Exploring Creative Web Design Patterns

2.6 Virtual Reality

Let's talk about virtual reality. If you have been to the mall recently you might have seen those VR stands that give you a free headset you can try. And you can make a fool of yourself when playing the roller coaster. Well VR or virtual reality, has grown tremendously in the past year alone, and the reasons are very simple. One, we have very powerful hardware now, we have powerful graphics cards that can power, that can push all those pixels to a headset. The number two reason is that it's becoming more and more accessible. Look at the Google Cardboard, it's $15. Sure you need an Android phone for it. It's not an integrated solution like for example the Oculus Rift. But it's $15, you probably pay more for a fast food dinner. The idea is that it's cheap and it's accessible. The number three reason is that this technology is cool. Yeah, it's like Tony Stark and Ironman cool. Now, because we're web designers and we don't really fly in high tech suits, how can we use VR in our websites? Well take a look at the website for the movie Blair Witch. It's best you use a VR headset for it but we can also use a mouse. This allows you to look around and interact with object and it's all very realistic. But in the end it's virtual reality. It might not look like much now but when you have a VR headset on it's a completely different experience. So this is one way of using VR to promote a game or a movie by creating or recreating scenes from that game or movie. Just putting it out there on a website that people can visit, they can plug in their headset. They can experience the whole thing before purchasing or going to the movie, very, very cool. So what else could we use VR for? Well, lots of things. For example, a real estate agency. Let's say they have a website and they're showing off a bunch of properties in VR. Instead of calling, scheduling an appointment to visit that property. Which if you've ever done that, you know, it can be a good experience or it can be a bad one, depending on the real estate agent. But, with technology like this, you put on your headset and you can visit every square inch of that house, the interior, exterior. You can look around, you can see everything you need to see. And you actually get a feel of what that house is like, what it could feel like living in that house without actually having to step outside and scheduling an appointment. Very, very interesting. What else, a car manufacturing for example they can do VR tours of the car's interior or exterior. So before scheduling a test drive, you know, maybe you are picky about the car interior and you don't want to waste your time. You can just grab a headset, you can see how the car is inside, see if you like it. If you do, call, schedule an appointment, very simple. Now as I was saying in the beginning, this is relatively new technology, but it's growing rapidly. All the big players have joined in this VR revolution, so to speak. Facebook got on board by purchasing Oculus VR. Google and Mozilla, they're both developing VR platforms of their own. So the future looks very promising. Now that's the end of this short course. I really hope it gave you an insight into how to take a more creative approach when it comes to web design. And I hope you found this information useful and maybe you're gonna use some of it in your next project. I'm Adi Purdila I would like to thank you very much for watching, until next time time, take care.