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

Top University tours coming soon…

Centre for Nanoscience & Quantum Information

We’ve just completed a shoot at this fantastic facility, and can’t wait to get them online for you all to see.  A selection of tours have been shot to show the impressive facilities including several labs, the impressive entrance foyer and even a view of the plant room, where the machinery is mounted on springs to reduce vibration!

State of the art, and we intend to get that across…

The facility is one of the most advanced of it’s kind in the world.  It has been built to have extremely low vibration and acoustic noise levels in order to allow accurate research across a range of disciplines.  We will be working with the centre team to produce a tour that not only shows you the environment, but also allows you to explore further with information hot spots.

While we work hard getting the tour ready, why not visit the website and take a closer look at what they do? Visit Site.

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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.

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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…

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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!

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