Blueplanet VR v2

Library of Realities.com review: Blueplanet VR Explore brings the immersion of virtual reality, allowing you to marvel at world locations of significant natural and cultural heritage in three dimensional photography and modeling. Featuring around 50 sites at over 40 locations, you can take in the sights from different vantage points as you freely roam around the landscape. Sites range from aerial photography to caves, canyons and lava tubes. From Asian temples to a Nevada ghost town. All in solitude, without the crowds that you'd usually find at these popular locations. Three short videos induct you into the experience, though the controls and user interface are straightforward so you could skip them entirely and move straight to the wall of locations. Choosing from a 4 x 11 grid of photographic bubbles with short titles, pass your hand over one of these and you'll be transported directly to a location. As your selected landscape is revealed a panel appears allowing you to orient yourself with a map, a model of the site or a short description of the site. Dismiss the panel with your trigger finger and you now have an unobstructed view and can use teleport locomotion to move around. Some locations also feature additional interpretive content, or lead you to neighboring locations. Occasionally a location will be enhanced with computer generated shafts of light, or an animated waterfall. We were particularly impressed with the modeling of Arizona's Antelope Canyon, which compared favorably with an equivalent experience in the Brink Traveler app, offering just as much modeling and photographic detail but permitting deeper travel into the canyon. Blueplanet VR Explore is single download of around 20 GB. Though this may seem large, it allows viewers to explore a large quantity of locations with no delays or loading screens, and considering the quantity of locations and amount of data needed to reproduce each of them digitally we think the developers have achieved a small miracle here. Comparatively, we could be waiting five minutes to download each location in turn for Brink Traveler. We still wish many of the locations could have been rendered in more even more detail, perhaps with an option to download a HD version. However on that score maybe we need to wait for the next generation of technology and storage to be able to become even more immersed in our surroundings. Visuals are also accompanied by ambient soundtracks that vary depending on the site. Some were well suited, while others were less so appropriate or faithful to the location. The Meta Quest offered a mute button, though we couldn't find an equivalent option for the PCVR version. Blueplanet is a detailed exploration of a large number of sites skillfully created in photogrammetry, but it's not without its issues. We'd love to give Blueplanet five stars we but have to mark it down in some important areas - most notably a clumsy UI and some stability issues. We had to reset the app several times after getting stuck with black screens when selecting a new location, both with PCVR and Quest versions. Also we'd have preferred more diversity in subjects and a better geographic spread of locations - 80% of these experiences are based in the American Southwest, with the only exceptions being 4 sites in Iceland, one in Nepal and three more in Java. The developer tells us there's a major update in the works for the end of 2023 with 30 new locations and an improved user interface and we'll revisit this review then. ✅ Many immersive 3D environments to explore. ✅ Great range of content and detail. ❌ Needs wider global coverage. ❌ Clumsy UI and some stability issues.