VR Theater, a Virtual Reality based Multi-Screen Movie Theater Simulator for Verifying Multi-Screen Content and Environment

The needs for a more immersive viewing experience in modern cinemas have given birth to novel movie theater technologies such as Barco's Escape and CJ-CGV's ScreenX; which utilize the side walls of a movie theater to project peripheral content to auxiliary the main content projected in the center screen. However, because theaters that support such application are each different in structure, producers need to modify the content for each theater which is a cumbersome task. In addition, the recent advances in Virtual Reality technology allows users to create unexplored solutions in the area of games, industry and simulation of spaces. VR based theater simulators are already in the market but restrict users from modifying certain aspects of the cinema and are limited to ordinary theaters. This paper introduces VR Theater, a VR based multi-screen movie theater simulator that enables researchers and multi-screen producers to provide a testing platform for multi-screen content and environment with arbitrary settings. VR theater can simulate any movie theater with different structures in the world as long as the correct dimensions of the cinema are provided, play custom main content and wing content for the side walls, select the view of a certain seat in a movie theater, mask out certain areas of the wing content to prevent projection light from entering moviegoers eyes and correct the size of the content being projected in the simulated VR movie theater. In addition, auxiliary functions that allow rearrangement of seat positions, lighting, wing projector position and side wall texture material editing is provided. We predict that multi-screen producers and researchers will be able to make use of this application when producing and researching for multi-screen content.