Why do we choose (and stick to) 3DVista for our 360 Virtual Tour Projects?
We did have experiences in making 360 virtual tour out of some personal fun projects though. When a client came to us and asked whether we could help create a 360 virtual tour for them, we knew it’s time for us to start doing a serious research to find and equip ourselves with most suitable software and setup for the business.
In this article we’ll not be covering the camera part, perhaps we’ll do it in another post. We’ll first discuss the top reasons why we choose (and stick to) 3DVista.
3DVista VT Pro is not the first and only software we tested. Arguably it might not be the most well-known 3D Tour software available in the market. Some clients might not even have heard about it. In the worst case, some of them might think that we made an odd choice in order to save cost. Of course that is a totally wrong impression. So as with many chefs, let’s share our recipe and the ingredients we use to cook our meal and explain a bit what actually makes the food shine.
Start of the Selection Process
We were not completely new and inexperience to 360 virtual tour. So before we started our journey, we had in mind where we were supposed to be heading to. Listed here below are some basic criteria we outlined for the 3D Tour Software selection:
1. The software must offer a lot of flexibility in customizing our tours
We are not going to work exclusively in any one single industry. Even if we do, each output tour must look fresh and modern in its own way. We need to be able to fully custom brand a tour to fulfill the very different and specific needs and styles of each project. Each of them must be unique.
Some of the beginner platforms we’ve been testing are very good at delivering the job at the elementary level, but they can only offer very limited customization capabilities. At the end all output tours look very alike, if not exactly the same.
2. The output tours need to be mobile-friendly
With more than 50% traffics reeling in from mobile devices nowadays, again this is not a nice-to-have, but is a must-have feature.
3. The output tours must support Google Maps Street View
Does it matter? Yes, definitely. Literally everything Google does about search and lead generation matters. You will be surprised to see how many people visit your virtual venue on Google Maps.
4. Preferably the Virtual Tour software is available offline or can be run locally
We prefer not to use a cloud/ SaaS (software as a service) platform. Our work will be affected when it is down. We also need to be able to work on our projects without an internet connection.
3DVista VT Pro Won by a Landslide
It didn’t take too long for us to narrow down our finalists and then decided 3DVista VT Pro is the winner. 3DVista does not just met all the criteria we set out above. It has among the best features of any advanced virtual tour platform/ software. There is no limitation at all. It works with most of the 360 cameras, and it even provides its own apps for offline tour viewing on mobile devices and VR headsets.
Like most other software packages, there is a learning curve in the beginning. But it’s nothing compared to Krpano, for which knowing how to code is a prerequisite. As a software development company, it is not a road blocker to us though. However, having a simpler layout and workflow makes our life much easier. Our development team can share their works-in-progress and collaborate with the design team and external photographers without any hiccup. But still the software maintains a fine balance of providing more than what we think we need without compromising the user interface. It is clean and easy to follow.
Countless Features, Unlimited Possibilities
Listed here below are our most favorite features:
Skin Editor
Skins are the extremely stylish and customizable inbuilt graphic design elements in your virtual tours. They include start/ loading page, stickers, buttons, text boxes and logos that can either be ‘sticking’ to or ‘floating’ on top of the virtual tour. It is what gives your virtual tour the look and feel of a branded presentation.
Powerful/ Customizable Hotspots
Hotspots are clickable objects. A hotspot can be an icon, a still or animated image, a text banner, or any area/ shape marked within the panorama. When clicking on it, it will trigger an action.
3DVista offers a wide variety of hotspots for every purpose. We have the total flexibility to customize and use them, for example, to navigate your tour, start playing audio, video, open a photo album, an URL, a pop-quiz or a custom info window that contains any of these elements in your own desirable way.
Hotspots can even work with moving objects in 360 videos. They dynamically move, appear, disappear and change in size with the object.
Without them, your 360 tour is no more than a bare medium. It is hotspots that make your 360 tour fun, interesting and engaging.
Embedding External Contents/ Creating Custom Info Windows
Apart from using Hotspots to pop up discoverable information, you can also embed external contents into your virtual tour directly. These contents can be videos hosted on YouTube, Google maps or 3D models sourced from other website such as Sketchfab. This is an excellent way to make use of public material or reduce the file size of your tour.
Interactive Maps, Floor Plans and Compass
You can place maps or floor plans for orientation on top of your virtual tours. The audiences can jump from one spot to another spot (room to room or floor to floor) more quickly. A radar tool indicates at all times in which direction the user is currently looking.
360 Video Export
Besides Google Maps Street View, the number of export options in 3DVista is tremendous. One of them is the ability to export your tour as a 360 Video. This is excellent for creating and adding social content on Facebook and YouTube.
Virtual Staging
Virtual Staging is a tool that allows the audience to seamlessly switch and transit between various versions of the same space. It is particularly useful for interior design/ architectural projects to demonstrate different furnishing possibilities with CAD renders – from an empty apartment, semi-furnished, to fully-furnished with different style/ color options.
Live Panorama
A Live Panorama combines several panoramas of the same spot taken at different times to create an interactive 360 time-lapse show. The result is breath-taking. While you’re having a look around, you’ll see the scenery change and evolve slowly. We can use this feature to show a house in different lighting conditions, or a restaurant from emptied to crowded.
E-Learning & Training Tours
With this feature, you can turn virtual tours into comprehensive and powerful teaching tools with discovery hotspots (‘treasure hunts’), question or quiz cards, integrated scoring, reporting systems and LMS integration – virtual trainings that are run legitimately like a game or an app, they are safer, less intrusive and more scalable than on-site practice.
Dual Viewers
Dual Viewers allows us to divide the screen into two parts, side-by-side. It is very useful for the audiences to compare two panorama scenes directly on the same screen, angle and zoom level, be it a day vs night, empty vs furnished room, or different construction stages.
More Gems To Be Discovered
The list goes on and on. Yet there are many amazing features and limitless possibilities for us to explore. Other exciting features that are not mentioned in this article include Auto-pilot, 3D Transition Effect, Live Guided Tour, Adaptive HDR Panorama, and Immersive Audio. All in all, we are a very happy value-added developer of 3DVista. We know we can do more with it.
See it for yourself
Check out the benefits of virtual shows and our sample tours in our earlier post Our New Suite of 360 Virtual Tour Services.
Other related topics:
Marketing Your Business with 360 Virtual Tour
How to add and view your 360 virtual tour in Oculus Quest
Drop us a line!
Whether you are intending to create new 360 virtual tours or planning to upgrade your old ones, we are here to make your project free from worries. Our team covers everything you need for 360 tour production.
Contact us and let us help you to create the most amazing 360 virtual tours!
Email: [email protected]
WhatsApp: +852 6099 4407
