Wanderer on Meta Quest: Time to Get Wandering Again
Meta Quest was launched with some wonderful Apps, many of which have fallen by the wayside as new, more exciting experiences but with many being updated, there are plenty that are worth revisiting. Without a doubt, Meta’s “Wanderer” is one of those.
Wanderer enables the integration of Google Street View into virtual reality, granting easy access to almost the whole globe. The application allows users to fully engage with 360-degree panoramic views, navigate across streets with a single touch, and instantaneously transport themselves from one location to another. The user interface is user-friendly and the implementation of speech recognition eliminates the need for manual input while searching for locations.
What’s With Wanderer?
First Launched on the Oculus Go, Wanderer is like Google Street View but in Virtual Reality, adding a whole new dimension to visiting the world. The concept was that you could not only see places in 3D, but it would feel as though you were actually there. In the budding Metaverse, the concept of Wanderer was pretty good. The App used Google Maps to plonk you at any place available in the system at street level. You could look around and navigate around using the Google system and visit all of those places that you wanted to, provided that Google had done it first.
It was fun and easy and when it ported from the Oculus Go to the Meta Quest 2, the graphics were pretty good. It was a nice, easy App that took the flat Google Streetview to a whole other dimension – quite literally. However, the thrill of other content available on the Meta Quest device, and VR in general, meant that Wanderer was soon consigned to the “must get back to, sometime” category. For many, it languished at the bottom of the App pile – either that or it was deleted altogether.
It’s easy to see why; it has limited appeal beyond initial interest in revisiting your old haunts, or visiting the odd international building, and it tended to take up a fair bit of Headset hard drive space. As Apps grew in size and complexity, Wanderer was a nice to have, not a necessity.
There was also the issue that you could only go to any place that had been previously mapped by Google, and then there was a differentiation between some areas. You could not, were it your yearning, explore the mountains of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush, because, probably quite rightly, Google have chosen not to send their back-pack 3D camera systems up there. There were also dark blue areas and light blue areas, denoting the density of Google data in a particular area; the darker the blue, the better the Streetview.
Wanderer Grows Up.
But the Wanderer team haven’t just been sitting on their hands these past few years, and its functionality has been updated to add new features, the king of which is the new time-travel feature. By far the best element of the updated package is the time travel capability. You have the ability to flip between different Street View views of a geographic place that have been developed throughout the years. This allows you to see the street you are now on as it appeared one, three, ten, or even more years ago at any given time.
Google obviously want to keep their map content fresh, but when they update, they don’t just ditch their old data – they back it up to some server somewhere. But now, Wanderer is able to access those previous iterations of Streetview, and take you back in time to what was, as well as what is.
This new feature on Wanderer allows you to go back to different releases of Streetview and see how things have changed in an area. Obviously, historical sites like the Parthenon or Pisa haven’t changed at all, but down at 66 Mafeking Avenue, or wherever else you want to visit from your past, there could have been major changes, and your childhood home could now be a part of a shopping mall. Nice.
The latest version of Wanderer allows you to step back to 2015, or even further, if the Google data exists for that time. You can access it by simply pointing the right controller towards the left controller, which will allow you to switch between various times easily. Upon clicking this, a context menu that includes a calendar icon, allows you to navigate to previous years via a popup. In addition to the selection feature, Wanderer now has a social discovery function that allows you and your friends and family to go to other locations and times together, provided that they are equipped with a Quest headset. It is possible to bookmark favourite destinations as favourites, which will allow you to return to them whenever you want.
We at Unity Developers have fallen back in love with Wanderer, thanks to this relatively simple, but engaging update. If you haven’t looked at Wanderer for a while, now might just be the time to give it another go.
