360° virtual tour technology

How does a virtual tour work?

We have invested in the best virtual reality equipment and software available and are constantly re-investing to stay ahead of our competition.

Many companies are producing virtual tours with a mixed array of quality, we advise that you take a clear look into how they are produced and what you really get for your money.

We offer the highest quality virtual tour available in many different formats to suit your requirements and budget.

This section of our website has been set-up to ensure you know exactly what your buying before you purchase any of the services we offer.

For all the techies out there, below is a step by step guide of how we create our high definition virtual tours.

Shooting the virtual tour

We use the latest professional digital SLR cameras alongside high end digital image editing applications. This technology ensures we maintain a high quality first generation image that is colour correct and free of any blemishes.

We also use very high precision panoramic equipment which include tripods and brackets manufactured by Manfrotto, wide angle & fisheye lenses and various 360° components.

Using this technology enables us to capture panoramic scenes at amazing image sizes of over 200 mega pixels.

These extremely large images help us to reduce to a size suitable for the internet without sacrificing on quality in any way. The images can also be used at there original size and output as large format prints up to breathtaking sizes.

Stitching the virtual tour

Your 360-degree panoramic scene is made from stitching 6 to 32 individual images together using complex mathematical equations and image recognition technology.

Using the industry's leading stitching software, we create panoramic images for either web and large format print.

A unique blend of image recognition and complex mathematic equations make this software second to none when creating professional panoramic images.

All the images are blended together seamlessly and colours are accurately adjusted to match. This ensures that your 360° virtual tour appears just as it was the day the photograph was taken.

User interface

To control all the functions in your virtual tour you will need an interface. If you require we can create custom interfaces to compliment your corporate branding.

Many items to control your virtual tour are included in the interface, some of these items include: panning, zooming, sound, hotspot and format controls. These items are explained in more detail below.

Panning & zoom controls

These controls appear in the form of graphical buttons within your interface. With these buttons the user can navigate from left to right, pan up and down and even zoom into and out of the scene.

Hotspots

These are navigational images that appear within the panoramic image itself. For instance, in front of a door appears an arrow, when the user clicks on the arrow they are transported into the next room. Hotspots can be used to forward users to a different area, to show a static pictures and can even be used to trigger sounds.

Sound

Each virtual tour can contain sound whilst the user is viewing the scene. This sound can be in the form of a music score, a voice-over or anything else you may desire.

Formats

All our virtual tours are supplied with an Adobe Flash interface. This format is compatible with 99% of business and personal computers.

We can also supply the virtual tours in different formats if requested.

Testing

All our 360° virtual tours are tested on different platforms to ensure compatibility throughout.

During the past decade there have been many ways to present your virtual tour with different types of software. Some of the software used in the past wasn't compatible will all computer systems worldwide. By using the recently developed Adobe Flash file format, our virtual tours are the most compatible to date, covering 99% of the worlds computer systems.

Hosting

All virtual tours we produce are hosted on high performance website servers with 99.9% uptime.

Ensuring your virtual tour is maintained with the greatest of care, we host each virtual tour on high performance website servers.

We supply enough webspace to host each virtual tour and ensure that enough data transfer is given for the most demanding of applications.

These servers are housed in a dedicated data center supplied by dual feed power intakes. These are backed up by diesel generators to ensure power is never lost.

Backups are made regularly to ensure your valued data is always kept safe.