I stood at the peak of Mount Rainier, the tallest mountain in Washington state. The sounds of wind whipped past my ears, and mountains and valleys filled a seemingly endless horizon in every direction. I’d never seen anything like it—until I grabbed the sun.
Using my HTC Vive virtual reality wand, I reached into the heavens in order to spin the Earth along its normal rotational axis, until I set the horizon on fire with a sunset. I breathed deeply at the sight, then spun our planet just a little more, until I filled the sky with a heaping helping of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Virtual reality has exposed me to some pretty incredible experiences, but I’ve grown ever so jaded in the past few years of testing consumer-grade headsets. Google Earth VR, however, has dropped my jaw anew. This, more than any other game or app for SteamVR’s “room scale” system, makes me want to call every friend and loved one I know and tell them to come over, put on a headset, and warp anywhere on Earth that they please.
Jetpack mode, engage
First stop: My hometown of Seattle.
Google Earth VR, which is currently a free exclusive for HTC Vive owners, will look familiar to anybody who has used Google’s “Earth” mapping apps before. You can grab the globe, zoom in and out anywhere, and see finer details as you zoom closer to any location. But this VR variant differs largely in that it reveals just how much 3D-mapped content the app really has—and displays it as handsomely as its limited system possibly can.
Take, for example, my casual flyover near Seattle’s Centurylink Field. I launched the app while floating high above the planet Earth and was instructed to use the Vive wands to move around. One button zoomed me closer, while another let me “grab” the planet and reorient it. I used these motions to spin the globe towards North America, then the USA, then Washington, until I was close enough to trigger a perspective shift. Before, I was looking down from a bird’s eye view; now, I was more level, like a guy in a jetpack flying over a city and checking it out.