Photo Sphere Viewer – 360° Panorama, Virtual Tour, 360 Video & AR 3D Model Viewer

Description

🌐 One plugin, four ways to show something in 360°

Photo Sphere Viewer started as a simple way to drop an equirectangular panorama into a WordPress page without wrestling with iframes or third-party embed accounts. It’s grown into four viewers in one plugin: panoramas, multi-scene virtual tours, 360° video, and AR-ready 3D models (.glb / .gltf). Add any of them through Elementor, Gutenberg, or a shortcode — whatever your site already uses.

If you shoot with a DJI drone, Ricoh Theta, Insta360, or anything that outputs a stitched equirectangular image, it’ll load. No proprietary format, no vendor lock-in.

Upgrade to Pro

📷 Built with real camera gear in mind

A lot of 360 plugins are built by people who never touched a drone. This one wasn’t.

• DJI Matrice and other drone panoramas — WordPress quietly re-compresses anything over 2560px into a -scaled.jpg since 5.3, which is fine for a blog photo and terrible for a 40MP aerial panorama. The plugin ships with its own ImageResolver that grabs the original upload instead, so fine detail doesn’t turn to mush.
• Ricoh Theta, Insta360, GoPro MAX, Qoocam, Kandao — any properly stitched equirectangular JPEG or PNG just works, no special export needed.
• Google Street View and Android Photo Sphere — same deal, drop the file in and go.
• Gyroscope viewing (Pro) — point a phone around and the panorama follows, VR-headset style, over HTTPS.

🧭 Four viewers

Panorama viewer — the original use case. Upload an equirectangular JPEG/PNG, visitors drag, pinch and zoom on desktop or mobile. Set field of view, zoom limits, movement speed, auto-rotation, a starting yaw/pitch, fullscreen, and a caption navbar with free zoom and download buttons.

Virtual tour builder — string together as many scenes as you want, connected with 3D arrow hotspots. Each scene gets its own starting angle and caption, and you pick which one loads first. Good fit for real estate walkthroughs, hotel tours, museum floor plans. Pro adds a scene gallery bar, a compass overlay, and the full premium navbar (move, fullscreen, autorotate, description, zoom, download).

360° video player — same dragging/looking-around interaction, but for an equirectangular MP4 instead of a still image. Play/pause, seek, volume. Pro unlocks muted autoplay and loop.

AR 3D model viewer — embeds a .glb/.gltf model via Google’s <model-viewer>, with an AR button on phones that support it. Point it at a WordPress Media Library file or an external URL, set a poster image, auto-rotate, shadow intensity and alignment. Pro adds HDR environment lighting, a skybox background, custom camera orbit, and the ability to lock zoom/tap-to-rotate if you’re building a fixed product showcase.

🧩 Add it wherever you build pages

• Elementor — four separate widgets (Photo Sphere Viewer, PSV Virtual Tour, PSV 360° Video, AR 3D Viewer), each of which can be switched off individually from the admin panel if you don’t need it cluttering the widget list.
• Gutenberg block — native block editor support with live preview. (coming soon)
• Shortcode Builder — a visual admin screen that spits out [psv], [psv_tour], [psv_video], and [psv_ar] shortcodes you can paste into a WooCommerce product description, a theme widget area, or anywhere else shortcodes render.

What else is in the box

• Fully responsive, touch-optimized drag/pinch on mobile
• Navbar buttons toggle individually — zoom, caption, fullscreen, autorotate, download
• Style controls for navbar background, caption color, typography, alignment
• Width/height in px, %, vh or vw
• Default yaw (-180° to 180°) and pitch (-90° to 90°)
• Custom canvas background color
• Mouse-wheel zoom, drag movement, two-finger touch, Ctrl+scroll, cursor capture and fisheye toggles
• Original-resolution image loading on by default (use_original=yes) for shortcodes
• Built on Vite, so the frontend bundle stays small
• Translation-ready (text domain photo-sphere-viewer, loads from /languages/)
• A clean shortcode API and Elementor widget hooks if you’re extending it yourself

Who actually uses this

Real estate agents doing property walkthroughs, hotels and vacation rentals showing off rooms before booking, 360° photographers building portfolios, museums and campuses doing self-guided tours, WooCommerce stores adding 360° product views or AR models, architects showing before/after spaces, and drone pilots who just want their DJI panoramas to not look blurry on the web.

Plays nicely with

Elementor, Elementor Pro, Gutenberg, WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, WPML, Polylang, and the usual caching suspects — WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache. Tested against DJI Matrice/Mavic, Ricoh Theta, Insta360, GoPro MAX, Qoocam, Kandao, and Google Street View exports.

How It Works

Using Elementor

Open the Elementor editor, search the widget panel for Photo Sphere Viewer, PSV Virtual Tour, PSV 360° Video, or AR 3D Viewer, drag one into your layout, then upload your image/video and set the navbar and styling options.

Using Gutenberg

Insert the Photo Sphere Viewer block, upload a panorama, configure it from the sidebar.

Using Shortcodes

Build one visually with the Shortcode Builder in the admin menu, or write the attributes by hand if you know what you’re doing.