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Virtual tours and 360 tours of spaces and places are powerful tools for marketing businesses and services remotely to potential customers. Many companies do not realize how impactful virtual tours can be and the significant benefits they offer. We highly recommend continuing to read this page to learn more about virtual tours. Additionally, check out our section on Google StreetView Photographers, where we delve into how you can enhance your business’s visibility by publishing your virtual tour on Google Maps, Google Street View, and Google Earth!
Why Virtual Tours?
Virtual tours are the next best thing to having people physically visit your location, business, or spaces. They provide an exact visual representation of remote places, helping industries such as real estate to sell properties and businesses to showcase their know-how and infrastructure. Factories can allow people, clients, and investors to walk through their facilities, and provide training and induction. It is a highly valuable yet often underestimated asset that every company should consider for various reasons.
- Remote Accessibility: Virtual tours enable people to see places without being physically present.
- Marketing Tool: They serve as an excellent marketing tool, allowing customers to view business infrastructure, spaces, and places remotely, thus reaching a global audience.
- Property Sales: They are highly effective in selling properties.
- E-commerce Integration: Virtual tours can be integrated with e-commerce to sell products in a store-like environment.
- Training and Induction: They can be utilized as training or induction tools.
Matterport Virtual Tours in South Africa
With extensive experience dating back to 1998, we specialize in creating virtual tours using a variety of advanced technologies. One of our latest innovations is the Matterport Virtual Tour scanner, widely regarded as the top commercial scanner available today.
To see the Matterport Scanner in action and learn more about how we use it to create Virtual Tours, please watch the video below.
What Are Virtual Tours?
A virtual tour is a simulation of an existing location, typically composed of a sequence of videos or still images. It may also incorporate other multimedia elements like sound effects, music, narration, and text, designed to give viewers the sensation of walking through a physical location without actually being there.
Virtual tours are more than just panoramic pictures; they are modern-day storytelling tools that allow exploration and interaction. They provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of a space, useful for various purposes such as real estate showcases, educational field trips, corporate training, and business previews.
Types of Virtual Tours
- Real Estate Virtual Tours: Designed to show potential buyers or renters the details of a property, allowing them to navigate through different rooms and get a feel for the layout and features, aiding in decision-making without an in-person visit.
- Educational Virtual Tours: Used by schools and educational institutions to simulate visits to museums, historical sites, and even outer space, providing a dynamic and engaging learning experience.
- Corporate Virtual Tours: Companies use these tours for virtual onboarding of new employees, showcasing the corporate environment to potential hires, or giving stakeholders a view into daily operations.
- Business Virtual Tours: Small boutiques to large department stores use virtual tours to give customers a glimpse of what to expect, enticing them to visit in person or make purchases online.
- Showrooms and Venues: Virtual tours display the space layout, design, and features to prospective clients, helping them visualize the space for events or understand the products displayed.
- Events: Virtual tours extend the reach of trade shows, exhibitions, and fairs beyond physical constraints, allowing global audiences to experience the event virtually.
Technology Behind Virtual Tours
The backbone of virtual tours is 360-degree photography, capturing every angle of a space to provide a spherical view. Specialized cameras capture a full 360-degree panorama, and the images are processed using software that stitches them together to create a cohesive panoramic image. This image allows users to “look around” as if they were standing in the center of the space.
Modern virtual tours are powered by platforms that integrate interactive features like clickable hotspots, transition points, embedded videos, and e-commerce capabilities. These platforms are often web-based, accessible from most internet-connected devices, and some also offer virtual reality headset compatibility for a fully immersive experience.
Advanced functionalities in recent projects include:
- Customized navigation interfaces that are intuitive and user-friendly.
- Ambient soundscapes enhancing the virtual space atmosphere.
- Integrated analytics tools to track user engagement and gather insights.
- Virtual reality (VR) compatibility for an immersive experience with VR headsets.
- Dynamic content layers that can be updated without altering the entire tour.
- Live tour capabilities allowing real-time interaction within the virtual space.