You can now watch Netflix using virtual reality headsets

In the near future, when it’s time to relax, you’ll head to the living room, sit on the couch, pick up the remote, turn on the TV, fire up Netflix, and zone out to your favorite show. But the living room, couch, remote, and TV won’t be real—they’ll be simulations on your virtual reality headset. Yesterday (Sept. 24) at Oculus Connect—the Facebook-owned VR company’s developer conference—Samsung announced a new model of its Gear VR headset, and Oculus announced a Netflix streaming app that’ll work on the Gear. The swathe of virtual reality headsets that are due to be released in the coming year—like Oculus’s Rift, and HTC’s Vive—are essentially focused on the hardcore gaming market as they’ll be expensive devices that will require powerful PCs to run effectively. Quartz’s Alice Truong noted, however, that the Gear VR could be the device that brings VR to the mass market, as it costs only $99. And apps like Netflix could prove to be the reason you’ll want to get one.