Virtual Tours| History and Applications

Let us say you are a real estate agent and a prospect contacts you. He is interested in a nice house in the suburbs, a house that is advertised in your inventory. But there is a problem. The client is a busy man and hardly has time to visit the house for an ocular inspection. How will you convince him to purchase the property considering that he needs to see it so he can make a decision?

One thing you can do is to bring a laptop and show him a virtual tour of the property. A virtual tour is defined as a simulation of a location, typically composed of a sequence of photos or videos. To make the tour more interesting, one can incorporate multi-media such as music, sound effects, narration, and text.

Many virtual tours consist of several images of a place taken from a single vantage point. The images are then stitched together. By controlling the mouse, the viewpoint is rotated from a single nodal point. In simple terms, a photo-based virtual tour shows you the place as if you are standing on a single place in that place while you look around.

Another kind of virtual tour is a video tour. Unlike the photo-based virtual tour’s static wrap-around feel, the camera in a video tour moves around. In effect, it is as if you are walking through the area. A video tour is typically a continuous movement taken at a walking pace.

The virtual tour was first utilized in 1994 as a museum-visitor interpretation. The tour featured a walk-through 3-D reconstruction of the Dudley Castle in England as how it probably was during the 1500s. The tour consisted of a computer controlled laserdisc-based system that was designed by Colin Johnson, a British-based engineer.

By using a virtual tour, a user can view an environment even if the location of the actual place is far away. The advancement of digital technology has considerably increased the quality and accessibility of virtual tours, with clearer and more detailed images, more seamless walk-throughs, or better navigational features.

The real-estate industry is one of the biggest users of virtual tours. Many types of tours are used, including simple options such as interactive floor plans to more complex full-service tours. Prospects, therefore, can view the property in considerable detail even if they are not in the property itself. Many real estate agents and companies even upload virtual tours of the properties for sale on their websites so everyone can access them. Furthermore, real estate experts have hinted that in the next few years, virtual tours will replace traditional slide shows.

But real estate is not the only industry that benefits from virtual tours. The tourism industry also uses such type of tour to show prospect clients about the place they are about to visit. For instance, a person who wants to visit the Eifel Tower in Paris can first check out a virtual tour so he can have an idea what it is like to stand on a park near the world-famous attraction. Or he can check out a tour whose nodal point is at the top of the tower, giving the viewer a panoramic view of the surrounding cityscape.

Universities are also beneficiaries of virtual-tour technology. Professors teaching in these institutions extensively utilize such tours as visual aids for their students. Those tours can be anything, from an educational walk-through of a ruin on how it would have looked like thousands of years ago to an exhilarating, impossible, fiery trip to the innards of the planet.

Virtual tours are definitely here to stay and are poised to be the future of product presentations.