Part of my Udcaity VR course involves doing a quick/light review of a Google Cardboard app. So I figured I might as well post that here too.

VR App review – Google Street View – iOS

To call Google Street View for iOS a VR app feels like a bit of a stretch. Upon opening the app it’s immediately obvious the app isn’t designed from the ground up for a VR experience. Instead, it’s optimised for its primary audience of phone users.

On the home screen, there’s nothing to indicate there’s a VR interface option at all. The search bar at the top of the page obviously requires keyboard input, the main map, and even the tiles at the bottom of the screen, all require touch and there’s no way of switching into a VR mode from this view.

Those tiles I mentioned, that’s the easiest way to get to the VR side of things. Scrolling down the page show a seemingly endless list of Google Street View locations that can be viewed using a cardboard setup.

Selecting a tile presents a street view style UI (still not in VR mode yet). This allows the user to tap the screen and move around the environment. You’d be forgiven for missing the small icon in the top right of the interface for switching to cardboard mode. It’s the one that looks like a little cardboard headset.

If you were lucky enough to make it this far, you’ll be presented with a standard Google UI telling you to turn your device on its side and put it into your viewer.

Once in Cardboard mode, you’ll experience a familiar interface to many other Cardboard VR apps. One difference here is they’ve mashed VR together with a desktop browser style Street View experience. Obviously to look around you just… well… look around 😉 but navigation is done via a point and clicks teleport interface. This uses the “on ground” style direction button similar to Street View’s desktop UI. It works well and it’s fairly intuitive given the navigation follows the users’ gaze. Basically where ever you look, if you can go there, the arrow will point the way. I prefer a more obvious waypoint style interface as it makes it clearer where you can go, but that’s just a personal preference.

As I said at the beginning it’s obvious this isn’t VR centric app, but then again it’s clear that isn’t the intent either. Given the nature of Cardboard being a mobile-based app, there’s an awful lot of sense in adding VR as a feature, rather than the primary UI.

Although mobile users are the primary audience, Google still does a great UI job for VR users and that’s to be commended. Really we shouldn’t expect less from an industry heavyweight like Google.

Of course, there’s always room for improvement, and this app is no exception. Street View being what it is doesn’t include any sound, it is just static 360 images after all. That being said it would be great to increase the emersion of the VR mode by including ambient environmental audio. It’s always amazing how good 3D sound can really put you in a place.

Conclusion

Ultimately Google Street VR did a good job of adding a VR mode feature to the mobile app. More could be done to improve the experience, but frankly, this is an impressive example of 3D content captured for one interface and repurposing it for another. It’s not exactly a virtual world tour vacation, but it might just encourage you to take one.