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















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.

With a few more taps, I was no longer flying; I was on ground level at "average adult height."

This is where Google Earth VR gets cool. After flying toward Seattle's football stadium, I thought it might be fun to walk through it. And I could. A few taps later, I was there, on the 50-yard line, throwing my hands up like some ridiculous version of Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman.

The reason this felt fun is because so much of the stadium's interior geometry had been rendered precisely—and the same went for the Seattle baseball stadium on the next block. Google Earth has juiced its assets up with 3D material that almost certainly wasn't captured solely from a satellite above, and that really sells the "I'm really there" feeling that you might expect.

Some of Google Earth VR's content looks really, really crappy, though. Squishy geometry and fuzzy textures will make some of your favorite real-life locations look like they've been ripped out of an N64 game. But being able to stand around at one-for-one scale with a famed building, landmark, or national park and get lost in the full, 360-degree feeling that everything nearby is at least rendered at total proportionate accuracy helps wash the squishy geometry down.

(Be warned: this level of detail does not apply to much of the non-Western world within Google Earth VR. You'll have a lot better luck finding fully rendered geometry in American cities than in others.)

A quick detour to Burning Man









Google Earth VR also uses clever tricks to keep users feeling comfortable while they're spinning and warping their nearby environs. You'll use the Vive wand as a pointer and grabber to transform your scale or location in the app—and while you do that, the view shrinks to a tiny periscope view until the motion has settled. It's still possible to make yourself queasy by grabbing and moving the Earth too quickly, but that sensation is easy to immediately halt, at least. Otherwise, motion takes place in controllable bursts, as opposed to swimmy, dizzying "flight" paths. (In other words, don't be worried by how sickening the app's official demo trailer looks.)

Pre-loaded coordinates appear in a simple menu interface, and new users will want to warp around the Earth with these for some of the app's most spectacular locations. The list is long and is full of landmarks like Big Ben, national parks like Yosemite, oddball spots like the deserts of Burning Man, and even a few outer-space locations (like a floating spot from which you can see a solar eclipse). The nifty "tours" tab will automatically and comfortably warp Vive novices through a series of global locations based on a certain theme ("water," "parks"), and I found these particularly soothing, since they wrest control from users during a 3-5 minute time span to show off a variety of worldwide locales.

The worst aspect of Google Earth VR in its launch state is an inability to type in cities, landmarks, or other custom coordinates. If you want to go to, say, your childhood home in VR, you'll have to grab the planet yourself and pick through roads, landmarks, and terrain until you find the old homestead at 227 Charleston Avenue. In my case, I struggled to find my childhood home for a while, especially when I mistook my old middle school for my old high school. Google Earth VR displays city names and landmark names, but roads and smaller details go unlabeled. (Once you find a spot, you can bookmark it for a quick return, at least.)

That hindrance, and the fact that some content renders quite weirdly, are worth tempering expectations over. The Statue of Liberty and Fenway Park are not perfect replicas here. But even these feel cool to fly over and walk through, and you can warp between them and far more convincingly rendered outdoor scenes with just a few clicks.

Expect to lose at least an hour just flying around the Earth—and the immediate future fantasizing about where you'll warp next time you put a Vive on. Google says this will remain an HTC Vive exclusive indefinitely.