Dallas Virtual Reality Video ProductionExploring Virtual Tours

360 videos and photos, often referred to as “virtual reality”, provide a comprehensive showcase of a property whose viewing experience is controlled by the viewer themselves and is unique each time they visit. Controls are available on their computers and mobile devices that allow them to look in any direction, at their discretion. You can have a “video” virtual tour or an “interactive” virtual tour, depending on how much information you want to have available and the perceived level of involvement your customer will utilize. The process for capturing content in this format has become considerably easier and more affordable over the years, and our team is proud to make it available to realtors, property owners, construction companies, and more. To see more Dallas virtual tours and other ways 360 content can be used, please visit our virtual reality page. Our service area is the entire Dallas, Fort Worth, and Denton area as well as north of US 380 such as Prosper, Providence Village, Pilot Point, Aubrey, and others.

Interactive Virtual Tour

Features of Interactive Virtual Tours

Navigation Options

Navigation of these virtual tours can be accomplished in three different ways. Located at the bottom of the screen is a collapsible menu of thumbnail images that enable viewers to jump to a particular part of the property they want to see. Additionally, a 2D floorplan can be installed that has clickable navigation points allowing viewers to jump from place to place. This also gives them a real-time indication of which direction they are looking in. Finally, virtual icons (typically arrows) can be placed throughout the property that viewers can click on to proceed to an adjacent part of the property. This is a very similar form of navigation to Google Street View.

These virtual tours can be embedded into your website for better branding control. If you site runs off WordPress, there is even a plugin for convenient embedding. They can also be downloaded and utilized offline for one-on-one or group in-person meetings. Additionally, these virtual tours utilize “Nadir” logos or circular logos that sit at the virtual bottom of each scene which can feature a company logo and custom text.

Hotspots are one of the coolest features of these interactive virtual tours. Hotspots can be placed anywhere within a scene and provide additional information about what the viewer is looking at via text, still images, or even video embeds. Our services can include the production of short video vignettes with a live tour guide that are produced exclusively for these types of tours. Ask for details on that!

Background music can be installed into a virtual tour to ideally provide your viewer with a more enjoyable viewing experience. As you’ll see in the demo on this page, the tour gives the viewer the option to enable or disable it and that functionality is preserved throughout the tour through the menu options located at the top right of the screen.

When creating a virtual tour, you can control where viewers look first when first loading a scene. You can also control how much they can zoom in or out. If you want each scene to slowly spin horizontally on its own, that functionality can be easily installed as well.

These virtual tours work with mobile devices with touchscreen navigation as well as gyroscopic responsiveness as well. That means whenever the viewer physically moves their phone or tablet in any direction, the virtual tour responds to that and rotates along with it. This is a particularly neat feature if your viewing audiences using VR goggles to watch this type of content.

Voiceover integration to provide an audio tour as well can be installed either on specific scenes or one overall voiceover that plays throughout. The use of voiceover for specific scenes is handy if you would like to audibly describe what it is a viewer is looking at when in a particular location. By contrast, a voiceover that plays throughout the tour can be a general welcome message or branding statement to set the stage for what viewers are about to experience. If you need a professional of any demographic to record your script, please contact us with your preferences and we will source an individual that meets your criteria.

Why Would I See Ads on a Tour?

Our choice of platform for hosting interactive virtual tours is Theasys.io. Theasys is a third party service with a monthly or annual subscription required to host an ad-free tour. A paid account is approximately $24/month or slightly less when paid on an annual basis as of the time of writing this article. Other hosting platforms may have similar implications when using free versions of their service. Please note that our pricing for an interactive virtual tour will never include the monthly or yearly fees charged by a third party hosting platform. 

Considerations to Make for an “Interactive” Virtual Tour

The amount of information that hotspots can deliver to your customers is far above the video tour and any other form of online communication. As a reminder, hotspots can display text, video embeds, photos, calls-to-action, and act as links to other parts of your website. The information, provided with the 360 visual, is by far the best way to cater to discerning customers that are interested in your product, service, or property, but have health concerns or geographical limitations to physically being there in-person.

Like a video tour, an interactive tour can be embedded into your website or other online platform capable of accepting HTML code. Embedding from a hosting site means the data of the tour is not actually stored on your website’s server and therefore should not affect your page’s load time considerably. Additionally, interactive tours can take advantage of VR headsets that give viewers utilizing them a truly unique experience with the ability to physically look around as though they were actually there.

Viewers that want maximum control will appreciate the interactive tour far more than a video tour. They can go anywhere, at any time, and easily backtrack to locations they’ve already visited. They can take the time to read information at their own pace, whereas with video tours, scene visits and on-screen text are only visible for a specified amount of time before the video transitions to something else on its own. This type of tour is great for discerning customers and longer attention spans, as well as highly nuanced subject material that you want to show.

Dallas 360 Virtual Tours in Video

  • Fully compatible with desktop / laptop computers as well as mobile devices.
  • Can be uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo, which can be linked to through real estate website profiles.
  • 4K resolution capability.
  • Can upload directly to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with 360 viewing capability.
  • Can include branding graphics and contact information.

360 Real Estate Photography

  • Fully compatible with desktop / laptop computers as well as mobile devices.
  • Can be uploaded to third party sites for linking to real estate profiles or directly to your own website.
  • Can upload directly to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with 360 viewing capability.
  • Can include branding graphics and contact information.

Considerations to Make for a “Video” Virtual Tour

Video tours are easier and more affordable to produce and consequently can have a faster turnaround in production. The process for integrating a live tour guide is also easier, though use of teleprompter is not possible due to the nature of this type of filming. It is advisable that any tour guide that appears on camera be very familiar with their content or memorize a script in order to present effectively on camera.

Video tours are like any other video that can be hosted on YouTube, which is owned by Google. With an SEO-friendly title, description, and captions to follow along with any voiceover or on-camera dialogue, your video tour has the possibility of getting indexed in organic search results of a target phrase your customers may type into a Google search. This must be planned in advance prior to tour production, so be sure to talk to our team about how you would like customers to find your tour without knowing that the video, or even your brand, already exists.

If your perception of your customer is someone that won’t necessarily need to dive deep in to what you’re showcasing on a virtual tour, it is recommended that a video tour be produced as opposed to an interactive one. The video tours are a one-click play and self-guided based on the video edit so that required interaction from your customer is kept to a minimum. Interactive tours are recommended for more nuanced products, services, or facilities that customers will take extra time investigating prior to a purchase decision.

Hosting and Branding Options

A number of online platforms, each with both free versions and paid versions that provide various VR-friendly features, are available online to build your virtual tours online. Features include custom branding, zooming in and out of an image, hotspot creation, and embeds of traditional videos if you have those recorded. Contact us for details on what your specific needs are and we can recommend the right virtual tour host for you.

Nadir Logo and Hotspot Example

Check out this photo and then “look down” to see an example of a nadir logo that is covering the mounting stand of the camera with a custom logo. We can take your existing logo and convert it to this format as well as add custom call-to-action text such as a phone number to dial or website URL.