You can zoom right out to a full-earth view and physically spin the globe around by depressing the trigger and pulling with your hand. Google Earth visualises the controllers in front of you, and even highlights which button does what. Anyway, navigating around Google Earth using the Oculus Touch controls is simple enough. Right, that used up 100 words nicely ( "nicely" - ed.). Basically Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings, only a bit worse because it’s French.įlorence – 10/10 Adore those red-tiled rooftops. Mont St Michel – 9/10 Weird-ass island monastery with awesome narrow streets. Not to be confused with Wolfenstein Castle, which doesn’t exist. Neushwenstein Castle – 8/10 It’s the Disney castle, innit? Looks pretty but too hard to spell. Looks like a mountain that’s been Tango-ed. Still in Early Access.Īyer’s Rock – 5/10 Big but too dusty. Niagara Falls – 5/10 Pretty but can’t see anything in the street-view pics because spray. Here are some quick and entirely serious reviews of the places that I visited: But the number of areas that do have this functionality is genuinely impressive. I went to Kathmandu, for example, and that was flatter than an elephant’s piano. Not every location in Google Earth has this full 3D feature. I got right up in the face of those Monument Valley mesas, and you could see every crack, pillar, and cliff edge on those craggy Utah bad boys. The models stand up impressively to close scrutiny to. And it looked pretty much exactly how I recall it. One of the first things I did was re-trace a route I walked through when I visited Paris early last year, crossing the Seine and passing under the Eiffel Tower before walking across to Notre Dame and the Louvre. The detail on these 3D renders is truly astonishing. In addition to this, however all of its terrain and many of its key locations are rendered in Full 3-D.Ĭities in particular have received a lot of attention, letting you fly around 3D models of places like Manhattan, Paris, London, and so forth. It has all the functionality of regular Google Earth, letting you locate pretty much any location in the world, and zoom in through layers of satellite footage right down to street view level, assuming it has photos of the available location, which is does in 99 percent of occasions. I’ve had Google Earth VR downloaded on my hard drive for ages, but I kept putting off looking at it because, well, it’s basically just a posh globe, innit? Sure, in VR the Earth might look a bit more spherical, but I stopped getting excited by spheres when I was about three years old.Īs it turns out, Google Earth is much more than a fancy Atlas. This makes me feel all the more foolish for ignoring it for so long. I only meant to dive in for a couple of hours to get a feel of the thing, and ended up losing half the day. Google Earth VR may not be a video game, but it has a feedback loop that’s just as compelling. Then I went to space again, before finishing up with a jaunt around Europe. Then I stopped off at Mount Rushmore before having a layover at Monument Valley. Then I went to space for a bit, and after that I passed by Kathmandu and Mount Everest. I started hovering over Paris, and then I went to Niagara Falls.
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