What if you could choose Netflix movies in VR?

Encouraging employees to unleash their new-age creativity is an increasingly popular practice in corporations.

Encouraging employees to unleash their new-age creativity is an increasingly popular practice in corporations.

It typically involves giving staff a chance to put forward their ideas and allocating them time to create them. In some cases employees get to work with people with specialised skills. For example employees who propose a clever idea for a smartphone app might be allocated a developer and a chance to build it.

Google and Microsoft are among companies that do this, and so it seems is Netflix.

The global provider of streaming films and TV series recently hosted a Hack Day event where staff experimented with new technologies, collaborated with new people, and generally were creative.

The results included a new experience for the HTC Vive virtual reality headset. Put on a headset, and you can be inside a virtualised movie rental store perusing the latest Netflix content. Other staff have produced a video showing how the Netflix interface could be further customised to the individual tastes of subscribers.

Netflix says there have been some deeper technical hacks from previous Hack Days that ended up as part of the service. One was a feature called SmallerMaker, an innovative image compression technology which offers a faster homepage load time.

Netflix says any staff-initiated feature goes through rigorous A/B testing first as does every upgrade to the service.