Travel in a time of Covid (using VR)

In 2020, I unknowingly planned ahead for Covid striking down my travel plans. Due to airfare deals, I spent most of my vacation in January and February, and so I completed those trips and then was grounded when I returned. I did have to cancel a few other trips during the rest of the year (Iceland for my birthday, Paris with friends, north eastern Europe with my parents, but at least I got to a few new places.

One thing you can do to travel during these times is to travel virtually using VR. This gives you a 360-degree view of wherever you are, where you can turn around and look in all directions and choose to continue traveling in any direction. Not the same as traveling for real, but it’s not bad for 2020.

There are several travel-related options in VR. For example, National Geographic has VR experiences available at Machu Picchu (in Peru) and Antarctica. They are very well done but limited in what you can see.

Another option is Wander, which basically takes all the info in Google’s Street View maps, and lets you wander around in it (on paths vehicles take) in VR.

You can search for locations you want to visit using a text search. This way, I traveled to the hostel I stayed at in Colombia and traveled around Cartagena again checking out the major sites. I was impressed I could still find many of the sites I visited over a year later.

Further, it has a random location option, where you can just be dumped anywhere in the world and wander from there.

Because Wander uses Google Street View data, you can even go back in time for the years Google has collected.

While the wander app is only $9.99, the Oculus 2 is currently about $300. Here’s a link to it on Amazon if you want to check it out:

Of course, if you get an Oculus, you don’t just get to travel virtually, there are many other gaming and social options, including AltSpaceVR (a social gathering place in VR locations) and Beat Saber (essentially a rhythm game with light-sabers).