Virtual Tour Software Process
Virtual Tour Software made quick and easy is what we're all about at RTV. Using the components in the RTV Tour Builder Kit, tour builders take a series of still images with the camera mounted on its side on our Custom Rotator (See Picture Below). This gives the virtual tour a wide angle view. With our virtual tour software and process, virtual home tours and virtual business tours utilize 360 degree panoramic images, partial panoramas, and even still images. The RTV rotator is specially designed to take a maximum of twelve photos at a pre-specified overlap. These twelve overlapping photos are then seamlessly and automatically stitched into a 360 degree panorama using our Photo Stitching Process virtual real estate property tours can be quickly created, uploaded, customized, and distributed using the steps below:
Setup the tripod with attached rotator and camera in the best viewing spot available. (This is generally in the middle of the room.) Use the bubble levels on our rotator to level your camera setup front to back and side to side. Start taking photos of the real estate property or business from left to right. Each time a new photo is taken, turn the rotator to the right until you feel the rotator click into place and take a new picture.
Once you have completed your twelve shots, if you have brought your laptop with you to your shoot, you can remove the card form your camera and put the card into a card reader attached to your laptop. This will begin the image assembly process using our virtual tour software and making it fully automatic for you and hands free.
Place a second media card into your camera, move to your next scene, level your rotator, and take your next set of images. While you are taking your photos the virtual tour software is working on assembling your images so you are being very efficient with your time.
Continue taking your images until you have all of your desired rooms stitched within our software. Most virtual tours will require about 4-6 panoramic scenes and 4-10 snapshot scenes to adequately showcase the property.
Once all of your images are in the virtual tour software you can quickly perform the following tasks:
Export high resolution printable images from your virtual tour software
Use our proprietary built-in compression algorithm to optimize your images for the web
Link your images within the virtual tour together with our directional Hot Spots
Preview your completed virtual tour.
This entire process from start to finish will typically take you about 45 min.
When you leave your location your virtual tour is ready to be published to our web servers for deployment. You can continue from one shoot to another until you have fulfilled all of your virtual tour orders for the day.
When you return to your home or office you then plug your laptop into your broadband internet connection and upload the virtual home tour or business tour to the RTV tour servers. Our virtual tour servers are located in Dallas, TX and have had 100% uptime for the last six years! The virtual tour servers and tour management system make tour production very simple and effortless for you. Our tour servers automatically perform the following tasks upon tour upload:
Tours are assigned a unique tour identification number and the servers scan over your tour for city, state, zip, and listing number if one exists.
Your tours are then customized with owner / Realtor banner, photo, logo and contact information.
Buttons and features including Google Map, Google Satellite, Local City and School Info buttons, Download button, Email to friend button, Add to Favorites, Send to Social Networking Site, Mortgage Info button, Secret Hit on demand hit stat button, Separate Slide Show presentation button, are all automatically created on the fly and added to the virtual tours.
Virtual Tours can then be distributed to local MLS boards and, Realtor.com and any other portal sites you wish to push the link to.
You receive an email with a hyperlink that will point directly to your virtual tour on the web.
Each week you and your customer will receive a hit report that will graphically display the top referring websites that push traffic to your virtual tours as well as which scenes in your virtual tours are most popular.
You are then able to deliver your virtual tour links to your clients or you can log into your tour management system to add additional features such as voice-overs, music, floor plans, fliers, advertisers, scene descriptions, listing data, video clips, and others to your tours all free of charge.
Your virtual tour remains on our servers giving you unlimited usage and virtual tour edits.
Click photos to see larger images
Why do you need the RTV Rotator (Panoramic Tripod Head) above?
The purpose of a panoramic tripod head as shown above is to allow you to accurately position your camera so that when you turn it, you're turning it about the VERY center of your cameras lens known in the industry as the nodal point (no-parallax-point). When you rotate your digital camera about this point you're able to completely avoid parallax errors in your images which lead to stitching errors. This is not something that can be achieved by using an ordinary bogen, or slick leveler head that sits on top of your tripod. Even if your tripod flips to one side you would not be rotating accurately about your nodal point. As you can see in the photographs above, the RTV Rotator will screw on top of the leveling part of your tripod.
All professionals within the virtual tour industry use a panoramic head. Parallax errors WILL result in a poor quality picture, massive stitching errors, longer tour creation time and most likely you not wanting anything to do with the industry overall. No matter how many tours you would like to create on a monthly basis you'll want to make sure you have a panoramic head so you can get the best possible pictures and therefore create the best possible panoramic images for your customers. Our RTV Rotator or panoramic tripod head also makes shooting the pictures much more systematic, and simple so this means that you will spend less time trying to stitch the pictures together afterwards and therefore run a profitable virtual tour business.
