10 Virtual Tours for 45,000 Members in a Remote World

A massive shift occurred in the world this year as businesses faced unprecedented restrictions, requiring the adoption of new technologies to stay connected remotely. If in-person meetings were a mainstay for an organization before, how could that be replicated online to still keep communities connected, and perhaps lay the groundwork for more inclusive event programs in the future?

When the global nonprofit Urban Land Institute approached Point Of Capture about producing a set of virtual tours for their 2020 Virtual Fall Meeting, we knew something very interesting was about to unfold. Using a 360 virtual tour platform for the subject matter they wanted to showcase was a perfect application of the technology. Telling the story of buildings and public spaces, as well as how they affect the communities where they are developed is complex in any medium. Telling these stories in 360 would require buy-in and coordination on every level.

Project Overview

The overall project plan was to produce virtual tours for ten international locations to be shared during the ULI Virtual Fall Meeting with thousands of real estate and land use professionals from around the globe. Tours would include Zoom interview content embedded as videos and audio clips to be played on demand in each scene.

Tour locations included:

• Empire Stores | Brooklyn, NY, USA
• Aoyama Building | Tokyo, Japan
• Yanaguana Garden at Hemisfair | San Antonio, Texas, USA
• Beach Plum Village | Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA
• Victoria Yards | Johannesburg, South Africa
• Pier 70 | San Francisco, California, USA
• Foshan Lingnan Tiandi Lot 1 | Foshan, Guangdong Province, China
• City Center Bishop Ranch | San Ramon, California, USA
• Salesforce Tower and Salesforce Park | San Francisco, California, USA

Preparing for the Project

The team at ULI had really done their homework before contacting us. They already had a solid vision of what the tours would look like and what type of interactive content would be included. They had even researched different virtual tour development software solutions and had a preference for 3DVista, the software we primarily use at Point Of Capture.

They requested a few examples of tours we had produced, and along with some other examples they pulled from the web, the team walked through this set of tours and took notes about what they did and didn’t like.

“Don’t have the panoramas auto-rotate. Let the user control it.”

“This is missing facts. Why am I on this tour? “

“Why am I clicking on this next pano hotspot? Where does it take me?”

“It was confusing in a sense because when I was dropped into the space, it doesn’t provide me with any sort of direction once I get here. I feel like with a lot of these virtual scenarios that I have experienced, it feels like in apps, for example, you’ll get a pop-up that gives you a sense of how to navigate this”

This input from the ULI team at the onset saved hours of testing and revisions down the road. We were able to build out the first tour with precise UX and graphic requirements that could then be replicated in the rest of the tours.

Branding Was Vitally Important

ULI’s brand is well-recognized by its 45,000 members and other industry professionals, so it was paramount that design standards were adhered to in all aspects of the virtual tours. This included logo placement, color palettes, fonts, interactive elements, and layout design. We worked closely with ULI’s Branding and Creative Services Team to create and approve assets that carried the same standards into the new interactive 360 environments.

Hosting the Tours Online

There were two major priorities when it came to hosting the tours online. 

At the project start, we needed to securely publish the work-in-progress tours in a way where key stakeholders could review them at different stages and interact with them in real-time throughout the development process. We set up protected directories on a dedicated hosting account requiring a username and password to start each tour. This allowed everyone to collaborate in real-time, made updates and changes simple, and kept everyone focused on the same version of each tour until it was ready for final publication.

Then the time came to host the tours on the client’s server and embed the content into their virtual event platform. A few weeks before launch, we worked with ULI’s IT department to set up test installations on their servers and verify that the tours worked smoothly on all devices.

Analytics 

Measuring the traffic and activity within each tour was critically important for evaluating the success of the project, as well as an excellent way to plan for improvements in future virtual tour projects at ULI. In addition to monitoring site traffic and session length in each tour, our software development tools allow us to individually name each tour element such as individual hot spots and embedded videos or audio. If certain elements are getting a lot of attention, we are able to see that behavior and determine how to fine-tune each tour. We can also see the most common journey through each tour, the order of scenes chosen, and what content was played when.

More than just visuals, we needed to tell the whole story.

The experience we were aiming for was not only to transport members to each location but to tell the full story of how the buildings or public spaces came to be. We wanted to include the history of the area prior to project development, and show the journey to what it is today. Authors Peter Slatin and Ron Nyren conducted 50+ interviews with planners, developers, builders, architects, and many others via Zoom conference calls, which were recorded, edited, and placed as a short video or audio segment throughout each tour. 

Virtual tours with audio and video clips create more of a hosted experience rather than an aimless exploration of panoramic images. Since the Urban Land Institute would traditionally include in-person hosted tours as a part of their meeting program, this made the virtual tours feel closer to an in-person experience.

The process of turning the recorded interviews into a cohesive story required all hands on deck. Once the interviews were conducted, the team had to go back through and select quotes that best supported the story of each location, clean them up to make them as succinct as possible, and put the narrative in a logical progression. 

Having the interviewees share unscripted perspectives based on their roles gave a new dimension to the experience and more meaning to what members were looking at and why.

User Experience

The highest priorities for interface design were simplicity and clarity. We wanted users who were completely new to the platform to immediately understand what information was available to them and how to interact with it.

There were concerns about inventing icons just for aesthetic purposes, and how that could lead to frustration if users had to guess which icon meant what, requiring them to ‘learn’ a whole iconography set just to trigger basic actions. It was decided that any icons should be immediately recognizable and understandable for end-users, or not included at all. 

The main menu at the bottom of the screen went through several revisions as we refined the descriptive text and the content to be included in the popup for each menu item. 

The team also paid special attention to how hotspots informed users about where they are heading next by consistently using a small image of the next scene, descriptive titles, and animation.

Ultimately we landed on a good balance of useful options that enhanced the story without overwhelming or confusing tourgoers.

Remote Photography

The state of the world in 2020 has put a lot of restrictions on travel and photography projects in general. Even without those unique restrictions, the international scope of this project required remote coordination with photographers to capture 360 panoramic images for each tour. Some of the photographers we connected with had extensive experience with panoramic photography, while others had no experience at all. 

For Brooklyn, NY and Nantucket, MA, Point Of Capture was able to travel in the Northeast USA to film the required content. Where air travel might have been considered in the past for both domestic and international filming locations, this was now out of the question, and photographers around the globe were needed to make the project happen.

We were able to coordinate with known industry professionals whom we knew could deliver high-resolution panoramic images. Particularly, Chris Du Plessis’ team at Map Your Town helped us out with Victoria Yards in Johannesburg, resulting in some truly stunning images that give you a real sense of being there. 

In other cases, students and traditional photographers stepped up to film 360 with rented lenses or with the Ricoh Theta Z1 one-shot 360 camera to capture the images we needed. Early on in the process, we created a straightforward PDF Photo Guide to maintain the requirements for capture and transfer of the files regardless of what camera was used.

Summary

Several weeks after the Fall Meeting, the entire project team met to review performance statistics and share ideas about the process and outcomes. Members responded well to the virtual tour content, as we could see in the number of sessions, positive comments, and overall engagement. Virtual tours were one component of many offered in the meeting program. Finding ways to interconnect conversations across breakout rooms, Q&A sessions with developers, as well as video and 360 virtual tours will be a priority in future planning. The virtual tours themselves will be made available for members within the Urban Land Institute's online content library, the Knowledge Finder. It will be exciting to see how members interact with the tours as evergreen content and how that informs planning for remote and hybrid meetings in the years ahead.