Virtual Tour Planning Guide

Introduction

The information in this guide is written from the perspective of Point Of Capture, the tools we use, and our years of experience working successfully with clients. That being said, this guide is intended to help you regardless of which tour producer you choose to work with, and we will keep it free and accessible even as we continue to improve it in the years ahead. 

Whether you are just kicking around the idea of building a virtual tour or have jumped in with both feet and need some pointers, the following advice will get to the core of your most burning questions and blaze the trail to a successful outcome.

The goal here is to get you and your team thinking about the most important choices needed to make your virtual tour a purposeful and exciting new addition to your outreach arsenal. If you have questions during or after your walkthrough of this guide, contact us any time at [email protected].

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Clarifying What a Virtual Tour Is, and Isn't

The term "virtual tour" gets thrown around a lot these days. Do a quick Google or YouTube search and you will come up with everything from video walk-throughs of properties, regular videos mislabeled as virtual tours, and old Flash-based web presentations that are more like a point-and-click video game from the 90s.

The interactivity, immersion, and quality of virtual tours have evolved substantially over the last few years, so we would like to take a moment and set the record straight! In its truest sense, a virtual tour is a series of 360 degree spherical images or videos, playing inside of a media player or environment where the user can scroll with their mouse, trackpad, keyboard (or look around if using a VR headset) anywhere inside the scene.

Every virtual tour includes navigation elements, whether automated or triggered by the user, to move around in a scene or move to the next scene. Multimedia elements can be included, such as video clips, audio clips, photos, and external web content. Typically, a menu triggering popup information relevant to the location and story are included along the perimeter of the screen. Other user interface elements may be included, such as a visual list of thumbnails for each scene, audio controls, a button to toggle full-screen display, or other functions prescribed in the project scope.

A constant point of confusion occurs when virtual tours are referred to as videos.

A video tour is not a virtual tour. Videos can certainly be included within a virtual tour, but a video tour itself lacks the interactivity and immersion of a true virtual tour. A better comparison is to think of a virtual tour as a highly interactive website, where each scene is like a page containing many elements of varying media types. All of the pages make up one cohesive, interconnected experience.

To take that one step further, the file and folder structure generated to host each tour looks very much like a standard HTML website, with an index.htm file, script files, and subdirectories containing supporting media elements, all of which can be read and displayed in any modern internet browser. (For you casual internet users, things just got nerdy. For you folks in IT, you probably just heard music.)

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Questions to Ask Your Virtual Tour Producer

• What virtual tour development software do you use and why?
• What hosting options do I have once my tour is ready to be published?
• What are the biggest variables for the cost of my tour and how can you help me manage that?
• How do you provide or produce other media to go in my tour including graphics, video, 360 video, and audio recordings?
• Will my tour work in VR headsets as well?
• How easy is it to make updates to my tour after it has been published?
• How do you envision supporting the tour 1 month, 1 year after the tour is published?
• Do I own the final product and can I do with it what I wish?
• Is the visitor activity within my tour trackable in Google Analytics?

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Common Questions Asked When Planning a Virtual Tour

How long does it take to plan, build, and publish a virtual tour?

On average, it takes 2 to 4 weeks from project start to publication of a virtual tour. There are factors that make this shorter or longer, and it all comes down to the complexity of the tour, availability of assets, and how proactive everyone is about communication.

How do you measure the ROI of a virtual tour?

This has everything to do with your marketing goals, and how well-tuned your tour is to track and meet those goals. A very basic tour consisting of a few scenes and navigation elements will be the same as tracking a blog post, with attribution based on the path visitors take before conversion. A more sophisticated tour can include many elements to measure like specific media assets with click-throughs to landing pages or embedded forms within the tour itself.

How much does a virtual tour cost to produce?

Some of the factors that affect the price of a virtual tour include:

? Total number of panoramic images

? Number of shoot days and travel expenses, if any

? Whether 360 video will also be included

? Whether drone footage or images will be used

? How customized the graphics, user interface, and interactive elements will be

? Other media to be produced such as videos, interviews, or audio capture

? Highly-customized layouts for various platforms such as mobile devices or VR headsets

? How detailed the Google Analytics data needs to be

We'd love to simplify things and provide a ballpark cost for an average tour, but it depends on too many factors to do that responsibly. Ask your tour producer for an hour of their time to go over the details of your tour idea and provide you with an estimate. Most will do this at no cost and it provides a much more realistic number for you to work with.

Are there ongoing charges or expenses?

Other than your hosting fees on your own website or other hosting option, once your tour is published, there are no ongoing expenses related to the tour being available for use. Requests for updates and new projects are common, so we price future work for clients based on actual needs and requests, rather than ongoing subscription services.

How will people access my tour?

Your tour will need to be hosted on a web server in order for people to view it from their own devices. This can be as simple as a subdirectory on your own hosting account, or we can work with your IT department to determine the best hosting location and help with the file upload process if needed. Your published tour is organized very much like a standard website, making it simple to upload, access, and share. If you prefer to have your tour available on one or several individual devices, this can easily be installed this way as well. Be sure to share these details upfront so we can plan accordingly.

Do I own the tour when it is finished?

Yes, you do. Your tour is yours to do with as you wish. We keep a production copy to serve as a backup if needed or to make incremental updates based on your requests.

What if we want to make changes or update the tour?

Changes to your interior or exterior environments, marketing goals, content, and people show in your tour can require updates throughout the year. Update requests are common and the great news is that updates are easy to make on the fly. There typically is no need to make your tour temporarily unavailable during updates. It's smart to get into a long-term mindset when it comes to including virtual technologies in your marketing mix. It is much easier and cost-effective to maintain and evolve your virtual tour over time than it is to treat this as a one-time project or start from scratch each year.

As a client, what will be expected of me and my team?

Your tour producer should do the heavy lifting, however, the more you and your team are able to contribute to the planning, organization, and execution of your tour, the better the finished result will be. In the best cases, clients prefer to work closely and participate in the process by providing access to staff, sharing media resources, and working through reviews & revisions together as needed. 

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Milestones and Meetings

Great communication can be the difference between a mediocre result and ending up with something everyone is truly proud of, where voices were heard, and ideas were turned into real action. But great results don't happen by accident. Establishing a road map early in the process helps everyone stay on track, share ideas at the most effective moments, and well... maybe even sleep a little easier at night. Obviously, for simple tours, you can hit the fast forward button on the timeline below. For tours that require detailed planning and team input to make them happen, the following information shows a good average of how projects play out, considering everyone's realistic schedule and the fact that a virtual tour usually isn't the only project on a client's priority list.

Project Stage 1 - Details, Intros, and Core Elements

Week 1: Define project scope, goals, and introduce key stakeholders to the production team. In some cases, photography is happening in this first week as well, but it is best to get initial details and introductions in place first. We'll set up a protected directory to temporarily host your tour so everyone involved can always access the latest 'work-in-progress' version of the project.

Week 1 or 2: Start building out the core elements of the tour interface and decide on overarching brand presence. Photography ideally happens at this stage to provide the backdrop for the rest of the interactive media elements. This is also the time to gather or capture all media assets that are being considered, choose what will be used, and prepare them for inclusion in the tour.

Project Stage 2 - Getting Things in Place

Week 2 or 3: By now we should have a set of high-quality panoramic images, a solid version of the user interface design, and a collection of media assets ready to include in the tour. This is a great time to start thinking about the story you want to share in your tour, and where to place elements to support that story. All popup menu items should be defined and either completed or well underway. This is also the right time to pre-plan for where and how your virtual tour will be hosted or installed, and do some testing to be sure everything is ready to go.

Project Stage 3 - Publishing and Hosting Your Tour

Week 2, 3, or 4: Once all of the important decisions are made, media elements are in place, and the team has reviewed and approved the final version, it's time to publish the content to either a staging site or the final hosting /installation location. We also need to set up and verify a connection to your Google Analytics account to measure traffic and activity.

Project Stage 4 - Review

No project is truly complete without taking a look back to determine what went well, what could have gone better, and what improvements could be made in the future. Several weeks after your project is live, we like to set aside time to meet with you to review the project.

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Functionality and Design Considerations

How your tour functions and feels to your visitors can have a big impact on the impression it makes.

Hotspot Design

Hotspots essentially come in four flavors. How complex you want them to be really depends on preference and what best serves the project's purpose:

? Simple icons conveying movement or the intended action

? Thumbnail photos or complex graphics

? Animated all the time to catch users' attention

? Animated on-hover to add a dynamic effect before clicking

Menu Style and Position

There is a surprising amount of flexibility when it comes to the placement of menus and other items on the screen. They can be in any corner or along any border. They can be static or have an animated toggle feature if you want to be able to move them out of the way. They can include just words, buttons with words, or rely heavily on imagery to convey their purpose.

Geographical Location

For many virtual tours, showing the property location on Google Maps is a helpful way to provide visitors with greater context and help them find you. This is typically made available via a popup window triggered by a menu item or icon.

Floor Plans and Site Maps

Helping visitors understand where they are on your property or in your building gives them a frame of reference for where they are in relation to the rest of the tour. Examples of uses would be a birds-eye view of your property exterior or a side view cutaway of your building showing viewers what floor they are on.

Pano or Scene Thumbnail Lists

A thumbnail list containing links to every scene is most commonly shown in a popup window, or in a scrollable filmstrip style interface along one of the borders of the main tour. Toggle Full Screen On or Off You'll want your visitors to have the option of viewing your tour within the browser like a typical webpage, or as a full-screen display with is often less distracting and a better overall experience.

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Embedded Content

Popup Photo and Photo Album Hotspots

Images are the go-to choice for adding supplemental information within scenes and telling more of the story. These can be triggered by menu items or hotspots and can be adjusted for how large they are on the screen. 

Popup Video Hotspots

Popup videos can be used to share short video clips at specific areas of individual scenes to enhance the story and give more context to what visitors are looking at.

Play 360 Video Hotspot

360 videos are unique in that they surround the viewer entirely and allow you to scroll around a scene in any direction. They can also be an exact replication of the same panoramic photo in your scene, but in video form to show action in the scene for a short duration. Bandwidth for your visitors needs to be considered when including 360 video, and not all visitors will have fast enough internet speeds to load 360 videos. Therefore, we recommend including 360 videos as optional content within your tour, allowing visitors to decide whether to watch the videos. Special considerations need to be made for the production of 360 videos if you plan to include them in your tour.

Audio Hotspots

Audio soundbites are a great option for including narration and contextual sounds throughout each scene of your tour. Graphics can be created to help show visitors what they are about to listen to and provide more control over the experience

Global/Scene Specific Music or Sounds

Global sounds play when a visitor starts your tour or enters a new scene. This can add to spatial awareness and create a mood based on the audio you include. A downtown street might have traffic sounds, a concert hall might play a brief clip of the musicians warming up, etc.

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Hosting, Collaboration, and Updates

Where your tour will be hosted is a critical detail that must be decided at the start of the development process. The same tour you create can be adapted to work on multiple platforms later, but there are design and functionality considerations to be made based on your target platforms.

Hosting Options

On your existing server or hosted website:

If you host a website already, whether that is on a company server, dedicated server, or a 3rd party hosting provider like GoDaddy, HostGator, or others, you have a simple option for hosting your new virtual tour. A subdirectory can be created on your hosting account and the files for your tour can be uploaded via FTP and ready to view within an hour.

Subsequent updates to your tour take only minutes once the initial installation is in place, making this a convenient and dependable option. You also get all of the benefits of traffic landing on your domain!

One concern with very basic hosting accounts is the available bandwidth as more and more people access your tour at the same time. If you start seeing more than a few hundred visitors per day you might need to consider upgrading your hosting plan to meet demand.

Updates and Developer Access:

Virtual tours are not static projects that are one-and-done. Updates to your tour are very likely at some point and are fairly easy to do with the right setup in place. Generally speaking, this means loading your tour to a location that can be accessed via FTP. Point Of Capture prefers to help with this! If we have access to the specific directory where your hosted tour is located, we can provide the dedicated service we like to show our clients, and easily make updates any time you request them. We understand that for some organizations this can be a big ask. Alternatively, we can transfer the finished set of files to you or your IT department so they can upload them as needed.

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Photography and Video Production

Photography is arguably the most critical element in your project. Where other aspects of your tour can have varying degrees of detail and quality, images, especially panoramic images for each scene, are the best opportunity to make a big impression on your visitors.

The information in this section will help you manage communication and expectations to ensure the best possible outcome.

What To Expect On the Day of Filming

• Some important ways to prepare include:
• Tidy up as much as possible in any areas to be filmed. Generally, this is more about decluttering and less about having everything spotless.
• Remove unsightly items such as ladders, cords, stacks of folders, boxes, dishes, etc.
• Plan to let as much light into each scene as possible for interior shots.
• Do take the time to clean any windows and glass surfaces, as these can be challenging to clean up in post-production.
• Choose a designated contact person to meet with the photographer and walk the property to identify important areas.
• Briefly introduce the photographer to staff and any security personnel, making everyone more comfortable and provide access to important areas during filming.
• Connect with your photographer via text message to improve communication throughout the day.
• It is very helpful and considerate to provide a secure area where your photographer can leave their equipment, set up their laptop to review images, charge batteries.

Working with Remote Photographers

It's very common today for a project to require remote photographers, especially when you choose a tour producer who is not in your immediate geographical area. Fortunately, there are abundant tools available to help with planning communication, setting expectations, and transfer of files.

Choose a producer who has experience working with other photographers internationally, and who is able to deal with inconsistencies in the source images if needed. Most photographers have at least some unique preferences with their routine and tools to make great images happen. When you work with other photographers remotely, it becomes a little bit like the wild west, and it helps to have the experience and patience to deal with surprises.

A smart way to mitigate these risks is to share a one-page PDF that outlines expectations about the type of shots you and the photographer have agreed to.

Here are a few more tips that help both you and your remote photographer prepare for the best images possible:

• Prepare a shot list far in advance to help the photographer understand what's needed and give them a chance to ask questions.
• Set up a Zoom call to meet face to face and share any important details. Introduce your remote photographer to anyone on-site at the filming location who can help them out when they arrive.
• Be prepared to move the shoot date if inclement weather or extenuating circumstances occur. Make it clear that you understand this can happen and that you are relying on their judgment.

Types of Cameras

We have quite a few options for which camera to use to capture the panoramic images and 360 video for your tour. There are some gold standards to know about, as well as some worthy alternatives based on the project requirements. We aim for this section to be a primer on the best practices for virtual tour photography, so you are well-prepared to discuss this with your tour producer.

DSLR or Mirrorless Camera with Fisheye Lens

The most professional virtual tours built today include panoramic images shot with a DSLR or Mirrorless camera. The detail, image control, resolution, and flexibility in post-production are unmatched by any prosumer action camera, dual-lens systems currently on the market. To be clear, we use all types of cameras in our productions! But for truly stunning panoramic images, DSLR/Mirrorless cameras generate far superior images in a variety of conditions.

Pro-Sumer Action Camera Dual Lens Systems

You are likely aware of the wide variety of user-friendly pocket 360 cameras available on the market. These have their place in virtual tour production and make creating a virtual tour quick and easy for beginner photographers, or in cases where shots require lightweight mounting in challenging situations.

It is important that you know there is a substantial drop in overall image quality compared to DSLR/Mirrorless cameras, in both resolution and dynamic range. Generally, images from dual-lens cameras max out at around 8000x4000 pixels or less, and DSLR/Mirrorless cameras range from 12,000x6000 to 18,000x9000 pixels.

These cameras do take moderate to high-resolution 360 video that is useable in your tour. Talk with your tour producer to determine whether these types of cameras should be used in your project.

All-in-One 360 Camera Systems

For panoramic images and 360 video, all-in-one systems provide a self-contained solution with impressive features that can be advantageous in certain filming situations. These have been out for a few years and there are varying degrees of quality depending on how new the system is.

The image quality for panoramic stills from these systems doesn't reach the level of DSLR/ Mirrorless, more in the 8000x4000 pixel range typically, unless it is a very high-end system. Where these systems do shine is in the capture of 360 video content that is stabilized, synchronized, and high-resolution.

Hope this helps!

Knowing a little more about which cameras are best for your particular project will help you have more elevated discussions with your producer about the type of content you want to create, and plan for shoot days, camera rental, and budget considerations.

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Measuring Success with Analytics

It's hard to imagine any media project not being measured today, and virtual tours are no exception when it comes to this requirement. The details you collect and analyze about your tour through Google Analytics can inform your marketing plans, improve the performance of future tour experiences, and uncover opportunities to better connect with your visitors. There are different levels of detail available based on how your tour is set up, from high-level visitor info to per-asset accountability. Let's take a look at the different metrics available below.

Total Visitors and Unique Visitors

Just like your website, your tour can be set up to report total visitors per day and how many of them are unique visitors. It can also track session duration and bounce rate to inform where visitors are entering the tour, for how long, and where they most often exit the tour.

Individual Asset Activity

Individual assets such as hotspots, videos, photo albums, audio playback, popup boxes, and hyperlinks can be named and tracked individually in your tours. If you are planning to review your tour performance and improve it over time, this feature can be an amazing tool to help make reporting more accurate and expedient.

Following Your Visitors' Journey

Virtual tour production is essentially non-linear storytelling. You have all of the parts to your story available, but visitors can consume each part at their own order of preference, timing, and even exclude those parts they do not find interesting. With proper setup, your tour can report to Google Analytics where visitors enter your tour, the order of scenes typically chosen, the media content they click on most often, and where visitors leave your tour most often. This information allows for unprecedented fine-tuning of your tour over time and better use of time spent on the type of content that is truly connecting with people.

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Summary

Hey, you made it! If you read through the details in this guide (or at least most of it) you are way ahead of where many new clients begin their planning process. We hope you found it useful and that it has prepared you for conversations with your team, leadership at your organization, and your tour producer.

One last thing. We appreciate hearing any feedback you might have about how useful you found this guide and any improvements you would want to see in the next version. Reach out any time by emailing [email protected].

We wish you absolute success with your virtual tour project! 

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About the Author

World travel? Sure. Amazing clients? Yes, please. Constantly evolving multimedia technologies? Let's do this!

After years of graphic design, web design and video production work, Matt Sheils was introduced to 360 video in 2015, which led to a whole new world of opportunities to apply this technology to multimedia projects.

As sole proprietor of Point Of Capture, Matt is committed to applying 360VR in the most impactful and meaningful ways today, while participating in the growth of the industry as we discover new and improved ways to connect people and ideas in virtual environments.

Matt lives with his wife and two sons in Arlington, Massachusetts. He spends most of his time trying to convince his family how cool virtual technology projects are.