360° Virtual Tours
I’ve always been interested in VR (Virtual Reality) photos and technology. Around 2003 I discovered Apple’s QTVR (Quicktime Virtual Reality) software and was able to create a couple of tours for website clients. My 2003 ‘digital camera’ was terrible, so results weren’t stunning, but it was awesome to see a final 360° product. You could see an entire room in full 360° and post it on your website to show to the world. To do it correctly, you needed a pano tripod head, fish eye lens, expensive stitching software, and a nice DSLR camera. I had none of that at the time.
Fifteen or so years later, the technology is miles ahead of what it used to be, and the uses and acceptance for VR have grown. Platform standouts like Matterport and CloudPano let you take full 360° tours of just about anything, and you get to be fully immersed in the tour by clicking ‘hotspots’ to ‘walk’ through the property. If you get lost, there are also shortcuts you can click via a toolbar or highlight tab to select the area of the property you wish to view. If you have access to a VR headset, you feel like you are actually there in the room. To create any VR tour you’ll need a 360° camera, which is another topic of discussion, but for the record I’m using a Ricoh Theta Z1.
Matterport and CloudPano
Speaking of Matterport and CloudPano, those are the platforms I’m focusing on here. Matterport seems to be geared more towards the real estate industry, where CloudPano seems to be industry agnostic. The way Matterport structures their subscriptions limits the amount of tours you can have live at any one time. So if you have a 25 tour plan, and you’ve reached your limit, you remove one tour to make room for another, or increase your subscription plan, which can be pricey. CloudPano has an ‘unlimited tour’ plans where your finished tour can live on forever. The one thing I will say is that you can edit CloudPano tours before you upload them, where Matterport doesn’t let you edit photos. You take the photo, and it immediately goes to the Matterport servers.
The Tours
I’m using my house as a demonstration and tried cleaning as much as I could. These were my first of each type so not perfect. In the Matterport tour, you can see me in a mirror or two as well as one of my tripods. You usually have to try and hide while taking the photo, so I have to work on my hiding skills. I didn’t show my garage or laundry room, just because. Just to mention, you take the Matterport photos from your iPad or iPhone, while the CloudPano photos are taken by clicking the shutter button on the camera, which I have set on a 10 second timer. Click, then hide behind a corner out of camera range.
Matterport
If you’d like to see the standalone tour and not embedded here on my website, then you can see that here. There are circular hotspots on the floor to help you navigate the property. On the bottom left, you’ll see an arrow that opens up a highlight tab so you can select each room individually instead of using the hotspots.
CloudPano
If you’d like to see the standalone tour and not embedded here on my website, then you can see that here. There are hotspots that will help you move to the next room, but also you’ll see a highlight tab on the bottom to select a room.
Wrap Up
I really like both of platforms, but CloudPano seems to be more useful due to the fact that tours can live on forever after they’re published. Matterport tours don’t live on forever, because the main use is to help sell a property. The property sells, then the tour gets removed. People can view their new potential house from the comfort of their own homes, which is amazing if you’re looking from out of state or just don’t want to drive across town. A wicked time saver. In my opinion, Matterport is a bit slicker and offers a bunch of cool features like the ‘dollhouse view’ and it’s transitions from one room to the next. There is a reason both of these tour platforms are leading the industry. They each provide beautiful imagery, and are easy to view and share. If you’re ever in the need of either, give me a shout.