Virtual Reality is coming to WordPress.com! As of today, you can create and publish your own VR content on any WordPress.com site, starting with 360° photos and 360° videos (beta), and you can view regular photos and panoramas in VR. Our goal is to make publishing VR content as simple as publishing text or photos to the web — just add VR content to your site and anyone with a web browser can instantly enjoy it.
Let’s start with some examples.
Click the “play” button on any picture below and our VR viewer will load. On a regular desktop browser you can then “look around” using your mouse, including in gorgeous full-screen mode. On a phone browser or a webVR enabled desktop browser, you’ll see a VR button in the bottom right — select it and our viewer will render the content in full 3D mode inside your VR gear. So far we’ve tested with Cardboard, Gear, Daydream, Rift, and Vive.
360° photos:
Panoramas:
Here’s a panorama that the Mars Pathfinder took:
We’re already seeing examples of how VR can help tell stories. The Harvard Gazette is starting to use 360° photos to convey their stories, for example in Confronting the Refugee Crisis.
Augmenting your own posts with VR content is simple: Upload VR content to your WordPress site just like you would with any other content, decide if you want to present it in 360 or cinema (panorama) mode, and publish it using the “vr” shortcode:
[vr url=path-to-photo.jpg view=360]
or
[vr url=path-to-photo.jpg view=cinema]
Detailed instructions are here.
An easy way to start taking 360° photos today is to use the Google Street View app (for iOS and Android).
We can’t wait to see how WordPress.com users will use VR to tell their stories!
WordPress.com News 
Reblogged this on Trasnochada and commented:
Realidad Virtual y contenido en 360º en sitios web WordPress.com
Hey, exciting times ahead of us! I look forward to all content of this kind 🙂
This is amazing, cogent, technology that bleeds just a little on the cutting edge. Well done! We’re in a whole new worldscape now — where the virtual becomes our reality.
Reblogged this on Doug and commented:
Huge props to the team on this one!
Reblogged this on Veni, Vidi, Velcro.
It’s probably just me but I can’t click and look around – can’t seem to get hold of the thing.
Well suppose I’ll get myself over to a forum because I can’t do it. Wouldn’t want only positive comments to land here – I reckon you need something of a cross-section.
Love smart technology
Ah! Panic off – got it – you click on anywhere in the picture and hold, and then move around, rather than click only on the icon and expect it to do things!
The 360 degree views work well. The panoramas do not. The view can be moved horizontally and vertically, but the height is too small. Zooming in does not work (yet?).
We agree, the panoramas are too zoomed out. We’re adjusting that later today or tomorrow to make the experience more surrounding and immersive. Manual zooming might happen at some point in the future when we have a UI inside the VR viewer.
This is awesome.
I’m looking forward to making use of this cool new feature.
Reblogged this on Ich sag mal and commented:
Super
Niice! Do you have any idea when this will come to self-hosted WordPress sites (i.e. not wordpress.com sites)? Will it require a plugin, or will it be built into the core WordPress?
Yes, it will come to self-hosted sites via Jetpack within the next few weeks.
Thanks!
Amazing! Interesting that the first two examples work perfectly on Safari but the last three don’t. Any reason?
They should all work! Mobile or desktop Safari?
I realize the 360 degree photo works but the panorama shot seems distorted.
The panoramas look best inside a VR display, on a desktop they look a little unusual.
Reblogged this on Zox Zin Min and commented:
Great!
should we compress the images? the street view images are like 20 mb, how do we keep file size at bay?
The VR viewer works with large files, so no need to compress on that account.
How will this functionality be provided to self hosted wordpress installations? Via Jetpack or another plugin or are there no plans for self hosted wordpress installations yet?
Support will be in the next Jetpack release (wich is not scheduled yet, but they usually happen about once a month).
Hello, that is great news for 360 content creators. How about placing hotspots? Is that feature will be available?
Thanks. Yes, hotspots is a feature that we are thinking about adding.
Reblogged this on Arrested Developments and commented:
The 360 degree views work well
This is cool!
Thank you
Awesome
Oh wow this is awesome 👏👍😍
Thanks!
I get a “Failed to Load VR Screen” message.
We had a slight glitch earlier – are you still getting the error?
That’s a great Christmas present! Looking forward to the self-hosted solution as well!
Reblogged this on Siefken Publications and commented:
This is cool! Now if I could just figure out what it means!
I’m sure it would take a camera that can do the 360 vr too. I’m not sure how to do it but I will figure it out. very nice and can’t wait to see people’s pictures!
You can use a phone and the Google Street View app to take 360 images – you rotate on the spot while the app takes lots of pictures, and it then merges them all together into a 360 image.
Viewed the post… An amazing tool that will boost the content of our WP Blogs. wonderful… Let me figure out how to use it…. Great boon it seems…
Great! But do I get this right that this feature is only available for blogs hosted on wordpress.com? When will it be available for self-hosted wordpress sites? So far, I use a special plug-in to display VR-content on my travel blog (voyagewizard.com).
Coming soon to Jetpack!
The Mars panorama is literally out of world 😉
The Science Geek
Reblogged this on Charlieseverythingblog and commented:
Cool VR and 360 stuff on WordPress.com 🙂
This is great news! it’s something I’ve been waiting for and I will upload some of my 360 images immediately. Do you have any specs for optimum or maximum image dimensions?
No specific specs, should work with any format.
I’m looking forward to this support advancing and improving soon. It would be nicer not to have to click to activate the 360 image, and to see the common features of other 360 image hosts, like ‘little planet’ view.
Thanks James, we’re hoping to add more advanced features soon. We’ll likely stick with the click-to-activate for the moment though, as we feel it gives better performance with minimal overhead.
Reblogged this on eyewitness and commented:
VR? This is the NEW BIG THING
Reblogged this on Kiranmathew and commented:
Virtual reality… such an amazing concept! Explore an image from every angle as if you were there! Travel across the continent in the blink of an eye, or skyrocket up to mars in a flash!
Now, WordPress bloggers are able to add 360° pictures and videos to further enhance all our readers’ experiences on this amazing platform.
Exciting!
I’ve been working on incorporating 360VR images into my site (see https://socalhiker.net/hiking-devils-garden-loop-arches-national-park/ for an example), but one of the challenges has been the file size and the impact on page load time.
It looks like this new shortcode is loading just a preview image until the user clicks the “play” button on the image. Is that correct? If so, I can’t wait until this shows up in Jetpack!
I
Yes, the viewer is designed to keep the initial loading time as small as possible and only a preview is shown until activated. It should be available in the next version of Jetpack
The BBC have been using the video version of this for some time. It’s well clever 🙂
I’m personally not a fan of 360 degree videos (something exciting happens and I’m always looking at the floor, for instance) but the 360 degree photos are beautiful! 🙂
I was successful with the vr code for one 360 photo, but how do you do it for a gallery of 360 photos?
You will need to use the VR code for each photo. Gallery support is something we are actively looking at.
I can’t wait to see the amazing ways people will be using this in their blogs.
Virtual reality… such an amazing concept! Explore an image from every angle as if you were there! Travel across the continent in the blink of an eye, or skyrocket up to mars in a flash!
Now, WordPress bloggers are able to add 360° pictures and videos to further enhance all our readers’ experiences on this amazing platform.
Thank you for responding to my cry for help, but I still do not know who to send the request to. If you can give me where o ask for help, I will be grateful. Yes, my WP account is at the gmail account. I just do not know how to ask support for help because I do not know who to ask or what address to send it to. I am still looking for possible early WP correspondence that tells me when I opened my WP account. Please help if you can. Mary H. Moore
Hello! Sorry to hear you still can’t access your account. We sent further instructions to the email address associated with your WordPress.com account, but in case you haven’t found it or the problem persists regardless, feel free to contact us at help@wordpress.com. Thanks, and I’m sure we’ll get it all sorted out.
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On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 11:24 AM, The WordPress.com Blog wrote:
> Toni Schneider posted: “Virtual Reality is coming to WordPress.com! As of > today, you can create and publish your own VR content on any WordPress.com > site, starting with 360° photos and 360° videos (beta), and you can > view regular photos and panoramas in VR. Our goal is to make p” >
Hello! We’ve sent you instructions to the email address associated with your WordPress.com account. If for some reason you’re still unable to access your site, please contact us at help@wordpress.com.