The Relevance of Virtual Tour in Branding Your Business

HD Virtual Tour Singapore

Excluding some remote countryside’s web has pervaded every nook and corner of the human habitat, so what is the need of an offline virtual tour or for that matter anything that is offline? There are so many reasons why offline HD Virtual Tour are relevant still today. Let's discuss one by one.

1. Cost: State of the art online virtual tours sometimes become prohibitively expensive. Creating a better online virtual tour and maintaining it, both are expensive. Registering domain (if you don't have a web presence), developing virtual tour content and making them web-ready takes a lot. Offline web development eliminates many of these things.
   
2. Technology: Online virtual tours rely largely on the speed of data transfer on the net and the processing speed of computers. There have been instances of computer crash. It also requires the understanding of several nitty gritty related to web technology in addition to just creating a 3D virtual tour. An executable offline virtual tour can run fairly smooth on all i386s and Macs. Besides, it does not require the ever upcoming web know-hows.
   
3. Accessibility: One can carry an offline virtual tour package in a disk or a business diskette whereas any online virtual resource can be accessed if you are connected to the net. With the disk/diskette with your pocket you are can always get a peek on the contents. You might ignore the fact but a considerable part of the globe is still not connected to the much hyped web.
   
4. Fleeting nature: As a native can you recall exactly what you visited on the net yesterday? I can't. And many of us will agree with me. Because web is so cluttered that we do more skipping to the sleek pages that actually read them. Eight years back I was getting more relevant information on the web on Google search, but today I am carried to a business portal 90% of the time. I end up at a boutique starting a search for aesthetics of female beauty. Offline virtual resource is specific and targeted.
   
5. Recall Value: A High Resolution VR Photography has much recall value than an online one. Because you are at leisure you can look at it, probably you won't tend to skip it for the junks.
   
6. Niche Marketing: Online resources have been targeted towards a homogeneous traffic. The web has proliferated to a bewildering extent. And it is increasing. If you know for sure that you are going to deal a few niche markets than it better with offline virtual tour. A company manufacturing Airbuses should better push a virtual tour presentation to a private Flight Operator.

Enough discussed on the pros of offline virtual tour. Anyways, "making a 3D virtual tour just the way you wanted" is creative and at the same time calculative. I would make you cautious - using off-the-shelf solutions is never worthwhile.

What is Interactive Virtual Tour?

High dynamic range (or HDR) Interactive Virtual Tour is a technique that allows a photographer to take the same image at different exposures and then blend them together to produce one image that features the best exposed parts from each of the images.

For a virtual tour this is particularly useful as most Virtual tours rely on a 360 degree perspective so often you will be shooting both away from and into a light source. Usually this would mean that you would have to compromise between the two and potentially have dark patches that are underexposed on one side and light patches that are over exposed on the other. Using HD Virtual Tour you can shoot at 3 or more exposure levels, low, medium and high and then blend them together to create the perfect panorama.

If you are considering using HDR then my advice is that you should first invest in a tripod and Panohead, the ghosting caused by holding your camera by hand will cause you no end of trouble during post processing and can even make your scene unstitch able. If you do invest in these pieces of equipment then with a bit of experimentation and post production patience you can create some beautiful HDR imagery for you virtual tour. If you are looking to sell the 360 virtual tours you produce HDR is now an industry standard and an essential tool to creating professional, vibrant and well lit panoramas.

Exposure Bracketing

To take HDR images technically all you need is a camera where you can manually change the exposure. You can then set the camera in a fixed position on a tripod and take several images at different exposures for use to create one HDR image. However this process is time consuming, especially for a 360 virtual tour where you will need to take several images for each scene to stitch together later. When your virtual tour contains 10+ scenes this can become a massive time sink. If you are serious about virtual tours then I highly recommend investing in a high end DSLR camera that features exposure bracketing. Exposure bracketing is a feature on a camera that allows you to set the exposures at 3 or more levels (usually low middle and high, then once you press the shutter button the camera will take the images in quick succession. This has the added benefit of reducing ghosting due to the greatly shortened time between taking the images saved by not having to manually adjust the exposure level.

Taking HDR Images

To take HDR images for your virtual tour you need to have the camera set to manual exposure and white balance. Once I have my camera and tripod set up I set my exposures by pointing the camera at the most over exposed part of the panorama (the sun if outdoors, otherwise the brightest light source). I then adjust the exposure until the image is just on the dark side of clear (you may want to be careful here if the sun is fully exposed as pointing the lens of your camera directly into the sun can cause sensor damage.

Try not to have it pointing directly at the sun and if you do then only for a few seconds). Once I have the base level set to my satisfaction I adjust exposure bracketing to at least +2 and -2 (some cameras are unable to stretch this far and you might have to take 2 bracketed images). Now your camera should be set and ready to take exposure bracketed images for HDR. You can test it by taking a sample picture, if the camera takes 3 images for each press of the shutter button then exposure bracketing is set and you are ready. Now just take the images you would normally take for a panorama and depending on how many you usually take (It vary between 6 and 12) you should now have a set of three pictures for each one, one light, one normal and one dark. For extra stability set your camera to a 2 second time delay, this will combat ghosting or blurring due to tripod shake.

HDR and post processing

Now you have your HDR panoramic images for your virtual tour you are ready to stitch them together. This can be done in a number of ways; you can use your raw images to create HDR images before stitching, you can stitch your images together using software that accommodates HDR and allow it to fuse your HDR images for you or you can create separate panoramas at each exposure level and fuse them together afterwards. Each of these ways has merits and I highly recommend experimenting with each to find which one suit you best.

HDR software: The HDR magic formula is to use to stitch the images together then output three separate panoramas at different exposures. Then use dedicated HDR software to fuse them together into one fully HDR beautifully exposed panorama ready for use in Virtual Tour Services.