Videos or Virtual Tours?
With an estimated nine out of 10 homebuyers heading online to conduct their initial house searches, property marketing professionals are well aware of the importance of offering some kind of virtual viewing to the internet audience.
Potential purchasers are keen to get a feel for a home in advance of committing to seeing it in person, and both 360 virtual tours and videos offer agents the opportunity to showcase properties in an online environment. But which medium is best for property marketing purposes? In his property column this week, US real estate broker Ray Pugel said: “Virtual tours of homes have been the mainstay for almost a decade, but now, the showing of homes on the Internet is transcending to video.” Is this really the case? Here we look at what each technology has to offer property marketing teams.
Videos Send Strong Property Marketing Messages
With online video site YouTube being the second most popular site in the world, and its owners Google sitting at number one, it is no surprise that the video medium receives a good billing in online searches. A full production video allows for a level of direction that cannot be achieved with 360 virtual tours – making it the perfect medium for a property marketing team looking to push home a message, while a carefully crafted videoette can speak more subtly about a property’s potential.
Virtual Tours Offer Autonomy to Explore
However, agents should not rush to mothball virtual tour technology, as it offers autonomy to the viewer, allowing them to tailor the tours to their own queries and questions. Indeed those looking to present a property in a style that suits all would-be buyers may wish to continue offering a choice of virtual viewing medium in order to reap the benefits of both.
photoplan.co.uk
Filed under 360 virtual tours, Articles, Sell your property with a virtual tour by on Jun 1st, 2011. Comment. 
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For mobile apple users
International photography company PhotoWeb has realized a technical breakthrough that until now has been beyond the reach of mobile Apple users – the ability to view panoramic virtual tours online.
This is an important development as more and more people are using mobile rather than fixed computers for their web searches. The number of global mobile search devices is predicted to grow to 1.8 billion by 2014 – outstripping the current PC and Mac internet population of 1.4 billion.
With hotel research and booking now done almost entirely on the web, and many people wanting to make informed comparisons and decisions via mobile searches as they travel, accurate and realistic virtual tours of rooms and facilities are increasingly important to PhotoWeb’s hospitality clientele.
But because Apple mobile devices haven’t so far supported Flash, Java or QuickTimeVR – the three popular virtual tour technologies available today – their users have until now been missing out on this functionality.
All that’s now changed, thanks to a recent update to the Safari web browser combined with the innovative new Universal Multimedia Viewer system developed by PhotoWeb. This can identify a mobile Apple user and automatically switch to an HTML5 code to provide full 360 degree viewing. No apps, plug-ins, downloads are needed.
“Our goal is to automatically provide all mobile devices with an image that’s exactly sized and optimized to load quickly and match the resolution of the device” said David Firestone, VP of Sales and Marketing for PhotoWeb. “So the viewer we’ve developed will recognize the device that’s being used, and source an appropriate image from a single high resolution file, using the technology preferred by the device. This means that in addition to supporting the iPad, iPod, iPhone and other small mobile devices, we can also offer optimized viewing in high resolution on larger screens, including a massive 2560 x 1440 view on a 27" Apple iMac.”
As well as displaying virtual tours, PhotoWeb'snew viewer runs video and presents still photos, using three tabs to access all content. It includes a “book now” button that takes users straight into the booking channel, a mapping function that includes the location of the user and the hotel, and a “share” button to link to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and hundreds of other social media sites.
PhotoWeb's Universal MultiMedia viewer is being implemented on thousands more travel sites and affiliates, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Priceline, Kayak, Yahoo, and Google – allowing? visitors to finally be able to view all rich media content on their mobile devices, before deciding where to book.
PhotoWeb was established in 1996, and recently completed the largest ever hotel photography assignment for the world’s largest hotel group, involving 3,500 IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) properties. PhotoWeb is in the process of converting all? 40,000+ panoramic images of hotel rooms and facilities held on its servers to the new format that’s viewable on mobile devices.
Source = PhotoWeb
Filed under news, News by on May 7th, 2011. Comment.
- Image via Wikipedia
InterContinental Hotels Group
As part of the most ambitious global photographic assignment ever undertaken within
the hotel industry, international photography company PhotoWeb has been commissioned by IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) to photograph 3,500 of its hotels across the Americas. The multi-million dollar contract will create a bank of over 100,000 still images and virtual tours, enabling guests to get the best ever picture of hotel rooms and facilities when they book online.
IHG is the world’s largest hotel group by number of guest rooms: 650,000 in over 4,500 hotels. The eighteen month project which will be completed by the end of 2010 involves a fifty-strong team of PhotoWeb photographers in the US, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America working across IHG’s well recognised and respected brands: InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts, Hotel Indigo®, Crowne Plaza® Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn® Hotels and Resorts, Holiday Inn Express®, Staybridge Suites® and Candlewood Suites®.
With hotel research and booking now done almost entirely on the web, the impetus for this unprecedented investment came from research carried out by IHG which showed that high quality photography had a strong positive impact on booking levels.
“Our research has shown that professional, high quality images improve our brand
perception and online sales, especially if the images are consistent across all of the
properties” said Steve Sickel, IHG Senior Vice President of Distribution and Relationship Marketing. “People expect to be able to make informed comparisons and decisions online, so the most important thing for our potential guests is to be able to see accurate, realistic and high quality photographs of our rooms and facilities, including virtual tours.”
Each of the 3,500 participating IHG hotels will receive a package of 33 images, including both still photos, and 360 degree virtual tours images which rotate slowly on their own, together with a zoom facility. These are ideal for providing a panoramic view, allowing guests to explore every area from floor to ceiling.
PhotoWeb is using Canon 5D mark II 21 megapixel camera systems, selected for their ability to enlarge up to 40 foot billboard size, and custom made rotators chosen to ensure the highest degree of virtual tour precision. All project photographers participated in an intensive three day seminar where they were trained in how to achieve the high standards and levels of consistency required by IHG.
David Firestone, Project Director for PhotoWeb, said: “We were thrilled to be chosen and trusted with a bold project like this. In a very competitive market where customers make their decisions online, it’s surprising that many hotels haven’t yet made the investment in the right level of photography that will make their offer stand out.
“We’re shooting exclusively in raw format due to the higher quality and additional
flexibility compared with the compressed jpeg format. And in line with IHG’s standards we’re not propping the shots or using models, because people want to see what their room – and the hotel – will actually be like when they arrive. We are keeping it real.”
source PhotoWeb
Filed under News by on Oct 14th, 2010. Comment.
- Image by akeg via Flickr
Estate Agent 360 Virtual Tours
360 Virtual tours for Estate Agents are the vanguard for property promotion. Today, lots of Estate Agents in the United Kingdom offer these virtual property tours to their clients. This is because there's an ever more increasing amount of property buyers who are looking for properties online. Those Estate Agents who can provide 360 Virtual tours on their web-site have a massive benefit over other Estate Agents who are basically displaying lists of images.
360 Virtual tours are virtual walk through of homes and properties that give buyers an life like experience of moving through the house. These tours cover the whole layout of the house including the lounge, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, the front parking zone and the yard. You can see the exact colours of the walls and the general cleanliness of the house.
Why Estate Agents Must Offer Actual 360 Virtual Tours?
1. It is possible for you to attract more clients to visit your site in the event you are offering estate agent 360 Virtual tours of the properties you are selling.
2. Your clients will be able to access the estate agent 360 Virtual tours round the clock and as lots of times as they need. They may even show it to their relatives and friends. These tours will help your potential buyers imagine themselves living in the house and help them reach a call faster.
3. You save yourself as well as your buyer time by not having to take them personally to visit the site. You need to visit the home only when buyers have evaluated and short listed those houses which they have liked and would like to visit.
4. You can pick to provide different types of virtual home tours depending on their requirements and your promotion budget.
Estate agent 360 Virtual tours can be simple slide shows of the property or can be elaborate video tours or can be the highly interactive 360 tours.
At www.tourvista.co.uk, they concentrate on making high quality estate agent 360 Virtual tours.
At www.tourvista.co.uk, you can give your clients an estate agent virtual tour from our web-site or your web-site or YouTube or basically in a DVD. Basically contact us from our web-site or make a phone call and they will help to you to market your estate agent properties using the latest estate agent virtual tours.
Thomas Williams - TourVista
Article from articlesbase.com
More 360 Tour Articles
Filed under Articles by on Sep 30th, 2010. Comment.
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