In an update that seems like its straight out of Star Trek, Valve have announced that you can now use Steam to play a 2D game on a giant screen within your VR headset.

The Desktop Game Theater feature is currently in beta, but even so it should work on the majority of games out there, provided they support Steam Broadcast. Here's the short changelog from this update:

• Added new Desktop Game Theater support, run any of your normal desktop games and have them appear on a giant virtual screen in your headset. Any game that supports Steam Broadcast should work with this feature, some tuning of the games graphical settings may be required for the best experience. This feature is currently in beta and can be accessed by adding "-vr2dgames" the command line when launching Steam.

• Fixed Steam not quitting correctly when shutting down SteamVR at the same time

• Added icon in the Library view in the Steam Dashboard to show which games support motion controllers 

While the gaming application of such a feature is limited, the ability to sit down in a virtual theater and watch a movie on a gigantic screen alongside your friends, and ideally no screaming children, is one of the benefits of VR I'm most excited about.

I doubt its going to be amazing on the first few iterations of VR devices, but as the resolution goes up, and the price goes down, this could genuinely be one of the most convenient and fun ways of experiencing a movie, or even just watching cat videos on Youtube.

Who knows, maybe VR will even become so good one day that it renders classic screens obsolete, at least then the price would be a lot easier to stomach.