Virtual Tours
The creation and delivery of a virtual tour has four distinct elements
- Planning
- Photography
- Editing
- Hosting
Planning
We work with you to make sure we know what you want from the tour, understand the likely audience, what viewpoints (rooms) you want to include, and whether you need any custom graphic work such as inclusion of logos, branding or interactive floor plans.
Once we know what you want, we’ll give you a fixed price and explain clearly what we’re going to do.
We’ll need you to make sure that on the day we do the photography, everything is ready – perhaps in a restaurant that means that tables are laid or flowers are on the tables.
We’ll agree a date with you and stick to it.
photography
If everything is ready to go, it usually takes between five and ten minutes to photograph each viewpoint.
We use a high resolution digital camera to take multiple overlapping images of the room. The technique we use doesn’t need any additional lighting – we work with just the ambient light for the most natural results, taking multiple shots at different exposures to make sure we capture all the detail in the darkest shadows though to the brightest lights or windows.
editing
This is a key part of the process and depending on the number of viewpoints takes a couple of days to complete.
For each viewpoint, we have to combine all of the individual images together to make each panoramic image.
To get the highest possible quality results, we carefully adjust each set of images to make sure the colours are as accurate and natural as possible. This is especially important when there was artificial light in the room.
We make sure all traces of the camera are removed, so that includes any shadows or reflections. In the vertically down view you see the floor, not the tripod for the camera or (as some other 360° photography companies do) a black hole or blurred mess where the tripod was.
In some situations we have to do additional adjustments to ‘tidy-up’ some of the images. We’ve had remove mole-hills from lawns, builders’ power cables, leaves from swimming pools and other unwanted things that couldn’t be removed on the day we visited.
Then we link the separate panoramas together to make the tour, apply any branding you need or include things like floor plans to make the navigation easier.
When we’ve finished the editing, we’ll review with you to make sure you’re happy with the results.
Hosting
There are essentially two options for hosting – you (or your web site provider) host the tour, or we host for you for an additional charge.
If the tour is being incorporated into your business web site, we normally recommend that the tour is hosted by your web site provider, in which case we’ll help them with the technical aspects of using all the necessary files.
Alternatively, we can host the tour for you on our servers. This does make it slightly easier if at some point in the future you need updates to the tour.
Whichever route you chose, we make sure what we’ve built works for you.
360° Panoramic Images for Social Media
Single 360° panoramic images can now be uploaded and displayed on Facebook pages just as easily as uploading any other photograph. Facebook can’t support a full virtual tour, but a single image works really well. On a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet, you can look around the image by just moving the device. You can see some examples on our Facebook page.