10 years of Bigscreen

My passion for VR started in 2012 when I received my Oculus DK1. I still have vivid memories of the “Tuscany” demo and playing Half-Life in VR. After the delivery of the DK2 in 2014 (Oculus’s first headset with positional tracking), I started Bigscreen with a vision of using Virtual Reality to enable people to watch movies, play games, and use their computer together with friends around the world. A shared virtual space with screens at the center of it. For the past 12 years, I have spent every day – nearly my entire adult life – working on VR. Why?

Virtual Reality is tangible magic. We have the power to trick the human mind into believing it has teleported to a different space, like a fully digital world or even an augmented version of our real life with mixed reality. It lets us visit fantastical places, hang out with friends across the world, re-live spatial memories, and play games with an immersion no flat screen can match.

10 years ago, we launched our first product, the Bigscreen app on Steam. It first supported the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and over the years, we expanded to support many other headsets such as Windows Mixed Reality, Valve Index, and the Meta Quest. Since then, millions of people around the world have used Bigscreen to watch their favorite movies and TV shows, attend live events like SpaceX rocket launches and UFC fights, and create lifelong friendships. We launched partnerships with major movie studios like Paramount Pictures, and watch parties for movies like Ready Player One.

In 2020, we took our learnings from our VR software and embarked on an ambitious mission to build new VR hardware and solve the painful limitations of VR that we experienced. We launched our first hardware product, Bigscreen Beyond, in 2023 and quickly followed with an improved Beyond 2 in 2025.

It’s an interesting time to reflect on the state of the Virtual Reality industry. VR in 2026 is smaller than the hype cycle of 2016 promised. The industry is challenging and it has been painful to watch many VR studios shut down. At the same time, VR is unquestionably here to stay. Millions of gamers use VR every month, hanging out in VRChat and playing sims like iRacing. VRChat continues to break concurrent user records, and VR continues to quietly grow. On the hardware side, standalone headsets like the Quest sold millions of units and brought VR to people who’d never have bought a gaming PC before. The passionate PC VR enthusiast community has been underserved by mass-market hardware for years, which is one of the reasons we created Bigscreen Beyond.

A year ago, we started shipping Beyond 2: 107 grams, dual 1-inch micro-OLED displays with 2560 by 2560 pixels per eye, an ultra-wide 116° diagonal field of view, and SteamVR tracking. In the first ten days, Beyond 2 outsold Beyond 1’s entire first year. It took nearly a year to catch up to overwhelming demand. Earlier this year, Beyond started shipping quickly, often shipping within the same day. After years of development and two generations of consumer electronics, we’ve now shipped more than 50,000 orders to 50+ countries around the world.

I’m proud to say Bigscreen is in a great position. We have a passionate community of VR enthusiasts that love our products, built by a small team with deep expertise in VR, across optics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, and computer vision. Bigscreen is now a profitable business with annual revenue growing ~3X, allowing us to keep building our vision for VR in a sustainable manner for the years to come. We’re putting every dollar back into R&D to drive an ambitious and exciting roadmap.

Thanks for being part of the last ten years. We wouldn’t be here today without the support of the VR community, from the people who tested Beyond back in 2021, to the earliest customers who preordered the Beyond 1 and 2, and the 16K+ members of the Discord community helping new owners get set up. There’s a lot more to build, and I’m excited to see what the next ten years could bring us.