It's not quite as immersive as some of the virtual-reality projects attracting investors, but YouTube's addition of support for 360-degree videos could initially reach a broader audience.

Out of the gate, YouTube's new videos look pretty great even if you haven't strapped a VR headset to your face.

"People can watch your videos on the existing YouTube app for Android, and by moving the phone or tablet around they'll see all the different angles while the video plays. They can do the same on youtube.com or embedded videos on Chrome by using the mouse to drag the point of view around, and we're working to bring this to iPhone, iPad and other devices soon," YouTube said in a blog post.

If you're looking to create your own 360-degree masterpiece, you'll have to go through a more complex of a process than simply uploading a video to YouTube and calling it a day. First off, you'll need a 360-degree video camera. You can't just mash up a bunch of videos you've taken from different perspectives, nor can you just take one giant panorama shot and upload it for simulated 3D.

Once you have your spherical video set up, you'll also have to run a quick Python script on it—which YouTube provides—in order to insert the metadata YouTube needs to correctly recognize and process the video as a 360-degree creation when you upload it.

According to YouTube's blog post, the site hopes to have an automated version of this process at some future point. For now, though, you need the script.

One neat feature is that panning around a scene while watching a video doesn't require you to be on YouTube's site at all. You can do it when you're watching an embedded video, as shown below. You can also pause the video at any point and spin yourself around.

The one bummer, so far, is that the videos are a bit lower quality than we might have hoped. In other words, don't expect to see any crazy 360-degree, 4K, crystal-clear videos just yet.