Croquet Corporation, provider of Croquet OS, the Operating System for the Open Metaverse, announced today a WordPress Plugin that allows developers to deploy 3D immersive, multiuser Metaverse worlds in any WordPress website or blog. Croquet Metaverse Web Showcase is free, no-code, easy to use and gives anyone using WordPress a quick and easy way to engage customers and visitors in a fully immersive, multiuser, social 3D world in less than five minutes. Web Showcase launched in December 2022 and quickly rose to the #1 spot on Product Hunt, the leading technology review forum.
Available today in the official WordPress Plugin Directory, Web Showcase enhances existing 2D websites, which typically depend upon scrolling and menu navigation, with an immersive environment that lets site visitors move freely throughout a showcase gallery to learn about the business while remaining interoperable to the existing site navigation. The result is significantly increased engagement by site visitors and an enormous new dimension in functionality.
Web Showcase is perfect for small business WordPress users such as agencies, consultants, non-profits, web developers, photographers or designers looking to create dynamic and unique experiences for site visitors. It provides a rich, highly interactive capabilities showcase that is highly customizable and displays company presentations, video testimonials, customer references and more, all in a social, multiuser immersive space. Web Showcase can be extended by brands and agencies to enable highly social in-site activations, games and promotions, improve engagement, dramatically enhance site experience and increase customer support and satisfaction while keeping customers close to home and not sending them away to 3rd party platforms.
Examples of small businesses utilizing Web Showcase include JJA Recruiting firm, Zach Fox Photography, and the publication Metaverse Professional.
Web Showcase site visitors can easily invite friends and colleagues to join them via text message, email, Slack or any other DM channel to collaboratively browse the space and converse using Dolby.io Spatial Audio Chat. Bloggers can add an immersive world to a blog post, making it even more social by inviting readers to come together for live audio discussion in a customized Metaverse gallery. It is cross-platform and can be accessed by any Internet device regardless of operating system, including desktops, tablets, phones and VR headsets.
“The web is the Metaverse and it will rapidly become multiuser and immersive,” said David A. Smith, founder and CTO of Croquet. “WordPress powers the web with 65.1% of all websites that use CMS technology(1). We will see the web evolve quickly as these websites deploy immersive multiuser technology to serve new and existing customers and facilitate ecommerce.”
Web Showcase is built on Croquet OS, the only operating system for the Open Metaverse, using Croquet’s open source Microverse World Builder. Developers and brands can extend Web Showcase, building completely customized spaces, promotions, ecommerce, games, interoperable portals and Ready Player Me(R) avatars using World Builder and a free developer API key from croquet.io. Microverse developers can use WordPress Plugins to distribute customized worlds, experiences, games and other activations they create with World Builder to hundreds of millions of websites and blogs.
Croquet worlds are part of the Open Metaverse and can be published to any web server, including within brand web properties, using this new WordPress Plugin, with full access to the entire ecosystem of the web including conventional payment, login and security systems and Web3 services. This Plugin and the basic version of Web Showcase are free to acquire and use. Croquet offers Croquet OS multiuser, low latency Metaverse infrastructure plus enhanced products and development environments for larger deployments which are priced based upon engagement.
Croquet offers a Partner Program with special support for WordPress hosts, agencies and web development shops. For more information, contact partnerships@croquet.io.