Equipment
There are various techniques for creating virtual tours. At WebWorld360.com we take
high quality panoramic images using the latest digital photographic equipment; A Canon EOS 400D Digital SLR capturing 10m pixels. When combined with a high quality wide angle lens this allows a full 360° image to be created from 6 images or less. Although the equipment we use is some of the most expensive, it makes the stitching process quicker and less prone to errors giving superior quality.
Panoramic head
The camera is mounted on a 'panoramic head' , which in turn is levelled precisely on a tripod which allows the camera to 'rotate' around the entrance pupil of the lens. This ensures perfect alignment when compiling the finished images. A series of overlapping photographs are then taken. For the best indoor results, all possible light sources are turned on in the property.
Stitching
The resulting photographs of your tour or panorama are stiched together on computer to create very high quality uncompressed '.tiff' master files, which can be 10,000 x 5,000 [50 million] pixels or greater in size. Very large prints, full of detail, can easily be made fom these files.
Once stitched, these master files are adjusted for optimium quality in Photoshop, before being exported as cubic images. It is here that the editing of the tripod can be done and other edits as requested by the client.
Once we are happy with the result, the images are stitched back together. These master images are then optimised, sometimes including HDR processing where appropriate, then resized, optimised again and processed ready for display using the various on-line viewing technologies. The final fullscreen 360° virtual panoramic of the above can be seen here.
Floor plans
If the client has chosen to have floor plans as part of their virtual tour, the sketches of floor plans that were created when at the location are recreated using CAD software. Hotspots are added to the floor plan using web design software to enable the floor plan to be interactive. Another added bonus for the client.
Hosting
A page similar to your website, (if you have one), is built to hold your virtual tour. This page may be linked to from your website or you may give this link to your clients, and these are hosted on our partner site, www.our360tour.com for FREE. This site has a fully searchable database of virtual tours, another benefit of having us build your virtual tour.
Alternatively you may have the virtual tour embedded into your websites pages. Websites incorporating our virtual tours are hosted on their own server.
And Finally...
The virtual tour is now ready to go on-line.
We hope you now have a better understanding of how virtual tours are created and the processes that lead to achieving the final spectacular result.
Click on the logo on the right to visit www.our360tour.com, which is where you will find examples of various tours created and hosted by us. For all enquiries please contact us here.