These days 3D tours are widely used for visualizing and marketing indoor spaces. There are a lot of players in the 3D tour technology field and it is easy to get a little lost in the weeds when trying to decipher the pros and cons of the various types of property tech hardware and software.
I’ve spent a number of years developing optical metrology systems and more recently designing the iGUIDE tech, so I wrote “The State of 3D Tour Technology” review which provides a comparison of the most popular methods and products for capturing property data and creating 3D tours.
This is the best article I have seen describing 3D tour technology. Your thoughts?
Here are my CliffsNotes:
“Because of that, the term “3D tour” is well justified for tours made using connected 360° images.”
I like the term 360 tour or 360 VR tour (although it’s not really VR).
“Among the many different 360° cameras, the most popular and supported ones are the Ricoh Theta and the Insta360. These cameras feature a slim two lens design which reduces, but does not completely eliminate, parallax errors, while cameras with more than two lenses will have higher parallax errors and more stitching artifacts.”
We shot our campus tour with the Insta360 One, the predecessor to the One X. We have a Ricoh Theta S, predecessor to the Theta V. Another 18 months, another camera!
“since more than 50% of 3D tours are viewed on mobile devices and 3D tours on desktop aren’t often viewed full screen and on a large monitor, limited image resolution is not a big issue.”
This would seem plausible but he doesn’t back it up with references. Our campus tour using Pano2VR is virtually useless on phone or tablet. We used Pano2VR’s Wordpress Plugin and it doesn’t deliver what I think their WebVR code might. But we didn’t have time or the coding chops to use the WebVR. If I find time I will be giving it a try.
“Due to the long range of the lidar, the iGUIDE camera needs fewer camera positions to collect the necessary data and its onsite capture speed is about the same as with 360° cameras. A 3000 sqft home can be captured in 20 minutes.”
