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360° Panoramic Imaging & Virtual Tours 360° panoramic imaging allows your customers to view your property, showroom or exhibition stand over the internet. 360° Images can be used to show off a single location, or the images can be linked together to create a virtual tour, letting your customers go from room to room, as if they were there. In many cases 360° panoramic imaging increases visitors to your website and also increases visits to your premises.
File size and load times are important, if it takes to long to load the panorama, people will lose interest and abandon it. It is also possible to use a mix of low and high resolution images in the same tour. As you switch between the images your viewing angle and zoom remain constant.
Image sizes: 703kB - 1.2Mb - 1.8MB - 3.1MB The next panorama uses this technique but it is hidden. The panorama opens with a low quality image which is fine for the size of window it is in. Clicking on the “Full Screen” button not only enlarges the image but loads a higher quality version at the same time. This saves loading the larger file at the start, speeding up website load times and reducing bandwidth usage.
Image one 751kB, Image two 2.65MB The user interface also increases file size, the more buttons and floor plans you have the larger the files will become. Applications and CD's can use very high quality panoramas, each image is normally over 20MB in size, so very little of the quality is lost when shown on large displays or from projectors.
The panorama can be set to pan around and tilt to a level position automatically. This also includes your field of view-zoom. In this example, look down and zoom in. After a few seconds the image will zoom back and tilt up, then carry on rotating. This is ideal for a single panorama or panoramas in a slideshow, for large display screens in foyers, window displays or exhibitions.
Hotspots are interactive areas within each panoramic image; there
are two types, area and point hotspots. An area hotspot is an area
of the image which ca Hotspots can also spot the next image; this means you can set which direction you will be looking when you arrive at the next location. In the example “Hotspots 1” you can enter the “Car Park Centre” image from three different angles and each time have a different view when you arrive enhancing the user experience. Look down and hover over the Hopki Media logo to see an area hotspot linked to our e-mail address. The button “Hotspots 2” opens the same example but this time using custom pointers. The Hopki Media logo on the ground does not link to anything, it’s just an information box, an “ i ” symbol appears next to the pointer when you hover over the logo. Hover over the car found in the “Car Park Centre” image, an “ H ” appears next to the pointer indicating its an area hotspot linking to an external source, in this case a Wikipedia page about Automobiles.
Directional Sound and Sound FX Sound enhances the viewing experience, immersing the viewer in the image. Directional sound lets a sound source come from an object such as a car, as the image is rotated the sound moves with it. Background music, button clicks, all adds to a full multi media experience.
Although you may go from room to room, you may wish to jump to a particular location without having to retrace your steps or restart the tour. A tab or button can be added to the user interface so when clicked will open a floor plan enabling you to go directly to the location you want. A quick link bar can be used instead of a floor plan with just text, such as “Living Room, Bedroom etc. Both of the buttons below open tours that have floor plans.
If you only wanted to show off two or three rooms of your property then we can build a mini tour. In the mini tour example below there is a button in the user interface "r" which will bring up pictures of the rooms you may view. The full tour button opens the same building but with access to every room using point hotspots and an interactive floor plan.
We can add your company logo or other branding to the panoramic images; we can then link them to an e-mail address or website. There are two ways of doing this, imbedded or inserted, the first method is the logo is imbedded into the photos and becomes part of the panorama. The second is that we insert the logo in the user interface so it remains static when in view, or you can have both.
Using text links on a webpage we can change the viewing angle of an image. A panoramic image of a showroom could be used as a page banner. When the product title is clicked the image could rotate and zoom in to see it. The below example uses this principle, using text links to point to our logo on the floor and text on the sea wall.
The panoramic image files can be Domain Locked to your website, www.yourdomain.com, this means that if anyone try’s to use your files without your consent the files will display a “Wrong Domain” message, however the wording in this message can be changed to suite your needs. The lock can contain more than one Domain, actually several thousand, so if you have other websites you want the panoramic image files to be on then this is no problem. The files can also have expiry dates set to protect them from long term use, these to can have custom text. The Domain lock only works when the files are published on the internet but the expiry date works locally so it can be used on CD-ROMs and Application Software. You can of course have both security methods embedded in the files if you are sending them out on CD’s, stopping people publishing them on the internet without your consent.
Hopki Media prefers to produce its Panoramas in Flash because of its compatibility with Windows - Mac OS X (Intel) - Mac OS X (PowerPC) - Linux x86 - Solaris as well as working with the following web browsers, Internet Explorer - Safari - Netscape - Opera - Firefox - Mozilla. Flash is our preference but other formats can be provided.
All this technology must be expensive right? No not really, our 360° panoramas are no more expensive than having a family photo made. In fact it takes five photos to create one panorama, so its even better value. Price does vary from project to project depending if you require floor plans or compasses, point spotting or hotspots. Our panoramas are like bricks, you can start with one or two then later on add more, building a more comprehensive tour. If you change a room then we can retake the pictures and insert them, seamlessly updating the tours. If you would like a quote please contact us. |
