimentary but you can look people in their eyes, see their mouth moving when they are talking and see hand movements either by using the controllers or through hand tracking, if setup. There are a lot of different theaters to pick from too, you can sit in whatever seat you want and change the volume of the movie and each person independently if someone is talking too loud or being annoying.

The system worked really well to create presence within the theater environment with others. You start not caring about the cartoon like digital avatars and it just turns into a group of friends sitting in a grand theater watching a terrible movie together while talking to each other and throwing popcorn or tomatoes at the screen in real time.

The AVP makes it easier since there are no controllers as it is all controlled through hand and finger tracking, along with the near lifelike digital personas in visionOS26 with eye, mouth and facial expression tracking, the hands and arms show up on the personas so you can see your friends mannerisms too. I use iCloud Drive to store the CoVideo Club library with everything already uploaded and stored in the cloud. I have a “Coming Soon” folder that all end users have shared with them and have it set to automatically download anything within that folder to their AVP.

The whole process for the end user is just put on the headset, join the FaceTime/SharePlay call, open the movie file and it syncs up. There are no streaming artifacts or lag in the movie since it is all already stored locally on your device. The AVP screens are super high res (3,386ppi) so 4k and/or 3d movies look spectacular. The only thing being streamed is the voices and personas of those on the call. You can drop in or drop out as easily as joining or leaving a FaceTime group chat, because that is all it is.

If you have a VR headset that can run BigScreenVR then shoot me a DM and I’ll invite you to the next one we do on that platform, unless you happen to have an Apple Vision Pro then I’ll invite you to the next watch session on there which should be happening in the next week or so.

I’d love to join your watch party if I am free during the showing. I’ll see if I can do it through my AVP, maybe just load up the mastodon chat log and play the movie locally or something. I have a Lemmy client on my AVP already but I’ve never used Mastodon before in any platform, should probably look into that today.

Grizzly (1976) was the third movie we watched in CoVideo Club back on Sept 17, 2020, Mandy (2018) and Dredd 3D (2012) were # 1 and #2. I keep all the previous movies on the iCloud Drive in an “Already Watched” folder, listed in watch order and date we watched it, in case we want to go back and rewatch something or find out when we watched it. But we never got around to watching Grizzly II even though I’ve had it in the catalogue since it was released in 2020, so I’m definitely interested in that.

Awesome, I will try to join sometime. This is an interesting of mine.

During CoVid I ran a VR movie club. When I noticed my friends started showing signs of cabin fever I convinced some to get Oculus Quests. We had 3 to begin with but eventually we had about 10-12 regulars from a group of about 20 people total. Some people only joined for one or two movies over the clubs lifetime. No randoms, most of us were close friends but everyone knew at least one other person in the group IRL.

I curated the movies with screenings every Thursday at 9pm local time. I opened it up to Saturday screenings every other week for more normal movies that people would request. We used a private theater in BigScreenVR as our platform. We hit the 200th movie in Jan 2023 when I decided to take a break. It was a lot of work curating a movie catalogue of weird, wonderful and hard to find movies but I scoured the internet to find the rare gems.

I’ve done a few one-offs screenings since; bring the group back together for a special events. I’m going through a bit of a rough patch in my life right now with a personal loss so we did Top Secret (1984) last night as movie 206 as a little cheer up session. The main group has transitioned from Quest headsets to Apple Vision Pros so the quality is much better and the coordination is super simple compared to where we started on Quest 1. Everyone still has their Quest 2/3/3s too in case there is a wider interest of the group to watch something together again if we want to but the AVPs are a much better platform so we stick to that if there are enough to go around.

I still keep my library of potential movies active and have been adding to it over the years. There is a lot in there that I hope we get around to watching with the club someday. But while the movies were the main draw the purpose was to just hang out and check on each other. I insisted on being available from 9pm onward every Thursday night so that there was a place my friends knew they could go to just hang out and talk or have a laugh if they needed to. They didn’t even have to leave their house and they could get as drunk or high as they wanted to without worrying about getting home afterward. It worked, there was a lot of trauma that we talked and worked through together over those years. We still talk about it fondly when we get together at parties and such.

We call it CoVideo Club.

Are you going follow this up with Grizzly II: Revenge (1983/2020) starring George Clooney, Laura Dern & Charlie Sheen?

It was filmed in 1983 but they ran out of money during post and it wasn’t finished and released until 2020. Charlie Sheen turned down the role of Daniel LaRusso in “The Karate Kid” in order to be in Grizzly II.

Yes! When I saw this post the Nokia 7380 was instantly where my mind went. I had the exact same phone, it was rad.

I remember at the time it was referred to as a “lipstick style” case. Loved that thing. I still have it in a box of old electronics somewhere, been thinking about digging it out and seeing if I could get it working again but assumed it wouldn’t on the current cellphone frequencies. I stopped using it when I got the original iPhone at release, so that was 18 years ago I guess. Haven’t not had an iPhone of some variation since.

The simplicity of it is what I always loved about the form factor. Yeah, it sucked for texting but maybe I shouldn’t be writing long texts nowadays anyway. It was fine if you are just replying with a couple words to a text. That reflective one way mirrored screen, real leather and simplicity of the buttons was a great mix of form and function for me at the time.

Your picture didn’t load for me so I am attaching my own;