This forgotten Google app turns Earth into an open world sport

When I am planning to travel a new destination, I try to get a sense of this place before I leave – especially if I’m going abroad. It is not that I am trying to reduce the tremor of culture, but it is helpful in knowing how the areas I am visiting really look. I prefer to know how much the area around my hotel is able to walk and what kind of restaurant is prematurely. Google Maps is certainly my first choice of my work, and I have spent hours in the tape.

But there is a better way. About a decade ago, Google quietly released an app that lets you wander around the world and in fact it feels like you stand in it. I’m talking about Google Earth VR, an app designed for the first generation of PC headset but still works on modern hardware. This may not be the most accessible version of Google Earth, but this is a kind of experience that is trapped with me and still offers immersion to the first person’s point of view as nothing else.

What makes Google Earth VR special? No time is wasted to demonstrate the app – a welcome tour opens when you have suspended Dawn’s Archus National Park on the Dawn crack. Press a button and time until the sun rises fully and the red stones are bathed in a warm shine. You get a few seconds to look at this endless Vista around you, but more days will pass that you will be dropped in the middle of Tokyo and is surrounded by long buildings. Finally, it closes you through a series of remarkable marks around the world, at different times of every day.

By the end of the tour, you will be familiar with controls and leave to discover. This is the place where Google Earth VR shines – you can fly yourself to swim over the whole countries or shrink to the bottom level and pressure your neck to see the top of super -long buildings. You have the option to rotate the world around you, change the point of view, or slowly flow into a city like a drone. This is all smooth move and you always feel like you’re under control.

The Earth VR app also really comes into itself when you are in a city where Google submitted detailed 3D imaging like Tokyo, New York and Paris. Take yourself to the surface of the road and feel that you are physically there, exactly without crowds or traffic around you. But even when you are spitting distances, even the best photographer meter, looks like AI influx. Buildings intensifies, cars appear to be melted, and good details end.

Fortunately, Google people used a genius solution – moving a controller to your head turns you into a street view. There is no better way to explain this as it is like to say, as Street View stands in photos. You are at human height, naturally free to look around with your head. Better yet, you can teleport some fit at a time of the next Street View image or cross the street to see a different approach. You can “walk” in such a whole city, irrespective of the open world game.

If you are unable to travel due to the limits of movement, Google Earth VR can be the nearest alternative – and this is not a conduct. It offers a surface presence so that flat screens cannot easily match. From your own home, you can stand at the Eiffel Tower base, shake over the Golden Gate Bridge, or flow over the Sydney Opera House.

The app contains a built -in list of famous signs that you can immediately go. Even better, when you were caught the imagery, you were not trapped by whatever conditions of light were kept in the real world. With a glimpse of your wrist, you can rotate the sun’s position in the sky to change the day of the day, put long shadows from the buildings, or make the desert a desert nail in the desert at midnight.

But even as a passenger once, Google Earth VR is incredibly easy. This is because it allows you to input any address, just as the maps app on your phone, so you can zero quickly in a particular place.

If I want to see how the walk from my hotel to the subway looks like my coming journey, I can easily fly on the ground level and enter the street view. I did exactly that before going to Malaysia last year, and wandering into the Street View helped me realize that the city was more concentrated than its Asian neighbors. It also helped me understand that my hotel was more accessible than another. With this information, I chose a different style of transport that needed something else but I didn’t force me to cross the eight -lane road.

Of course, you can’t find the real sense of the locality without direct traffic or pedestrian activity – it is a pity that Microsoft Flight Simulator is not with its moving cars. But you can still find a lot about a place by finding a clue in the environment. Are the shops opened in the daytime? Is the sidewalk well maintained? The list continues.

Even for the basic principles of trip planning, Google Earth VR disables maps on the phone. And although the app has not received any major updates in the past years, it takes pictures of Google’s latest street views. Any business or store front you see in the app will still face the real world.

For the first time, I tested Google Earth VR on an original Oculus Rift, when real virtual reality was still a novelty and it needed three infrared camera in my wall. Nevertheless, the scale and freedom he offered was impressive. But I was rarely forgotten about it – even last year I did not raise Meta Quest 3 and decided to revise my old Okolas Game Library.

However, Google Earth VR does not run locally. You will need a VR PC with a decent GPU and will either need USBC cable or a decent router for wireless streaming. The idea is that your PC offers the game and sends the output to the headset. This looks like a solution, but this is the only practical way to experience this app for most people in 2025.

Setup complexity and keeping the cost of hardware aside, Google Earth VR Never seen better than the current crop of headset. Improved visual loyalty makes it an unrealistic experience that I think everyone should experience. And yet, the app is sitting near the brink of abandoning today.

I was a little surprised that the app still draws directly from Google’s servers into 3D and street view data, but this access can be stopped at any time. So if you are curious and still with hardware, look at the world while it’s still online.