This weekend I traveled from New York to Los Angeles in virtual reality with Android XR.
The Google Maps experience in the Samsung Galaxy XR headset is the most impressive software on the system at launch.
Over the course of eight minutes in the video below, you’ll see me learn the gestures to navigate the globe in VR using hand tracking. I go from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the famed Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles.
What wins me over is the control over movement with my hand and gaze. Each pinch grabs a spot in the world, with hand movements dragging to those spots or scaling and rotating the world. I’m reminded of the opening moment of The Under Presents from Tender Claws, for some reason, and I love it so very much.
What makes this system comfortable is vignetting movement catapulting across hundreds of miles of Earth with a grid view, even switching from the planet being horizontal to vertical. From New York to outer space and down back to Los Angeles is no joke technically, and it just works.
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Netflix looks great in the headset, I’ve launched Demeo and golfed in my favorite escape from reality, Walkabout Mini Golf. I even downloaded Virtual Desktop and enjoyed its menu at 90 FPS, but I’m choosing not to connect Android XR to an outside PC until I feel I’ve exhausted it in standalone. I’ve spent some time with Inside Job from Owlchemy and my colleague already wrote about the experimental AI-infused Asteroid experience. I’ve even connected a USB hub to the headset and viewed multiple UVC video inputs simultaneously.
Google Maps is what I’ll miss when this headset goes back to Agile Lens, which lent UploadVR their newly purchased Samsung headset for the weekend for analysis. We’ve also ordered headsets and controllers ourselves with varying schedules for delivery.
Google Earth VR on Steam released in 2016 for free using the Vive controllers for interaction. Rated “very positive” across all these years of Steam PC VR usage, for some it stands the test of time as their favorite VR experience and proof that a new medium had uses for a digital realm with scale and distance at your command. Google Earth VR gave people in a whole range of PC VR headsets a way to see their planet from new perspectives. When the complaint is that there isn’t more content in VR, for the last decade Earth’s mapped regions have been there to explore with Google in PC VR. Now a more advanced version of the experience runs in standalone on the Galaxy XR system.
There’s a lot more available to dive deeper into Google’s latest efforts to map indoor locations in Maps, and Google Play offers a flat version of “Google Earth” for Android XR that works smoothly as well, allowing for custom map-making while multitasking with other Android panels.
I use a globe app called Spatial Earth in visionOS while I work much as I’m doing now writing this article from Galaxy XR. It’s nice to have a three dimensional globe in your space to look at any time and zoom into as an interactive reference object. I use a separate app called Fly for fully immersive views in VR with 3D tiles from Google on Apple’s headset. The controls in Fly are meant to make you believe you’re flying a single person drone with some sort of holographic control interface, with 2D menus featuring landmarks and search all secondary to the flying mechanic. Some apps do 3D tabletop representations of maps, too. None of it quite impresses as much as seeing something tall in the distance catch your eye and pulling yourself over to it.
Google Maps in fully immersive virtual reality with hand tracking immediately and powerfully provides new perspectives. But Android XR as an operating system, at least at launch, doesn’t appear to leave space for anything else meaningful to join this immersive view.
If you wanted to visit France to witness a cool event that happens in that country, I recommend putting on Apple Vision Pro and sitting for 30 minutes to attend the MotoGP race at Le Mans with Johann Zarco.
Now, I’d also recommend checking out whatever place you want in France with Google Maps too. What hardware you use to get there and how soon you need to go is something for us to address in a different article.
Google Maps impressed me when I first tried this headset last year. Now that I’ve had Google’s standalone spatial operating system on my head for a few days, using my hands to grab a place of interest on the Earth’s surface and pull it toward me feels a bit like coming back to that dreamy future of VR some inspired googlers explored with us a decade ago in Google Earth VR. If you have an Android XR headset, do a friend a favor and put them in Maps first.
