Background:
I recently used my aged Samsung 360 camera to take a couple of 360 pictures. To my chagrin the CyberLink software that they gave to process these has become unusable (it makes them into gray boxes). So I resorted to some open source software script that uses Hugin. I wasn’t impressed with a few of the results and haven’t really been impressed with the image quality from my Samsung cameras. And now it appeared that both the hardware and software had become orphans.
In my tinkering I came across Pannellum and would like to pursue that route to deploying 360 content. But that requires some tinkering with JavaScript and learning a bit of Python. I have plans to do that but in them meantime I’ve decided to get some experience with real world virtual tour packages and get a current camera to work with.
So I bought an Insta360 X3. Nice little camera and I hope the software and my cellphone keep getting regular updates – I’d like to get my money’s worth out of it before it becomes an orphan.
On the right you can see it alongside the earlier ones. Much more capability and a much higher price tag. (I bought the older ones used but even new they didn’t come close)
In doing my research I’ve come across a number of commercial packages for doing virtual tours. I’m thinking Matterport eventually. For Real Estate I hear that Zillow is the best and easiest to use though I’m not sure how much Zillow is used in Canada.
Kuula.co is the one I’ve tried playing with first. It has a Free entry point. I uploaded a bunch of pictures I took a the library where I work. Then I linked them together with hotspots and added some text and a URL.
My first try is below:
What it doesn’t give you is the hotspots . . . a lot of time went into those.
It does create a sort of map (the INFO button in the upper right corner) – I didn’t do that. I’ll have to find out if it’s deriving the locations from the image content or GPS metadata.