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. 
Image by Michael D Martin via Flickr
A List Of The Advantages From Adding A 360 Virtual Tour On Your Web Site
With the advancement in technology, services are improved and they get better. Probably, you are not quite familiar with virtual tours namely panoramic virtual tours and a 360 degree virtual tour. A virtual tour is a useful tool for website owners as they able to provide a graphical presentation of certain property to website visitors or internet users. Typically, this process involves the simulation of a certain location that really exists and this may consist of moving or still images, virtual models of actual locations and videos.
Virtual tours are used by webmasters to make the sites look attractive and they also add narrations, animations, music or texts. Because many of the sites don’t require plug-ins or downloads, the virtual tours are easy to use. The real estate market has benefited much from these virtual tours and they are using these widely. With these, the web visitors can have a glimpse of buildings, homes and other properties at varied angles. These days, many industries are employing this type of technology as a marketing strategy for endorsing their products and services.
One of the many fantastic things about employing virtual tours when utilized for promoting real estate is convenience since potential buyers can examine the properties without being in the actual location. Just by simply clicking the maps, they can easily navigate the floors and transfer from one room to the other and take a good look at the featured property with clarity. These days, the real estate market brokers are making good use of the panoramic virtual tours and 360 virtual tours in their websites. In order to lure other brokers and potential buyers, they make sure that their sites look attractive to the visitors.
Nowadays, the online users and visitors have benefited from the virtual tours. Moreover, owners of websites benefit a lot from these as there are more than 50% of the online viewers who prefer to see the real location after viewing the virtual tour. Also, the buying decisions of prospective customers can be influence through these virtual tours. An increase in traffic and recall-value of potential buyers is also achieved. Furthermore, the retail industries can gain more revenues as they display their showrooms. The real estate brokers that used the virtual tours in their websites were able to attract different buyers and because of this, they have improved their sales.
These virtual tours are really great for both entrepreneurs and customers so that they can save more time and they can use the site comfortably and conveniently. These can turn images to a flat 2-D world into a full 360 virtual tours to represent the real look and appearance of a property and the website visitors can take a look at the properties online as if they were actually there. Thus, virtual tours have can be very useful for companies, firms and businesses. The virtual tours have also been used by other markets aside from the real estate since the virtual tours have been very useful for the Internet users.
cherryjam.mobi/
Filed under 360 virtual tours, Articles, Sell your property with a virtual tour by on May 27th, 2011. Comment.
Prague, Czech Republic, March 28, 2011 – A newly published photo of the ancient Philosophical
Library at Strahov Monastery takes the crown as the largest interior photo in the world. The
image of Strahov Philosophical Library, at 360cities.net/library, has a total resolution of 40
gigapixels, or 40 billion pixels.
Shot by photographer Jeffrey Martin over a period of five days, the image reveals the highestresolution
view of any interior space that has ever been captured. In the image, thousands of
priceless, ancient books are visible, in detail down to the worn leather on the spines; the fresco
on the ceiling of the library is captured down to the brush strokes and cracks in the plaster. In
short, this photo captures the details of room in a way that has never been done before.
Previous attempts at world record gigapixels include Martin’s 80-gigapixel image of London,
a 26-gigapixel image of Paris, a 70-gigapixel image of Budapest, a 26-gigapixel image of
Dresden, and Martin's previous record holder from 2009, an 18-gigapixel spherical image of
Prague. This new Strahov 40 gigapixel image, if printed at normal photographic resolution,
would be 23 meters long and 12 meters tall.
Martin, a panoramic photographer and the Founder of 360Cities.net, created the Strahov 40
gigapixel image from 2947 high-resolution individual photos. These photos were then stitched
together into one single image using a powerful workstation PC.
Further information about the making of this image can be found at http://blog.360cities.net/
strahov-gigapixel
About 360 Cities
360 Cities is dedicated to promoting geo-located, high-resolution spherical imagery by providing
the best- anywhere platform for publishing panoramic photography on the web. 360Cities.net
is the web's largest collection of spherical, map-based panoramas, and through its partnership
with Google Earth, this content is introduced to an even wider audience worldwide. 360 Cities is
a Netherlands limited company with a subsidiary in Prague, Czech Republic.
Contact
Jeffrey Martin – Founder, 360 Cities
email: [email protected]
Filed under 360 virtual tours, news, Photos by on May 23rd, 2011. Comment.
Virtual reality – museum
A new museum in Belgium is offering you the chance to take a real live tour of its exhibits – without ever leaving the comfort of your chair.
Visit the website of the MAS Museum in Antwerp and a tour guide carrying a camera will show you around the place in real-time as though you are really there with them.
If that already sounds cool, wait until you hear the best bit. You can control your tour guide's movements using the directional arrows on your keyboard.
What you will see is not a recorded video but a real person who will receive your instructions on a PDA and take you round the museum's artworks and masterpieces in the direction of your choice.
Guides can be booked during the museum's real opening hours – 10am to 5pm from Tuesday until Friday and upto 6pm at weekends. These 'virtual' tours will be running until 5 June.
You can have a go here.
thedrum.co.uk
Filed under 360 virtual tours by on May 20th, 2011. Comment.
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