System: Valve Index & HTC Vive
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: 360 Video and Animation
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: Visiting Hawaii as a tourist is amazing. But when you get to “Let Hawaii Happen” with a local as your guide, it’s a totally different experience. Start by paragliding into an island of your choice. Then, upon landing, a local will give you the most personal tour of their island — virtually-speaking.
Review: Have you ever wanted to visit Hawaii? Well, now you can in VR! But you won’t be getting to the Islands on a plane. You will need to paraglide into the locations you want to visit! While the short motion controlled ‘flights’ are nice the rest is played out via some good quality 360 video. The idea of this and many other VR tourist videos is to give you a feeling of what it is like to visit Hawaii. Maybe you plan to go there one day, or maybe you will never be able to. Either way, this is well worth a look just to see what it’s like. Or if you have been, maybe watch this and reminisce of your holiday times.
Looking at the pictures of this app doesn’t give you any indication of what it is really like. I imagined paragliding over Hawaii, feeling as free as a bird. But I wasn’t free at all, in fact, it was a red herring because I wasn’t even moving! What this really is, is a nice collection of 360° videos about Hawaii. There is nothing wrong with them and indeed the app is free anyway so there is very little to moan about. Just don’t expect the same things that I first did when downloading this app.
