So, it’s Autumn 2020 and the question is… is there yet any immersive ‘Google Street View’ VR headset for the impoverished historian and topographer, at under £300 and with good visual resolution?

The latest edition of the UK’s venerable PC Pro magazine triggered my interest in this question, with a review of a £300 VR unit called the Oculus Quest 2. Apparently it’s rather good, 1920px per-eye at a 90hz refresh-rate, £299 and just starting to ship now.

Looks good, so the deal-breaker question is… can it run Street View? It’s a difficult question to answer via search. You would think that everyone and their dog would have a neat Web page listing VR kit that works with Google Street View in 2020.

Turns out that my question was formulated wrongly, due to me being totally clueless about VR. Oculus effectively has its own app ‘wrapper’ for Street View and it’s called Wander and sells for £8. This app lists as being compatible with the Oculus Quest, so will presumably also be compatible with Oculus Quest 2. The reviews of the late-2018 app suggest the app was a bit dodgy until the end of summer 2020, when it had updates which fixed a lot of the complaints.

But Will Hart at CthulhuWho1 provides a vital snippet of information about the budget Oculus Go as a Wander-capable sub-£300 option…

“The Oculus Go does require a Wi-Fi connection, and the one-time use of a smartphone to get it connected at first”

So, while it appears the Oculus Go can currently be had for £150 from Argos in the UK, and less if you’re willing to risk eBay, the smartphone activation is a deal-breaker if you don’t actually own a smartphone. I assume that the “smartphone activation” may also be the case with the Oculus Quest 2 too.

This vital information then led me to discover that the Go and the Quest are just the wrong headsets, as…

“Oculus Rift S is meant to work with a desktop PC, connected through a dual USB 3.0 and DisplayPort cable, the Oculus Quest is completely wireless.”

Right, so that’s the solution. What I actually need is an Oculus Rift S + desktop PC + the cables. Which would actually be powerful enough to run not Wander, but rather the full Google Earth VR on Oculus Rift. Google Earth VR added Street View at the end of 2017, and is free rather than £8. It’s perhaps also more likely to continue working in the long-term.

Additionally, when I go back to the PC Pro review I learn that…

With Oculus killing off the Rift S (£399) in the coming months, the Quest 2 really is in a league of its own.

Thus the answer to the “£300?” question appears to be: wait until the Oculus Rift S can be had for £250, perhaps as a ‘discontinued hardware’ bargain in the New Year sales for 2020/21? One should be able to use it with the full Google Earth VR app and a desktop PC, given a USB 3.0 port and possibly a DisplayPort splitter cable. The risk there is that cheap Oculus Rift S’s don’t actually flood the market in a few months time, but keep their price and gradually become expensive eBay rarities for VR headset-collectors.

The other possibility is that Oculus manages to get the Oculus Quest 2 to offer a one-time activation option via an Android tablet such as the popular Kindle Fire, rather than a smartphone. But I guess one of their aims may be to harvest the phone-numbers, which they couldn’t do from tablets. Also, it would mean Facebook interfacing with an Amazon device.

Until then, it seems that the impoverished topographer has to carry on using Google Earth while nudging his nose into a widescreen desktop monitor… for free.

Update, May 2021: the Oculus Rift S never went into the bargain sales. But there are now big 34″ curved monitors priced below £500 inc. VAT. These are meant for videogamers but could be a viable StreetView alternative for many older desktop users who don’t want the VR games and want to use normal spectacles etc.