Netflix Oculus Rift hack lets you watch House of Cards in your own private cinema

Hack transports you from your bedroom to a dimmed theatre

(Netflix/YouTube)

A debate has been bubbling away for some time now about whether the Netflix experience of watching a movie on a tablet in bed can match actually going to a cinema, but now a hack that makes the streaming service fully 3D has brought it full circle, sort of.

Fooling around on a day off, Netflix staff hacked their own code to see what weird and wonderful new features they could come up with.

'Oculix' was one of the more interesting creations, turning its scrolling menu into a 3D galaxy of thumbnails and its viewer into a cinema screen.

The latter makes sitting down to watch an episode of House of Cards like going to a cinema, albeit a weird, claustrophobic dystopian cinema with no audience or curtains or chairs or sticky floors.

Fairly useless, I'm sure you'll agree, but it's interesting that Netflix is playing around with the technology.

If VR does prove to be a game changer and not just a brief distraction for the entertainment industry, it could one day be implemented in the creation of content itself, giving a truly immersive experience of something like HoC, where you find yourself in the corridors of the White House yourself.