Google has released Google Earth VR, a VR application where you're given a jetpack and the whole world to explore. In other words, it's basically Google Earth + VR + jetpack = awesome. Google's site has a pretty impressive trailer, and you can get it for free on Steam right now. People seem to be really liking it on Steam (for now at least), and this is the first VR app that's actually got me interested.

Funnily enough, on a course I'm currently on, I'm supposed to create a VR application, and one idea I had for it was a jetpack. I didn't go anywhere with it because I thought it'd be too much work for a single person (and I still think so), but I thought the idea had pretty good potential. Turns out Google thinks so though, and apparently thought so long before be.

Anyway, I posted this under PC discussion because for now, this is just a PC thing. But obviously this could be big for VR as a whole, and not just VR gaming (this isn't a game, after all).

Doubt it. The idea sounds neat but I doubt enough people will care, specially with the VR price tag

I hope you don't think that the visual fidelity will be anything close to what is shown in the trailer.

Sounds really interesting.

Judging by some YouTube videos, the actual thing doesn't seem to be too far off from the trailer. Of course if you get too close to the ground, it looks like a mess, and there's probably some areas that don't look quite as good, but overall it seems pretty awesome. It's mostly simple shapes anyway, so as long as the textures are good, there shouldn't be much preventing it from looking that good.

Hope its coming soon for the Oculus I think they are still waiting for Oculus Touch to be released. I think this could be a neat application. Not a Killer App yet but a good start.

I think this is nice and all, but even with the fact that it's in VR and feels a lot more real than looking at things in 2D pictures, I can't help but think this is more of a novelty/tech demo than anything that will catch on with people.

That's basically VR in a nutshell. Personally I think this is still the most impressive VR application that I know of. Come on, you can basically fly around in the real world? Sure, the novelty will eventually wear off, but this is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for in VR, and I didn't even know there's anything specific I'm looking for in VR before this. I haven't been following VR too closely, but everything I've seen so far has been much less impressive than this.

But yeah, it'll be better when we get a good VR application with more substance than this.

Which part? It probably uses Google Earth for the world like the name suggests, Google already has 3D shapes which enables the 3D part, (I think), slaps VR on top of it, and uses controllers for handling movement (i.e. the jetpack part). In practice, it's built to use HTC Vive which includes the headset and the controllers. I'm not sure if there's anything preventing other VR sets from being used though, as long as you can use a similar control method.

If it was affordable then maybe it'd be a killer app.