VR is a natural fit for travel. After all, the technology is all about unchaining the user from their physical boundaries. Using virtual reality technology, one can tour places near and far, real or imagined, and even travel through time. After all, the technology is all about travel. Far more than travelogues, still pictures, or even video, a VR experience is the perfect way to gain a “sneak peek” of a destination before so much as packing a bag.

Applications of Virtual Reality in Travel

Hotel giants, airlines, museums, and more are leveraging the new virtual world to create happier, healthier, and better travelers. Below are some of the best examples of how VR is set to transform the travel industry.

Google Street View = Virtual Reality Travel

Google Street View came into existence long before the average user had ever heard the terms “virtual reality”, “mixed reality” or certainly “head-mounted display”, but in many ways it is the original form of VR travel. Picking a random spot in a random city and enjoying a mouse-clicking tour through the millions of 360° photos taken by Google’s fleet of Street View Cars has been a pastime of many over the years.

Last year, Google gave the old standby a serious upgrade and brought it into the VR age. Users of the Google Maps smartphone app can now slip their phone into a Cardboard headset and enter the virtual world.

The new feature is a no-brainer for Google, the developers of both Street View and Cardboard. It is perhaps the best example of accessible VR: the DIY headset paired with the free web app. Listings of the best places to virtually travel using Cardboard are already online. Falling down the Google Hole may never be the same.

Hotel Provided VR Headsets

Hotel giant Marriott has faith that virtual reality will be a key component of the travel sector in days to come, with a number of entirely separate virtual reality applications currently available.

Marriott began their foray into the virtual world with #GetTeleported, a publicity event in which guests and press were invited to don an Oculus Rift head-mounted display and engage in a stunning virtual experience, taking users around the world. The event was an enormous success, and Marriott soon doubled down on their VR investment.

Today in several Marriott hotels, guests can order a Samsung Gear VR head-mounted display to be delivered to their room, in what is charmingly called VRoom Service. The headsets come pre-loaded with a number of virtual experiences set around the world, from Chile to Beijing, and are on loan to guests for up to 24 hours. These “virtual postcards” are a marketing play to increase Marriott brand awareness and attract tech-savvy millennials to the chain, and are expected to roll out to more locations soon.

YouVisit and Littlstar Virtual Vacations

Taking Marriott’s idea of virtual travel to its logical extreme is YouVisit. Using proprietary cameras and video streaming techniques, YouVisit has amassed an impressive library of HD virtual travel experiences. Using a Google Cardboard mobile-based headset, the viewer is taken on a virtual tour of locations from Alaska to a Carnival cruise ship.

Although they are technically 360° videos, not true virtual experience where the user can move around at will, YouVisit still provides an excellent and economical way to travel the world without leaving home. The videos are a great way to choose one’s next big vacation destination, or just kill some time while waiting to board a plane.

YouVisit isn’t the only 360° travel video repository. Littlstar, YouVisit’s main competitor, bills itself as a VR cinema network and maintains large variety of 360° still photos and videos. Going beyond self-produced content, the library includes pieces from name brands like Discovery and National Geographic. Although Littlstar does not have YouVisit’s strict focus on travel, they have enough videos in the travel genre that both companies should be inspired to keep improving and refining their offering.

Virtual Museum Tours

Museums have been placing their art online for years. Art deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible, but many people will never get the chance to travel to the Louvre, the Met, or other famous locales around the world.

However, still pictures can only go so far. So much of the museum experience is rooted in walking the halls, standing before a piece in contemplation, and discussing it with friends, family, or fellow art enthusiasts. Skilled curators are a key component of art appreciation, but text or even recorded audio simply don’t have the same impact.

Startup firm Woofbert hopes to use virtual reality to change that. Compatible with Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR head-mounted displays, their app WbVR creates virtual art galleries. Users are free to wander the halls and view pieces from any angle. Meanwhile, educational content such as narration from cultural icons like Neil Gaiman are unobtrusively surfaced. The effect is much like renting an audio tour from a brick-and-mortar museum. Wandering the halls as one pleases, listening to the soothing sounds of the gallery and an expert narrator, is extremely immersive.

Qantas Virtual Reality In-Flight Entertainment

Finally, Australian airline Qantas is leveraging VR to solve an age-old travel industry problem: keeping airline passengers happy. The firm has experimented with Samsung Gear VR headsets in its first-class seats, giving passengers access to a variety of virtual experiences and games.

Virtual reality, with its natural novelty and entertainment value, is an obvious evolution of old-fashioned in-flight entertainment. Giving each passenger their own private world in which to disappear allows them to ignore annoyances and distractions far more effectively than a pair of earbuds and a third-run movie. Qantas is leveraging the opportunity to keep flyers in a travel mindset, pre-loading the headsets with tours of a number of exotic destinations. For now, the headsets are limited to first-class due to the cost of deployment and maintenance. If it catches on, as seems likely, then the firm will roll them out in all classes.

The most exciting thing about virtual travel is the way it naturally pairs with real travel. Whether used as a preview of a travel destination, or to help us navigate the travel process and the destination itself, the technology is set to become an integral part of how we move around the world.

The sheer amount of available technologies to choose from, the different functionalities they provide, the differences in each one of them and the fact that there’s no holy grail in web development, nor a one solution fits all, all of this makes it quite scary to embark on a learning journey.

This is why we’ll attempt to demystify the process and shed some light on these different technologies here. Two common technologies in the web development world are Django and Laravel, which are back-end development frameworks.

But let’s slow down a second, and talk about what a framework is.

Frameworks

Frameworks are software abstractions. Abstractions are core concepts devoid of complexities and details. We actually deal with abstractions in our everyday life, not just in software. For example, if you want to drive your car, you don’t need to understand the thermodynamics of the engine and the energy cycles inside or even the complex mechanics of the car, you simply need to steer the wheel.

The benefit of using such abstractions in software is the fact that it helps young developers get into the game quickly and use the generic tools created by professional developers to their own need and hence they won’t have to reinvent the wheel on every single function that they might have.

Two famous software abstractions are Libraries and Frameworks. Libraries are a group of methods/objects that produce a certain functionality, and that you might use however you see fit, there’s no one way of using it. Frameworks, on the other hand, are stricter structures, that function as the skeleton of your application.

Frameworks help you skip the hassle of developing the low-level infrastructure and get right to the business logic of your application which results in a neater and more professional application.

There are fundamentally two categories  of frameworks in web development:

Front-end frameworks

front-end frameworks address the client side development problems and mainly focus on CSS or JavaScript. Nowadays JavaScript frameworks like Vue.JS and Angular are the norm for developing web applications.

Back-end frameworks

Back-end frameworks are responsible for the server side logic implementation. The magic that takes place under the hood and brings your website together. How to deal with data, store data, how to manage responses and so on. There are a few core functionalities of back-end frameworks that we need to understand.

Routing: when your server receives a request, it has let a certain resource or a certain action handle it. If you visit mywebsite/products then the products controller should respond with the appropriate resource and so on.

Templating: Assuming you don’t use client-side frameworks like Angular and Vue.JS then you to make the views and fill them with data. The view is basically the page that the user sees on his browser, templating allows you to dynamically fill the page with data according to the data passed by the controller.

Note that there are many other design structures each of which has its own way of dealing with the view and its data.

ORM: ORM stands for object-relational mapping, which is the layer between your model and database that acts as a virtual object database.

There are other features as well, such as security, caching, scaffolding and creating resources and so on.

Django

Django is an MVT or a model view template framework built with python. It’s a free and open source framework that encourages rapid development and helps developers write efficient cleaner code. It’s quite a powerful framework and it’s used by some of the greatest enterprises in the world as their back-end infrastructure. These companies include Pinterest, Udemy, NASA, and Instagram.

Laravel

Laravel is an MVC or model-view-controller framework built with PHP which is one of the most famous languages of the web. It’s also a powerful framework used by 9GAG, UNION, Toyota Hall of fame.

So where to go for that? How to live? How about you start with the list we have for you today… here are the 10 blogs about WordPress to read in 2018:

WPBeginner

A blog that delivers content for people who have just come into the WordPress world and need to learn the (very) basic things, such as adding an image to a post or creating custom menus. In short, this blog is very popular because it actually helps everyone to learn WordPress.

Apart from beginner guides, WPBeginner also keeps you connected with the newest stories, events, themes and plugins, and everything else that has to do with WordPress. Plus, the blog is updated daily.

WPMU DEV

Looking for expert recommendations and in-depth advice? WPMU DEV is one of the strongest blogs for WordPressers out there. The guys at WPMU DEV cover very interesting topics and somehow manage to do it in an equally interesting way.

On this blog, you can find WordPress-related posts from multiple categories, everything from beginner to advanced topics. WPMU DEV will provide you with some of the best tutorials and tips in the community.

WP Tavern

WP Tavern is the main news site in the WordPress community. It brings you a daily dose of news stories on all WordPress-related topics.

Check it out to stay updated with all the latest releases, announcements, events, plugins, themes, general goings-on and etc. Chances are, if anything happens in the world of WordPress, WP Tavern will cover it.

ElegantThemes

The company blog of team Elegant Themes, but it’s much more than that. The blog covers how-tos on various WordPress topics, focusing on practical advice that anyone can apply.

Of course, it’s also a place where the team shares what’s going on with Divi and the other products by the company.

Elegant Themes is a very good place to start learning the secrets of WordPress.

CodeinWP

This is us! CodeinWP covers myriads of WordPress content, starting from tutorials on WordPress usage, to the company’s transparency reports, to plugin lists, to top theme lists, to in-depth research posts.

Check out CodeinWP if you want to learn about WordPress overall, and find out not only about the platform’s tech-related inner workings, but also the business side of things.

The goal is to give you in-depth information about various WordPress resources, but also deliver it in an easy to understand form.

The four most common mistakes corporate teams tend to make when creating new IoT business models:

1. Working until the solution is perfect
2. Waiting for the right moment to launch
3. Over-deliberating project execution
4. Making many wrong assumptions