I really liked the Google Daydream View VR experience when it launched, but unfortunately, it had a very limited selection of apps. There weren’t too many games to play, for example, and it wasn’t possible to play locally stored videos right in the headset. Instead, you had to upload them to a service like YouTube to play them back. That has officially changed, and you can now watch your own locally stored content, whether it’s on your phone’s storage or a microSD card, using a third-party app. It’s easy as pie, so I’ll walk you through how right now.
- Open the Daydream app on your smartphone
- Navigate to the Google Play VR store (or tap this link right here.)
- Download the “Skybox Ultimate VR Player” application. It’s free!
- Open Skybox Ultimate VR Player on your headset. It’ll take a bit to recognize all of your videos if you have a lot.
- Enjoy!
See? Playing local videos on Google Daydream is super easy
It’s that easy, and you no longer have to search for apps that don’t support video natively. Skybox supports 180-degree and 360-degree video, can automatically detect MP4, AVI, MOV, VR, 2D, 180/360 file formats, allows users to switch between left/right and over/under formatting and more. It recommends you store your videos in the default Skybox folder on your phone, though I found it was able to detect all of my movies, even on my microSD card. I haven’t tried it yet, but Skybox also supports the ability to stream VR content from your PC, in case you don’t want to keep it on your phone.
Skybox works really well, even if the developers consider this an “Alpha” version, so give it a whirl now!
