Virtual Reality, WordPress, & Web Design: What Does the Future Hold?
Virtual Reality and WordPress – What’s There?
Let’s start with the big news, it was just announced that all WordPress.com sites will now support virtual reality images and videos. That means the 409 million visitors to WordPress.com blogs every month now have a chance to be exposed to virtual reality images. I only hope this pushes virtual reality more into the mainstream.
And it’s not just limited to WordPress.com – some developers are already making it possible to add virtual reality to self-hosted WordPress via plugins. I did some digging around the plugin repository and I found two promising plugins:
VR Views
VR Views helps you embed 360-degree mono-and-stereoscopic images and videos into your WordPress site. It uses Google’s VR Views library, which makes it fully compatible with Google Cardboard.
To handle issues with responsive design, i.e. users who don’t have Google Cardboard, the plugin defaults to a “magic window” that will work on any desktop or mobile browser, regardless of hardware. The “magic window” allows readers to move their screen around to view the image in 360 degrees of glory but lacks true virtual reality.
To create your virtual reality content, you can use any device that is capable of capturing 360-degree videos or images. And once you have your content, implementing it is as easy as adding a shortcode to your WordPress site.
WP-VR-view
WP-VR-view is another plugin which lets you add Google Cardboard compatible virtual reality media to your WordPress site.
And just like VR Views, it degrades considerably for anyone who doesn’t have virtual reality hardware
Roadblocks to Widespread Implementation of VR and Web Design
Beyond the rather obvious roadblock of VR headset adoption, there are some other things standing in the way of virtual reality.
Responsive Design
How do you build a website that functions for both virtual reality headset wearers and regular users alike? That’s the major problem designers will need to cope with. Right now, most implementations involve a toggle to move between modes. But is that really the best virtual experience?
And how do you handle menus? Eye-tracking menus work great for wearable headsets but obviously not for desktop browsers.
I don’t have answers to these questions. But I do know that having to grab my headset and hit a toggle button isn’t a very immersive experience. And it probably would relegate virtual reality to “occasional treat” rather than “daily habit.” At least for me.
Bandwidth
We already know how massively important page speed is. Are visitors really going to be willing to wait for large 4K 360 degree videos to load? For special occasions, I think yes. But for everyday browsing? That’s a tougher question to answer.
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