Category: Update

We’re thrilled to announce that WPVR has undergone a significant transformation, making virtual tour creation not just easier, but also more aligned with your marketing needs.

In the 2024 update, we’ve introduced features that redefine the ease and and increase efficiency of creating virtual tours with WPVR.

One of the standout improvements is the time it takes to create a tour.

Now, you can put together a simple yet stunning virtual tour in less than five minutes.

That’s right!

This leap forward in efficiency means you can focus more on creativity and less on the technicalities.

We’ve brought some more significant features.

Let’s have a look at them.

The WPVR Improvements You Will Love!

As we dive into the specifics, you’ll see how each new feature in the WPVR update is designed to enhance your virtual tour experience, making it more intuitive, engaging, and marketable.

Whether you’re showcasing properties, hotels, or any other spaces, these updates are set to elevate your virtual tours to new heights.

Stay tuned as we explore each of these exciting new WPVR features in detail.

1. Call To Action (CTA) Button on the Tour

The first major enhancement in WPVR is the addition of a Call To Action (CTA) button directly on your virtual tours.

Now you can link to an external page, opening up new opportunities for interaction and marketing with this feature.

Here’s how you can use them:

• Real Estate Showcasing: Direct potential buyers to a contact page or more detailed property information, enhancing the likelihood of engagement and inquiries.
• Hotel Virtual Tours: Embed a CTA that leads to a booking page, seamlessly connecting the virtual experience with the convenience of making a reservation.
• Promotional Campaigns: Use the CTA to highlight special offers or deals, guiding viewers to a landing page where they can learn more or take advantage of these promotions.

Following the exciting addition of the CTA button, another standout feature in WPVR is the ability to password-protect your virtual tours.

2. Password Protected Virtual Tour

Continuing our journey of innovation, we now offer password protection for your virtual tours. This password protected tour feature is all about exclusivity and privacy, allowing you to control who accesses your tours.

Here’s the value you’ll find:

• Exclusive Access for Clients: Share private, password-protected tours with clients, providing them with a unique and exclusive experience.
• Monetization Opportunities: Create a subscription model for your tours, offering paid access to exclusive content and adding a revenue stream.

Once you publish or update your tour with this setting, it becomes accessible only to those who have the password.

With password protection, your virtual tours become a versatile tool for both exclusive marketing and potential revenue generation.

Especially if you’re in the museum or art gallery business, it can be an amazing addition!

3. Private Tour Creation Access

We’ve also brought another layer of control with “Private Tour Creation Access”.

Make a tour private and specifically choose who can edit it.

Here’s what this means for you:

• Tailored Access for Clients and Team Members: You can now grant editing access to selected clients or team members, ensuring that your tours are being refined by the right hands.
• Controlled Collaboration: This feature is perfect for collaborative projects where you need to manage who contributes and views the tour during its creation phase.

This private setting gives you more control over your virtual tours, ensuring that access is limited to a select group.

It’s a straightforward way to manage who sees and contributes to your project, keeping it secure and focused.

4. Easy Scene Navigation Menu

To make the user experience better, we’ve introduced another option, “Easy Scene Navigation Menu” to WPVR. This feature is designed to make navigating through your virtual tour very easy.

Here’s what it does for your tours:

• Streamlined Scene Selection: Visitors can now easily toggle through different scenes in your tour. With an expandable and collapsible menu, finding and viewing specific scenes is straightforward and user-friendly.
• Improved User Interaction: This navigation menu ensures that visitors engage with every aspect of your tour, enhancing their overall experience and interaction with your content.

This new menu is all about making things easy and quick for your visitors.

They can see everything you have to offer in your virtual tour without getting lost or missing anything important.

5. Dedicated Tour QR Code

Another exciting feature you’re getting is the “Dedicated Tour QR Code” feature in WPVR. This innovative addition allows you to generate a QR code for each virtual tour, it can be shown on the landing page too.

Here’s how it elevates your tour experience:

• Instant Access Anywhere: Place the QR code in strategic locations, like brochures or physical ads, allowing people to scan and access your virtual tour instantly.
• Seamless Integration: This feature, available with the embed add-on, bridges the gap between offline and online marketing, offering a quick entry point to your digital space.

It’s a smart way to bridge the gap between physical and digital marketing, giving your audience a direct and effortless path to experiencing your virtual spaces.

6. Social Share Options For Tour

To further enhance the reach of your virtual tours, the WPVR update introduces Social Share Options. This feature is all about extending your tour’s visibility.

Here are advantages,

• Easy Sharing on Social Platforms: Now, your viewers can share your virtual tour directly on social media, expanding your audience with just a few clicks.
• Better Online Presence: These share options, available with the embed add-on, integrate smoothly into your tour, making it more interactive and shareable.

7. Optimization For The Virtual Tour Creation Process

In our quest to make your experience better, WPVR has introduced key optimizations to the tour creation process.

Here’s what these updates mean for you:

i. Save Tour with “No Tour Reload”

Now, when you publish or update your tour, the page won’t reload and send you back to the start. This means you can keep editing right where you left off, making the process smoother and more time-efficient.

ii. Dynamic Scene & Hotspot IDs

Forget the hassle of manually assigning IDs to each scene and hotspot.

With our new update, these IDs are automatically generated, simplifying your workflow and saving you valuable time during the tour creation process.

8. Tour-specific Custom CSS

And lastly, we’re excited to introduce another feature that amplifies your creative freedom: Tour-specific Custom CSS.

This update is all about personalization and fine-tuning the aesthetics of your virtual tours. Here’s how it elevates your tour creation:

• Enhanced Customization: You now can add custom CSS snippets to individual tours. This means you can tailor the look and feel of each tour to match your specific vision or branding requirements.
• Creative Control: With this feature, the power to craft a unique and immersive virtual experience is in your hands. Whether it’s adjusting layouts, colors, or styles, your tours can now fully reflect your creative intent.

This level of customization ensures that your virtual tours aren’t just about showcasing spaces but also about presenting them in a way that aligns with your unique brand and style.

Wrapping Up

With these updates, we hope that creating virtual tours will now become not just easier, but also more aligned with your marketing and promotional needs.

These updates are a way of making WPVR the go-to tool for virtual tour creation, where ease of use meets marketing efficacy.

Ready to take your virtual tours to the next level?

Upgrade to WPVR Pro and unlock the full potential of these amazing new features.

And if you haven’t used WPVR yet, go ahead and start using it now.

It’s a wonder how fantastic WordPress is. You have a countless number of plugins that help you simplify all your efforts easily. WPVR is one of the few VR plugins that allow you to create a Virtual Tours on your WordPress website.

Since the start, WPVR managed to deliver with stable and quality output. And with time, the plugin developed into something amazing.

Now you can create a virtual tour, on your own, with tons of customization. That too, with a simple and user-friendly interface.

Let us look at some of the exciting features that WPVR incorporated since we launched our first stable version.

What’s New With WPVR?

1. GUTENBERG BLOCK SUPPORT

The time when this plugin was launched, WordPress was on the verge of upgrading to WordPress 5.0 with a major change. They made Gutenberg the default editor, replacing the Classic Editor.

Hence, WPVR was modified to provide Gutenberg block support.

You will get a separate block called “WP VR” under the common blocks.

You simply need to use the block and provide the tour id to the block.

And your tour will be added to the post/page.

2. ELEMENTOR SUPPORT – WPVR WIDGET

For those of you, who love to use the Elementor page builder, you will now get a separate Widget to embed the virtual tours created using WPVR.

Simply drag-and-drop this widget to any section. Provide the widget with ID, height, and width; you will be able to see the virtual tour added.

Hence, customize your page and add a virtual tour wherever you want by directly using the Wpvr widget.

3. AUTO ROTATION

The plugin allows you to create an auto-rotation effect on your tour. Once you have created a tour, you can set it up so that, if not touched, the tour will rotate automatically.

You can control the auto rotation speed and direction, and you can set a timer for auto-rotation to start again when stopped by visitors.

4. COMPASS (PRO)

Sometimes it makes more sense to include a compass to your tour.

Now you can display a small compass on the bottom right corner of the tour.

5. DEFAULT SCENE FACE (PRO)

You will be able to set the view that will appear first by default when the tour is loaded on the page.

Simply define the pitch and yaw of face you wish to show at first and that will be the face that will appear first when a tour is loaded on the page.

6. SCENE BOUNDARY (PRO)

This is one of the great features that let you have more control over the tour you create.

You can set horizontal or vertical boundaries to control how much a person can look left or right, and up and down.

7. ZOOM CONTROL (PRO)

You can even control how much a visitor can zoom in or out.

You can limit the max zoom in or max zoom out and you can set it up so that the tour is already zoomed in a bit when loaded.

8. HOTSPOT CUSTOM ICONS WITH COLOR CUSTOMIZATION (PRO)

This is a brilliant feature that allows you to make the tour more attractive.

You get to choose from 900+ font-awesome icons as your hotspot icons. This is ideal to make the tour more meaningful.

For example, you can set a person icon to indicate ‘walk this way’.

On top of this, you can even change the color of these icons. The plugin gives you the color customizer option to choose the color you desire for your hotspot icons.

9. TITLE AND AUTHOR (PRO)

For every scene, you can give a title the scene and give an author name.

For example, let’s say you created a virtual tour for a house, and for the scene of the bedroom, you can add the title ‘Bed Room’.

10. 360 VIDEO SUPPORT

You can also embed 360 Degree Video tours, rather than creating a virtual tour using images.

Either provide a video link from Youtube or Vimeo or upload a 360 Degree Video and let visitors take a virtual video tour.

WHAT’S NEXT ON WPVR?

We are constantly trying to add more and more features while keeping it out of any sign of complications. The idea is for everyone to be able to create virtual tours easily and have full control over it. We are currently working on more exciting features.

UPCOMING FEATURES OF WPVR:

>>Google Cardboard Support: A VR box can really take a virtual tour to the next level. Hence, it only makes sense for us to integrate the virtual with a VR box so that visitors can get an enhanced feeling of reality.

>>Cubemap Virtual Tour: We are also planning to introduce a second type of virtual tour Cubemap. Currently, we have the Equirectangular virtual tour which requires a 360 panoramic image. The Cubemap will rather require 6 flat images of the same height and width. This will create a cube space for visitors to take a tour.

>>Background Tour Music: Often people use virtual tours to preview or showcase their location. A piece of delightful background music could only make it even better. Hence, we are working on a way for users to add music to a tour. Imagine visitors taking a tour while listening to soothing music and enjoying the tour.

These are a few of the many upcoming features that we have lined up for the future.

There is no limit to how much you can achieve using a quality virtual tour on your site. Whether you wish to highlight real estate properties, museums, hotel amusement parks, spa, campus or any other purpose, a virtual tour will certainly make it more credible and reliable.

Upgrade to pro to enjoy all exciting features and use virtual tours with no limitations.

Hence, go ahead and start using WPVR and create amazing virtual tours for your site visitors.

We are happy to announce that WPVR is now completely Gutenberg compatible. This means, you can embed virtual tours on any web page, whether you use a Classic Editor or Gutenberg block editor.

Since November 2018, the latest virtual tour creator in WordPress has been released. WPVR, an exclusive WordPress virtual tour creator plugin, allows users to create amazing virtual tours using 360 Panoramic Images.

You simply need to upload a proper 360 degree panoramic images and this plugin will turn them into an amazing virtual tour, where you can move about, zoom in or out, and get information as if it is a real tour. 

Let me show you how you can embed a virtual tour using Gutenberg block editor.

How To Embed A WPVR Virtual Tour using Gutenberg 

Once you have created a virtual tour, collect the ID generated and go to the web page you wish to embed it on. 

This virtual tour creator automatically adds a WPVR block type under the common blocks of Gutenberg.

Ga naar een bericht of een pagina en klik op voeg blokicoon toe (het +-icoon) en selecteer bloktype als "WPVR". En er wordt een blok toegevoegd zoals in de volgende afbeelding:

Zodra Block is toegevoegd, klikt u op het Instellingen icoontje in de rechterbovenhoek van de pagina en selecteert u het menu Block voor de werkbalk van WPVR-blok.

Here, you can see you need to provide “id”, “Width” and “Height”.  Once you provide data in the field, the block will update the data.

Nu kunt u de pagina bekijken of publiceren en u zult zien dat het virtueel op uw pagina is ingebed.

Why Was It Important to Make WPVR Gutenberg Compatible?

As you know, WordPress has integrated Gutenberg block editor as the default editor since the end of November 2018. And this virtual tour creator was not Gutenberg compatible at that time. 

Since the release, the uniqueness of the plugin got people hyped quickly, and the installations kept on increasing. But people using Gutenberg was having compatibility issues.

This is because this plugin was configured to generate shortcodes in order to embed the virtual tours on web pages.

When Gutenberg became the default editor, you could create virtual tours, everything would work properly at the back-end. But Gutenberg didn’t support the shortcode that the plugin generated, hence you would not be able to embed a virtual tour on any web page.

In January 2019, our developers made a long-awaited update. WPVR is now fully Gutenberg compatible and will work with both Classic Editor and Gutenberg block editor. You can now create and embed virtual tours on your webpage without any issues.

Conclusie

As you can see, it is so simple and easy to embed a virtual tour created by WPVR whether you use Gutenberg or Classic Editor.

It is time you start using this amazing virtual tour creator and connect with visitors. Start enjoying the benefits of using virtual tours on your website.