Go Guess (2018) is a new interactive VR quiz game from developers Oblix that tosses you into Google 360 captures and makes you to guess where you are. The twist? You’re playing against other people, and you can hobnob in a social VR space between rounds.
Like its 2D forebears such as GeoGuessr (2013), Go Guess tasks you with investigating the captures by hunting for clues. You might be out in the wilderness looking at plants, or on a sunny beach hunting for a sign—anything that will help you distinguish the Welsh countryside from Tasmania, or Japanese islands from the Pacific North West coastline.
Giving you a number of nodes to teleport to, you can investigate the scene as much as you like. Rounds take place periodically, although avatars are named randomly currently, so it may be difficult to find and make friends in between matches, which is represented as a 3D render of Times Square in New York City.
Once you’ve found out where you are in the linked-together captures (or where you think you are), you can pull up a globe, mark the map and do some fine-tuning until you’re happy with the location. The closer your guess is to the actual location, the higher the points.
Google opened up its treasure trove of 360 Street View captures to developers late last year, although there was a proviso for developing apps and games with the data: it had to be free.
The app is free and supports Oculus Rift headsets, although since it’s on Steam, it’s likely SteamVR-compatible headsets such as HTC Vive and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets will work as well, albeit without appropriate controller models.