An important aspect of a website or blog is to keep it exciting for visitors. They want people to find their website fascinating, easy to use and overall successful. You can have the best content in the world, but if your site is poorly optimized, hard to use and slow to load, you’re not going to have a lot of recurring traffic.
In the following article we would like to introduce you to some WordPress plugins that you can use to integrate VR into your website for free. With the plugins you can often embed 3D configurators in VR.
WordPress has well over 50,000 plugins available to choose from, so it’s not surprising that they keep pace with the latest and greatest technical trends and allow your website to do almost anything you want. One of the latest trends in web design are the host VR (Virtual Reality) options on your website and WordPress, unsurprisingly, already offers good solutions in this respect.
These are mainly 360-degree images and videos that can be displayed in stereoscopic formats (i.e. the image is divided into two parts to allow the 3D feeling when viewed through VR lenses).
What can you use VR for on your website?
VR is already a world wide technology, but the integration of VR into your website will still be seen as an innovation today. A few may take the trouble to attach a HTC Vive or Google Cardboard to view their panoramic image, but for those who do, you can display products or certain locations with excellent clarity with VR and show that you and your website are ahead of the curve.
You can also use VR fantastically for marketing purposes if you want to present a particular product from different angles, or if you want to take a virtual tour of a fancy location or property you want to sell. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the fantastic offers from WordPress developers that allow them to freely host this cool technology on their website.
Web VR View – Add Photo Sphere, 360 Video to WordPress – by Tumanov Alexander.
This is the most popular VR plugin and allows them to display Photo Sphere images and 360 videos on their WordPress page, which means that you can use their smartphone or specially developed Samsung Galaxy Gear camera to capture a panoramic image or video. Visitors to the site can use their smartphones to navigate realistically and vividly through their image or video.
Supported web platforms are Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, IE Edge and Firefox. Native platforms are iOS 8 and higher and Android 4.4 (KitKat) and higher.
There are other plugins to choose from that essentially share the same usage as MomentoPress for Momento360 and VR Views, allowing you to easily use and view panoramic images on your website. Algori 360 Video is a fantastic special 360 video plugin that is especially useful if you only want to display omnidirectional video content.
WP VR – 360 Panorama and virtual tour creator for WordPress ByRextheme.
The purpose of this plugin is to host virtual tours on your website, perfect for travel writers or people who want to rent or sell a property. With this plugin you can combine panoramic images into a virtual tour that captivates people with a simple and user-friendly interface, customizable features, easy embedding and intuitive navigation tools. There is both a free and a premium version, whereby the premium version offers some small extras as well as personal support by the team.
Virtual shop for WooCommerce byOtaiz.
A particularly interesting plugin is the Virtual Shop for WooCommerce. It is something of a trendsetter and shows what is possible with VR technology. WooCommerce is an open source eCommerce plugin that was specially developed for online shopping websites with WordPress. As the plugin’s name suggests, you can use your VR headset to enter a virtual shop and explore the products on offer, call up detailed information on each available product, add it to your shopping cart and then buy it. The idea is to convey the feeling of a brick and mortar shop from home. The app is still at an early stage of development, but gives an idea of what the future of eCommerce will look like once VR technology has fully taken effect.
These are the best known options currently offered by WordPress. As already mentioned, some of the features for this plugin are still under development, but the technology is already available and can be used for free, so why not try it on your website?
We hope that we could give you a short overview of currently available VR plugins for WordPress. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to contact our experts via our forum.
Thank you very much for your visit.