Most people meet our library on a computer first. They read about it at a desk, open a page, and want to see whether any of it is real before they go and find a headset. That is a completely reasonable way to start, so the player is built to do something useful on a desktop rather than throw up a wall telling you to come back with better hardware.
There are two genuinely different things you can do on a computer, and they are worth separating, because one of them is real VR and the other one is not.
Lane one: the flat window
Open any experience on a desktop or laptop browser and it plays in a flat window. Click and drag inside the picture to look around, exactly as you would on a phone. Wherever you point, the video is really there in that direction, because it is a real 180 degree capture rather than a cropped rectangle.
What you get in this lane is the composition, the colour, the movement and the sound. What you do not get is depth or scale. Your two eyes are being shown the same flat image on a screen roughly half a metre away, so the stereo half of VR180 is simply not being used. A cliff edge looks like a photograph of a cliff edge. In a headset the same shot makes people lean back.
Use this lane to browse, to decide what you want to watch properly later, and to show somebody the idea over your shoulder. It is a shop window and a good one. It is not the product.
Nothing we say about presence, depth or scale applies to a flat browser window. If you have only ever watched that way, you have not really seen it yet. The reasons are in what makes VR travel feel real.
Lane two: PCVR through desktop Chromium
If you have a headset plugged into or linked to your computer, the same page can go fully immersive, and this is real VR with real stereo depth. It runs on WebXR, the web standard that lets a page ask the browser for an immersive session.
What you need:
- A Chromium based browser. Chrome or Edge both work. Firefox does not support WebXR on desktop, so it will only ever give you the flat window.
- Your VR runtime running before you open the page. SteamVR for a Valve Index, an HP Reverb, a Bigscreen Beyond, a Varjo or similar. Quest Link and Virtual Desktop count as well, because they present your Quest to the computer as a PCVR headset.
- The headset awake and tracking. A headset in standby will not be offered to the browser, and Enter VR then looks broken when it is really just asleep.
With that in place, press play, then press Enter VR. Both presses are required, in that order, because browsers will not start an immersive session without a genuine user gesture. There is no way for us to skip it and no setting that removes it.
Picture quality in this lane depends on the same two things it always does: what your connection can sustain and what your headset can decode. A tethered PCVR setup usually has the best connection in the house, so it tends to sit high on the quality ladder.
The handoff: send it from your computer to your headset
Most of the time the honest answer is that the headset on the shelf is the right screen, and the computer in front of you is just the thing that found the page. So the player offers a handoff.
On any device that cannot enter VR itself, phones included, two things appear beside the title while an experience is open:
- An "Open in your headset" button. On a Quest this is a direct web launch link. Press it, put the headset on, and the browser is already sitting on that experience.
- A QR code. Point any headset with a passthrough camera at your screen, look at the code, and follow it. That route is not Quest specific, which makes it the one to use on a PICO, a Galaxy XR or anything else with a camera and a browser.
Both carry the same address, including the specific experience you were looking at, so you land on the thing you chose rather than back at a home page. Inside a headset browser the handoff hides itself, since you are already at the destination.
This is also the neatest way to hand something to somebody else. Open the experience on your laptop, turn the screen towards them, and let them scan it with the headset they already own.
What about a computer with no headset at all?
Then you are in lane one, and that is fine. Plenty of people watch that way at a desk, and the library is worth browsing on a big screen: the map is genuinely better with a mouse, the destinations index is easier to scan, and collections group everything by mood and landscape rather than by country.
What we would ask is that you do not judge the depth from a monitor. Judge the places, the light and the sound from the monitor, then judge the depth in a headset. They are different questions.
Common problems
There is no Enter VR button
The browser has told the page that no immersive device is available. Start your VR runtime first, wake the headset, then reload. In Firefox the button will never appear at all, because WebXR is not supported there.
Enter VR appears but nothing happens
Press play before pressing Enter VR. The immersive session needs a user gesture on a page that is already running video, and starting cold sometimes leaves the session request stranded.
Dragging does not move the view
You are probably dragging on the controls rather than the picture. Click inside the image itself and drag from there.
It looks sharp and then goes soft
That is the quality ladder doing its job. It steps down when your connection wobbles rather than stopping to buffer, and it climbs again on its own once there is room.
Where to go next
If you are sitting at a computer right now, open something and drag around it: Drifting Through Venice is a good first test because the canal walls give the movement something to measure itself against, and Oxarafoss Waterfall is 30 seconds long and mostly there to prove the sound is real.
Then send it to a headset. Browser specifics for each device are on the device pages and at watching VR in a browser, with step-by-step guides for Meta Quest and PICO. For the format itself, read what is VR180, and for the whole category start at the complete guide to VR travel.