System: Valve Index & HTC Vive
Price at Time Of Review: £10.99
Comfort Rating: Green
Genre: Interactive Experience
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Standing or Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
VR Shop Score 1/100: 60
Description: City VR (cityvr.com) allows you to discover new perspectives to look upon cities like never have before. Touch and feel the skyscrapers, teleport around, walk like a giant, take snapshots of favourite views and moments, or simply enjoy the sunset from the top of the world. City VR is inspired by Skywand (skywand.com), an immersive motion control system for aerial filming. As Amber Garage’s first artwork, Skywand allows anyone, including cinematographers and those with zero drone experience, to create precise aerial filming plans in an intuitive 3D virtual interface, then have actual drone flights executed accordingly. Skywand eliminates technical barriers to achieve professional drone cinematography by automating the flight process and arming visionary filmmakers with a powerful and intelligent partner.
Review: It has to be said City VR is a pretty amazing experience. Put simply it is a 3D render of the city of San Francisco in California, USA. It looks great and feels amazing to get down and close to all the buildings and landmarks. But sadly City VR has two big problems. The first is its asking price. It’s just way too expensive for what it is and while you might spend a long while exploring the city you will soon get bored of it making that £10.99 price tag almost inexcusable.
The other problem this experience has is called “Google Earth”. It’s 100% free and you can do the same thing this app offers, only on a worldwide scale! Why would you pay £10.99 for a single city when you can view the world in VR for free! Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive to look at, but sadly it was way ahead of its time and way overpriced.
