Kuula is the most popular virtual tour software to create 360/3D tours for real estate, architecture, construction, art galleries, education and more.
Check Kuula here: https://kuula.co/
For more information on the development carried out, take a look at: TPL Fomento San Sebastian Tour
What is a 360° Virtual Tour?
A 360° Virtual Tour is a collection of 360-degree panoramic rotating images, stitched together to form a full, 360° view of a location.
A virtual tour may consist of one or of several high-resolution photographs brought together in a complete tour package. This high-quality user experience shows multiple locations throughout a site, switching views via hotspots or thumbnails. Users have full control over what they want to look at and may zoom in or out to enhance the scene being viewed.
In addition, descriptive text and/or images called hotspots transport the viewer from one place to another or simply provides more information, videos, and sound can also be included in a virtual tour package.
How to create a 360° Virtual Tour?
To create a 360° Virtual Tour is simple and you do not need that many gadgets. In our work we used:
- Tripod
- 360° Camera
- Mobile phone
- Computer
The 360° technology is getting more popular nowadays, but the technology and improvements of this technology are still emerging. That is why you can find many different 360° camera options in the market. We, as a beginner, set up 3 main points to be aware of before buying a 360° camera:
- Price
- Easy to use
- Quality of the image
The first approach to capture a 360° virtual tour has been the recording of the building itself and after a few trying, we can say it is an easy-to-use technology. Nevertheless, we share a few tips that we have learned trial an error.
Tips to create a 360° virtual tour:
- Make sure that the whole space is tidy because the 360 does not understand the offstage.
- Clean your lens before you start
- Position the camera and check that it is properly aligned.
- Find good lighting
- Point directly at your subject matter
- Hide yourself form the camera angle
- Be careful to assure the “continuity editing” of the different images
Editing tools for a 360° virtual tour:
Once all the recording is done, we had to choose a tool that would allow us to edit all the footage and add all the extra information to make a complete immersive experience.
After online research of different tools, we decided to go for Kuula, a Cloud-based 360° virtual tour software. We would like to share the pros and cons that we evaluated before taking a decision.
Pros of Kuula:
- Simple to understand
- Easy to use
- Good image optimisation
- It accepts video and audio
- It is fast
- It is responsive
Cons of Kuula:
- The main disadvantage is that aesthetically the result may look basic and a bit old-fashioned compared to other programmes.
