360 Virtual Tours – The Virtual Tour & Panoramic Photography Co.

Top London Commercial Location goes interactive…

We were recently commissioned by top property people Strutt & Parker to produce a 360 Virtual Tour of this top London commercial space to boost enquiries.  A mix of stills and tours were produced for One Cavendish Place, which is situated in the heart of the West End.  The tours will be featured on the developers website as well as being given out to prospective clients to boost interest in this fantastic location.

The tour itself features an interactive floor plan, contact details and location map.  All this is accessible from within the tour itself, meaning you get maximum exposure while people are engaged in the location.

What Strutt & Parker thought!

“Very good value for money, the Virtual Tour is exactly what we required and covered everything we set out to achieve”  – Guy Milne, Strutt & Parker London

View the stills here, and the 360 Virtual Tour here.

Continue Reading

First nice days of 2010 bring in some good results…

Brean Fort Project

The 2 examples are taken from a current project we are working on that includes a detailed tour of the Brean Fort in Somerset.

Good weather was required, and on this shoot we were not let down.  Fantastic blue skies welcomed us for most of the day, although the bright sun gave us some challenges.

HDR Virtual Tours

A technique called HDR was required for these shots, which enabled us to capture the features of the sun as well as the landscape and ruins of the fort.  9 shots were combined to form the complete 360 image, but each of the 9 shots was itself shot 9 times at different exposures.  That’s over 80 separate images per tour!

To view the tours click here.

Continue Reading

Why we have a love of flash….

Flash & Virtual Tours

Most people don’t pay much attention to what format virtual tours are provided in, but in reality it should be one of the first things you should ask when finding a virtual tour company.

Virtual tours come in a range of formats.   The aim of this blog post is to explain the difference between them, and explain why Flash is the best format for your virtual tours.

Back in the day…

10+ years ago when virtual tours were pretty new on the scene, the most popular formats were Java and Quicktime.  Both are simple formats that offer a basic, and in the case of Java, low quality virtual tour experience.  Each of those formats required the user to have a specific ‘plug in’ installed on their computer, and as many people didn’t have this the majority of users didn’t stick around to see the tour.  The result was a tour that only a fraction could experience.

Times thankfully moved on, and technology also moved at a rapid rate.  Adobe launched their ‘Flash’ application for viewing online media and people loved it.  It allowed the user to experience things on a different level, and also allowed a level of interactivity that had not been seen before.

Luckily the virtual tour industry realised that flash tours were the future and a number of flash development programs focused specifically on virtual tour creation emerged.

So why Flash?

Using flash to produce virtual tours allows us to be a lot more creative.  Here are just a few of the features we can build into our Flash tours:

• Interactive hot spots to navigate between scenes
• Information tabs that contain specifically targeted sales copy or educational text / images.
• Sound or even moving video in the tours.
• Thumbnail or floorplan navigation.

The best thing about Flash is that 98% of computers have Flash enabled.  This means there are no awkward plugins to install, no error messages and no blank spaces where the tour should be.

Do some companies still use Java and Quicktime?

Yes.  Unfortunately there are still virtual tour providers using these now dated formats for their virtual tours.

Here at 360 Virtual Tours, we provide all our projects is Flash format!

Always make sure you’re up to date!

Although older versions of Flash will run fine with our tours, always ensure you have the latest version on your computer.

To find out your version and to update, visit Adobe here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Continue Reading

Our interactive virtual tour for the Helicopter Museum is finished and we just had to show you…

More than just a virtual tour…

There is a good reason why we’re so excited about this tour.  Number 1: It’s our first tour created under our Charity Scheme, 2: It takes advantage of interactive hotspots that expand with more information about the area they point at.  The uses for this type of interactivity are endless, but we’ll talk more about how they have been used in the Helicopter Museum example above.

The information hotspots, as shown above, are a fantastic way of getting across information to your visitors.  It gives an extra dimension to tours that goes even further to captivate people and keep them engaged in what you have to offer for longer.

However, there is another great reason why these hotspots are an excellent feature on tours.  With the example above, the hotpsots have been used to convey facts about exhibition pieces.  This allows for the tour to not only be used on their website to entice new visitors, but used as an educational tool when their educational staff visit neighbouring schools,  Bingo!

Accessibility

Further plans for the tour also include making it available within the museum for those that are less able bodied.  They could take a look inside the cockpit of an aircraft using the interactive tour, a view they otherwise wouldn’t be able to experience.

What the museum thought…

Please see the comments from Lee Mills, General Manager below:

“The Helicopter Museum is overjoyed by the kind donation of this virtual tour and immensely impressed by both the quality and professional production of the end product.

The virtual tour will take pride of place on our website to give potential visitors to the Museum a taste of what they can see here and at the same time it clearly demonstrates the size and scale of our world famous collection. A feat that standard still imagery simply cannot accomplish.

We will also be using the virtual tour as part of our Education Outreach Programme, this is where our Education Officer and volunteers go out to the schools, clubs and disabled groups that for different reasons are unable to visit the museum itself. Thanks to this virtual tour we are now able to ‘walk’ them around certain parts of the museum and even into a cockpit as part of the presentation.”

View the final tour here…

Continue Reading

We have just completed a great Virtual Tour for Hazelwick School, Crawley.

The project brief

Hazelwick School approached us and had a very clear brief in mind.  They required 14 tours of their site done in a high quality way with an interactive floor plan/map plus custom designed skin buttons and intro text.  No problem we said, and turned up a few weeks later to shoot the 14 locations.

On location

A day in January at the very beginning of the new year term was identified as the shoot date, and it was a very cold and crisp one at that!  Luckily the snow had managed to hold off for the day and allowed for an on time arrival despite the hazardous M4!

Martin, our contact, had been very pro-active and had the 14 locations all set out, with a timetable for the days shoots down on paper.  Each tour location takes around 5 minutes to shoot and as we had the whole day ahead of us a relaxing pace (mostly!) was in order.  Each location was scouted out and the perfect position for the camera & tripod was sought before shooting would take place.  After around 5 hours on site, the work was done.

Skin design

One of the requirements of this project was an interactive map as the form of navigation.  Martin at Hazelwick School provided a PDF map, which we then altered with a simple border and crest.

All the buttons and images you see on the tour skin were custom designed with colours from the original school site.  A simple map pin was designed to fit in with the feel of the skin.   We also designed a great looking intro box for the start of the tour with a subtle crest in the background, nice touch!

The end result

You can see the 360 virtual tour by clicking here.  Hazelwick School were pleased with the end result, here’s what Martin Klin had to say:

“I think that 360 virtual tours have done a fantastic job. The tours are of high quality, and the skin looks superb and fits very well within our site. The team worked incredibly hard to meet our requirements, and we particularly like the interactive map that they included as part of the design. We hope to work with them again in the summer to produce several more locations . Well done 360virtualtours for doing such a great job!”

Martin Klin (Website Developer, Hazelwick School)

It was a great project and we are very pleased with how it has turned out.  So many educational institutes are recognising the need to show off their locations in the best way possible, and there really is no better way than an interactive virtual tour!

Continue Reading

3 Locations get the 360 Virtual Tours treatment!

The beginning of 2010 saw a brand new website launched for Crest Nicholson, along with the inclusion of 6 new Virtual Tours produced by us.

The Commission

We originally began working with Crest and their marketing company back in October.  The project encompassed 3 of their locations; Henlow, Epsom and Poole.

The show homes are superb (and we’re not even just saying that!).  Each location has it’s own individual style and it was important this was captured in the tours.  The penthouse at the Poole Quarter has fantastic panoramic views over Poole Harbour, Epsom has an Eco theme with some fantastic ‘green’ features and Henlow offers great modern living in a great location.

Site Integration

It was important that the tours integrated well into the site.  We worked with the web developers to produce a tour skin that was subtle and easy to use.   A transparency was used to fade the skin buttons and thumbnail links and neutral colours were used to enable the tours to be used on any site design and not look out of place.

The Virtual Tours

We’ve still got several sites to shoot, but in the meantime take a look at the virtual tours here:

Poole Quarter:  Click here to view the Poole Quarter Virtual Tour

Henlow – Meadow Walk:  Click here to view the Henlow Virtual Tour

Epsom – Elements:  Click here to view the Elements Virtual Tours

Benefits of a Virtual Tour

When people view static photos online of a location, be it a show home or an art gallery, you will often find that it just isn’t enough.  A 360 Virtual Tour allows a user to get a real feel for a place.  More and more people are realising this which is why we are seeing a real growth in virtual tour photography.

Want your own Virtual Tour?  Visit our 360 Virtual Tour page by clicking on the header link at the top of the page!

Continue Reading

View Larger Map

We’re pleased to announce that the Helicopter Museum, Weston-Super-Mare will be our first chosen charity for 2010.  This follows on our previous Blog entry regarding the scheme.

We will be creating a number of fully interactive 360 Virtual Tours for them to use on their website, and hope to have the project completed by February.

The project will include some hanger tours and a selection of internal cockpit shots.  Look out for the completed tours in our Blog and on our portfolio pages in February.

Do you know a charity that would benefit from some Virtual Tours? Then please get in touch with us on 01275 460209 to discuss the scheme.

Continue Reading

This 360 Virtual Tour was created nearly exactly one year ago, on New Years Day 2009 to be precise.

This was a tour created for an outdoor climbing company and they wanted a rotating tour to be displayed on an Plasma TV in their briefing rooms / office as a nice centrepiece.   They wanted a scene that was desolate and preferably with no people in view.   Seeing as Cheddar Gorge is a hugely busy attraction all year round, it made sense to pay the location a visit early in the morning, when most will still be in bed nursing a cracker of a hang over.

I arrived around 8, and took several shots over the next hour.  In the end a different tour was chosen for them with climbers in shot, although I have always like this eerie shot.

I will be returning in January 2010 to re-create the shot with some HDR to bring out more of the highlights.

Continue Reading