Brink Traveler: Virtual Travel
VR Review ★★★★★
Apple PCVR Quest Link Travel Comfortable Roomscale Stationary
Brink Traveler immerses you in virtual picture postcards of natural wonders that you've always wanted to visit and helps relive memories of places past. All in solitude. Without the crowds that you'll usually find at these popular locations. Not content to simply place you within expertly captured photogrammetry and 3D modeling, Brink Traveler also adds animation to waterfalls, birds in the sky and other surprises while surrounding you with a realistic audio experience.
The app features many diverse locations around the world, but the quantity varies depending on which platform you use. Both the PCVR and Meta Quest version include 48 environments and the legacy Meta Link version for PC offers 40 locations. Though the Apple Vision Pro version has only 18 locations, it is available at a cheaper price.
Brink Traveler screenshot of Iceland's Haifoss.
Around half of the destinations featured on Brink Traveler are within the United States, but the others are spread out around the globe. US destinations include Antelope Canyon, Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon, Crystal Crag, Death Valley, Glen Canyon, Goblin Valley, Horseshoe Bend, Lone Pine Peak, Mt Morrison, Mt Whitney, The Wave and White Pocket. Other destinations are located in Spain, France, Iceland, Norway, South Korea and New Zealand.
Walking around each location is possible either by pressing on the joystick or by walking around in your actual room. Though confined to a small viewing area, it's fun to maneuver around the available space to appreciate the landscape in three full dimensions and to peer over ledges into chasms below.
Presentation is also very good. The elegant menus are easy to operate and additional functions are available by pressing on a watch on your off-hand. A compass in your dominant hand helps you explore several points of interest hidden in the landscape, offering a little more interpretation of the scene around you. There's also an option to frame your fingers in a rectangle to take a photo – this takes a little getting used to, but then quickly becomes second nature. We also appreciate the simpler touches, such as describing the time of year, temperature and wind speed at each location.
Elegant menus. This notebook lists the POIs you've found.
Brink Traveler also offers a social feature. Share each location with invited guests using a room code, or mingle with random strangers on the internet. Each user must own a copy of the app. When we tried connecting with strangers, unlike the Wander app we rarely found anybody available.
Audio narration is presented in English and includes immersive effects, such as an echo when you're standing deep in a slot canyon. Unfortunately the interpretive descriptions of each location are rather light on content, and if you've already read the description on the loading page while downloading a new location, then the audio narration is just a frustrating repetition.
We found some the over saturated colors to be unnatural and occasionally an animated model added to the scenery – such as a cruise ship passing through a Norwegian fjord – was distracting to the point of breaking immersion. It would be great if these could be turned off. Also, though it's good to see the support of multiple languages (listed below), and as far as we could tell this support doesn't extend to audio narration. When using the app in a language other than English, the narration was absent and the additional content for the POI feature wouldn't even show up as text.
Exploring Greece's Navagio Beach.
Our original review expressed disappointment with the limited availability of interpretative content, but this has been partly addressed with with the addition of an AI assistant. Access the assistant via a walkie-talkie in your hand and it will respond audibly to your spoken questions about the destination in which you're currently location.
Brink Traveler is an excellent way to experience a good selection natural world landmarks if you can't travel there yourself. Having spent time exploring the world of Google Street View from inside the Wander app we do find the limited area of each Brink location to be confining, but Brink Traveler is unsurpassed in graphical detail and immersion. Another option is Blueplanet VR Explore which features good photogrammetry and contextual information over a greater number of locations but feels less polished.
Summary:
⬤ Excellent immersive experience
⬤ 18 (Apple), 20 (PCVR), 27 (Quest) diverse world locations
⬤ Elegant user interface is easy to use
⬤ Limited opportunities for exploration
⬤ Interpretative content could be better defined
Supported Languages:
English French German Japanese Korean
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