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Netflix project lets you mind-control its interface
Netflix's developers are at it again, using the company's annual Hack Day to come up with clever, if sometimes wild, ideas on how to improve the streaming service. This year's crop of hacks mostly focus on intriguing Stranger Things integrations, but the most interesting result is one named MindFlix, that lets you navigate and control Netflix with your mind.
Netflix stuffed its video service into an NES cartridge
Netflix's experimental Hack Days often lead to wonderfully off-the-wall projects, but its latest might have produced the best example yet. Engineers Guy Cirino, Carenina Motion and Alex Wolfe have whipped up DarNES, a hack that turns the original Nintendo Entertainment System into a Netflix playback machine. The '80s-era console is unchanged -- the real trickery is inside a special 256KB cartridge. You probably wouldn't want to go on an Orange is the New Black marathon given the chunky 8-bit graphics, but it's nice to know that you can.
What if your Netflix queue was just a big, virtual room?
Sure, we know Oculus VR chief technology officer John Carmack's likes watching movies on the Rift headset from bed when he's sick, but what if you'd rather catch up on Orange is the New Black instead? A recent hackathon at Netflix produced something that could make that possible. The custom UI, dubbed "Oculix," shows off what it'd be like to navigate the interface in a virtual space replete with gesture control. It looks pretty neat if you ask us. What, with its floating tiles and text descriptions and all that. Sadly, unlike the home-brew Oculus apps we're used to, whether or not the greater community will get to give this a shot is up in the air. As is typical with Netflix's Hack Day projects, the outfit is making no promises of Oculix ever seeing the light of day.
Netflix engineers experiment with bump-based video sharing and sleep tracking
Netflix uses its internal Hack Day competitions to encourage new thinking around its streaming video service, and its latest event has produced a few clever experiments that we wouldn't mind seeing in finished apps. One of them, Netflix Beam, uses Apple's Bluetooth-based iBeacon technology to share Netflix videos between iOS devices just by bumping them together. Another effort uses a Fitbit to check if you fall asleep mid-movie; if you do, you can resume from the point where you nodded off. Other handy Hack Day inventions include gamepad-friendly text entry, custom playlists and PIN-protected profiles. Netflix warns that these projects may never reach its public-facing software, but they're still worth checking out to see what the company's engineers are thinking. We've posted two of the pitch videos (Beam and the sleep tracker) below, and you can see a few more at the source link.
