The app known as "EarthQuest" or "Earth Quest" on older reviews has been rebranded as WorldLens: All-in-One Virtual Travel on the Meta Store — it is the same app, continuously updated by the same developer (Boec). The underlying technology, Google Earth 3D data and Street View integration, remains the same. If you search for it on the Meta Store, use "WorldLens" or follow the link below. The developer's website is earthquest.site. This review covers the current WorldLens version which includes significant additions since the original launch: World AI, 3D Street View, Time Travel and Upscale 3D Imagery.

What is Earth Quest / WorldLens?

Earth Quest — now officially called WorldLens on the Meta Store — is a VR Earth exploration application that brings the power of Google Earth 3D and Google Street View into a standalone Meta Quest headset. It is the closest available standalone equivalent to Google Earth VR, the celebrated PC VR application that first made it possible to fly over the planet in immersive 3D — but unavailable on Quest. WorldLens fills that gap with additional features that the original PC version never had: AI conversation, multiplayer, time travel and 8K street-level imagery.

The app uses Google's global 3D map data — the same underlying satellite and photogrammetric surveys that power Google Maps and Google Earth — to construct a three-dimensional representation of the entire planet. Nearly every recognisable city on Earth is available in immersive 3D, meaning students can fly over London, descend into the streets of Tokyo, orbit the Great Wall of China, or visit the neighbourhood of a student whose family originates from Lagos or Mumbai. The coverage is global, constantly updated, and includes residential streets in most countries.

The app has been continuously developed since its launch in 2023, with each major update adding substantial new functionality. The current version — listed as WorldLens — includes: AI-powered Upscale 3D Imagery for enhanced close-up quality, 3D Street View (a first for VR Earth apps), Time Travel to compare historical imagery, an AI travel companion (World AI) that communicates in your language, multiplayer co-exploration, a realistic day/night cycle and adaptive atmospheric haze. It supports 34+ languages including all major European languages plus Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese.

What's Inside

Curriculum & Educational Fit

WorldLens (Earth Quest) is the most powerful Geography tool available on standalone VR — its scope is literally the entire planet. Any location studied in any Geography curriculum can be visited, flown over and explored at street level. For GCSE and A-level Geography, this means every case study location — Mumbai, the Maldives, the Sahel, Snowdonia, the Mississippi Delta, the Three Gorges Dam — can be experienced rather than merely described from a textbook photograph. The combination of 3D aerial view, Street View, and Time Travel covers the three most common Geography fieldwork needs: spatial context, street-level observation, and change over time.

For Human Geography, the ability to compare urban morphology across cities — the grid layout of Chicago vs the organic street pattern of Cairo vs the planned density of Singapore — is immediately curriculum-applicable. For Development Studies, juxtaposing the urban landscape of a high-income country city with a low-income country city at street level makes abstract development indicators concrete and memorable. For Environmental Change, the Time Travel feature showing coastal erosion, urban sprawl, deforestation or post-disaster recovery over years is a uniquely powerful teaching tool. For EAL students and Cultural Identity, being able to fly a student to their family's home city or neighbourhood in VR — and sharing that experience with their classmates — is one of the most meaningful inclusion activities available in any VR app. Suitable for all ages; no content concerns.