WorldLens VR has introduced a new AI-powered feature on Quest that adds subtle 3D depth to Google Street View environments. The app is available now on Quest, with a SteamVR version currently in development.
The first time I loaded into WorldLens VR’s new AI-powered 3D Street View mode, I thought the feature was broken.
When you first drop onto a street corner, you are just looking at the standard, flat imagery wrapped around your head. But if you stand still for a second, the depth layer snaps into place. It’s a strange realization when it happens: buildings suddenly separate from the sky, foreground objects take on physical weight, and the scene stops looking like wallpaper.
The developer, Stoian Eduard Andrei, has been rolling out steady optimization updates to fix blurring and edge warping around objects, but even with those fixes, the effect is understated. It isn’t a dramatic, pop-out book 3D spectacle, and it shouldn’t be oversold as one.
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3D Street View, Times Square, NY City
Instead, it relies entirely on subtle, real-time parallax. I tested it in an old European square flanked by a massive church. When you shift your physical weight or move your head, the foreground elements slide against the background just enough to trick your brain. It feels like a step in the right direction rather than a total visual overhaul.
This subtle depth is most striking when you drop into high-density urban environments like Times Square. In the headset, towering digital billboards cleanly detach from the structural steel and glass skyscrapers behind them. Even chaotic, organic shapes, like a dense patch of bushes in a sidewalk planter or a clump of trees outside a restaurant, manage to pop out with satisfying depth.
The effect carries over beautifully to complex indoor spaces as well, like the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. Standing inside the museum, the app successfully separates the reflective cars from the open, multi-level walkways behind them, turning what used to be a flat, static panorama into a believable physical hall.
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Inside the Porsche Museum, Stuttgart, Germany
Getting these flat images to warp into 3D on a mobile headset is no small feat, which is why the tech behind it is so interesting.
When I spoke with Andrei on a video call, he told me that restraint was intentional. He originally built the app under the name EarthQuest out of a personal obsession with Google’s 3D Tiles API, aiming for grounded presence rather than high-concept visual tricks. “The main design goal was realism,” Andrei told me. “I wanted the Street View environments to feel natural and believable in 3D, corresponding to the real scene as closely as possible.”
In written follow-up questions, Andrei confirmed that because Google doesn’t provide raw LiDAR data or depth maps for third-party developers, WorldLens has to infer the entire spatial structure from a single raw 2D panorama on the fly.
Pushing that much streaming data through a standalone headset can cause performance problems. During my testing, rapidly jumping from dense city centers to narrow mountain passes sometimes overwhelmed the system, occasionally throwing a “RAM usage high” error before crashing straight back to the Quest dashboard. When I reported the issue, Andrei noted that his backend analytics show a lifetime crash rate under one percent for the build, pointing to tight Meta OS memory limits mixed with heavy streaming threads. In fairness, I was pushing the app aggressively at the time, loading multiple locations in quick succession and forcing scene reloads. Fortunately, the app’s state-saving is solid, since rebooting drops you right back onto the exact street corner where it failed.
To handle the blurry ground textures common in third-party Google Earth apps, Andrei also built a proprietary 4x neural network upscaler into the preferences menu. It acts as a sharp texture filter for close-up viewing without hallucinating fake objects or inventing fictional geometry.
While a PCVR port is in the works, Andrei is holding off on estimating a release date too early given the scale of the project. However, he noted that moving to PC-tethered hardware will provide significantly more performance headroom. According to Andrei, the goal for the PCVR version is to push visual detail and caching capacity further, which should mean faster loading, near-instant 3D generations, and reduced 3D tile pop-in compared to standalone hardware.
Images captured in WorldLens VR on Meta Quest 3. The 3D effect is difficult to capture in a still image.
While virtual travel remains a specific niche within the broader VR ecosystem, WorldLens VR shows why these experiences continue to resonate with some headset users. There is a massive psychological difference between looking at a flat map and getting that brief, genuine sensation that you are standing on a street corner halfway across the world. It is the kind of experience where you can easily lose yourself for hours just exploring, hopping from one random corner of the globe to the next.
For an app built by a solo developer chasing a personal obsession, that alone makes it worth a look.
