Monday, 21 April, 2025 UTC
Summary
There’s an Apple Vision Pro app that will turn your home into a Blockbuster video store.
For readers too young to remember the video store, Blockbuster was a chain of stores where you could rent out movies, TV shows or video games for a couple days and return them before the late fees started stacking up. From VHS to DVD to Blu-ray, Blockbuster didn’t survive the rise of Netflix subscriptions and neither did the contemplative physical experience of walking through genres of box art trying to find the perfect movie for a night with family or friends.
Now, with the power of spatial computing, you can have that back.
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ReelRoom is one of the first apps I’ve seen to utilize window management really effectively inside visionOS. Selecting movies, changing the parameters of a shelf and getting it positioned just right in space is all fairly straightforward. You can customize the number of rows and columns in a shelf and remove the backing so you can see the wall behind it. One of my favorite features is an infinite shelf which cuts slits in your floor and ceiling to display a very large collection of movies using the illusion of space you do not have.
ReelRoom offers rooms, shelves, objects, and windows with the ability to upload animated objects for amusement and decoration.I used the app to make a virtual shelf featuring box art for almost 100 Blu-ray movies I keep in a binder. Long ago, I decided that with a few exceptions, the boxes for my movies, video games and TV shows weren’t super important. If I was going to enjoy the media again one day, I decided I just needed the disc or cartridge in a safe spot. But I do miss the sensation of holding a movie box in each hand and considering the vibe of each story held within. That feature isn’t present here yet, but the developer seemed open to the idea when I emailed them about it and, overall, this experience is still closer to Blockbuster video than scrolling a list of movies on TV.
I added movies to shelves both in headset and from an iPhone app called Trakt. The featured image on this post is the shelf I made representing my binder of Blu-ray movies that took me just a few minutes to select. Selecting movies from the shelf offers information and links to where you can stream or buy the media.
The developer behind the app is listed as Jason Norris, who also released an app for Plex and Jellyfin local media servers called Screenlit. We’ll be on the lookout for updates to both apps to see if Norris continues to make it easier to turn your home into a Blockbuster and home theater with more texture and depth than allowed by flatscreen subscription streaming.