Youtube VR has been given a useful feature that I didn’t know about, and you probably didn’t either.
I became aware of the feature while browsing the Quest blog. Meta mentions it in passing in a post about this month’s video highlights. Although the feature has apparently been around for months, I haven’t heard or read about it anywhere.
This is all the more surprising since it introduces a new feature of the Meta Quest UI and was apparently developed with Meta. The blog post calls the new YouTube VR feature “2D mode”. I tried it out and will explain what it’s all about.
What the YouTube VR 2D mode does
When playing a video in YouTube VR, you can now seamlessly switch between the immersive mode (YouTube VR as a VR app) and a panel mode (YouTube VR as a 2D app) and back again. Just click the appropriate icon as shown in the following video.
YouTube VR appears to be one of the first VR apps to support seamless switching between VR and 2D modes.
According to Twitter user Luna, the feature was accidentally rolled out in August 2023 and removed shortly after. Officially, it was rolled out to all headsets after the launch of Quest 3, Luna writes to me. It is not mentioned in the Meta Quest release notes.
What else does the 2D mode offer?
The 2D mode has other advantages:
4K support is also relatively new. Until a few months ago, playback quality was limited to full HD. YouTube VR can now play videos at 4K resolution.
Source: Mixed News
