Panoramic Photography Blog – 360Cities

We at 360 Cities are dedicated to getting people started with panoramic photography and virtual tours. The more people practicing this virtue there are, the better. Therefore we’ve created online resources to get you started. For information about using 360 Cities, browse our Help Center, ask questions in our Community Support Forum, leave questions below this article or contact us directly. Questions about panoramic photography in general can be asked and answered at Panoverflow, a site devoted to helping beginners and experts to get their questions answered.

One of the things that we believe will make life of pano photographers easier is the virtual tour hosting platform, which is a part of 360 Cities website. Virtual tours hosted there are not simple 360-degree interactive panoramas, but full-blown virtual tours, including graphical floor plans, hotspots and interactive transitions between panoramas. We call them Immersive Tour Widgets. The tour widgets can embedded into your or your client’s website to let you or your customer experience a hotel, restaurant, shop, office etc. through fully spherical, 360-degree panoramas. Take a look at an example video of how the virtual tours can look like:

(the video features imagery from a virtual tour of Intercontinental Tahiti Hotel Resort created by Gregory Panayotou)

The 360 Cities website allows its members to build such virtual tour using the Immersive Tour Builder. The tour builder is a hosted online solution, no download is necessary for your or for the viewers of the created virtual tours. After you upload panoramas to 360 Cities, it allows you to add a graphical floor plan, connect the panoramas with hotspots and then publish the preview of the finished tour to our website. After we receive a payment from you or your client (depending on the type of collaboration), and you can then embed the tour into your client’s website. This tutorial video will guide you through the process of creating a virtual tour.

To get started with the Immersive Tour Builder, you must have created a 360 Cities account,  be an approved author and you must have uploaded panoramas that you want to use for the virtual tour. If you’re stuck at any point, please let us know. We’re here to help you! Good luck, happy building and happy selling!

We’re pleased to announce that we recently began offering our Immersive Tours via graphic design studio lucidCircus, who is active on both the U.S. and European markets – press release.  We’re excited about the opportunity to have our Immersive Tours included in some of lucidCircus’s creative web projects.

lucidCircus and 360 Cities combine efforts

If you are interested in partnering with 360 Cities, please read this and contact us.

Thank you everybody for participating in the Restaurant Tour Promotion. During October and November 2009, the users of our Immersive Tour Builder were able to create one restaurant tour and embed it in the restaurant’s website for free. We’ve had many interesting submissions, some of which will be added to our Virtual Tour Gallery page soon.

From the feedback we’ve been getting,  it’s clear that most of you are interested in seeing examples of virtual tours embedded in restaurants’ websites. We cannot show all of them for various reasons (we don’t have the links, the tours are not embedded yet, we were asked not to write about it, etc.) However, we did the least we could do and we’ve selected three nice looking tours and linked them below. If we didn’t include your tour and you want us to write about it leave a comment below the article.

Now that the promotion is over, you can of course continue using our Immersive Tour Builder to create any number of virtual tours you want! You can create a tour for free and show it to your client using the tour preview page. You only have to pay the activation fee when you want to embed the tour into your client’s website. Take a look at our tutorial on how to build your first virtual tour using 360 Cities.

Below are three examples of restaurant websites that received a free embedded tour during our promotion:

The Old Stone Bar and Grill, Ireland (by Gearóid Casey)

click on the picture to open the website

Excalibur, Hannover (by Igor Marx)

click on the picture to open the website

Note that the Excalibur restaurant tour contains more than 5 panoramas, which was more than it was allowed in the tour promotion. That was possible due to the fact that the client paid for the additional panoramas in the tour.

Restaurante Fondue Mezzanino (by Luciano Correa)

click on the picture to open the website

Do you want us to write a blog post about your tour? Leave a note in the comments! If there’s enough requests, we’ll post another article soon with your websites and tours.

Check out the recently completed immersive tour of the Noumea Hotels group in New Caledonia:   Noumea Hotels Tour

Richard Chesher has done a remarkable job creating and selling this tour of five GLP resorts in New Caledonia.   Actually, it’s five tours in one.  Check out the over 40 panoramas and navigate your way around the hotels either by clicking on the arrows or on the floor plan of each hotel.  Nice job, Richard!

If you are looking for inspiration in an immersive tour, look no further:

InterContinental Tahiti

InterContinental Moorea

InterContinental Bora Bora Thalasso

InterContinental Bora Bora Le Moana

These four magnificent tours were created by Gregory Panayoutou for InterContinental Resorts in French Polynesia.  Testimonial from appreciative client:

“Gregory Panayotou’s creativity and talent combined with the remarkable 360 cities immersive tools have allowed our four InterContinental Resorts in French Polynesia to really enhance our worldwide communication. We are extremely pleased to have our resorts displayed in the default layer of Google earth thanks to 360 cities immersive tour platform. All in all it is a great proposition that I highly recommend to any hotel wishing to communicate efficiently and in a fashionable way.”

Pierre Lesage

Regional Director of Sales & Marketing

Thanks to Greg for making this happen.

We’ve got a lot of fans out there looking at all the panos on 360cities.net and Google Earth.   Panos are viewed tens of millions of times per month.  Phenomenal when you think about it.  It’s tough to say how many actual “fans” we have – I mean there are hundreds of thousands of people viewing our site every month – but how  many of these are fans?

My colleague, Jan, has been promoting 360 Cities on Facebook, where people have been signing up and becoming our fans.   Growth in the number of Facebook fans has surpassed our expectations thus far.

I consider myself to be an immersive tour fan.  There probably aren’t a lot of people out there who understand this.  I’ll explain.  The 360 Cities’ Immersive Tour Widget is our new product, which we have been promoting heavily.  You can read about it here:   Immersive Tour Builder  FAQ – the idea is to allow our members to create virtual tours on our server using their uploaded panos and allow the resulting immersive tours to be easily embedded on customers’ websites.  The idea is to help members to sell their panos and for us to pay our bills.

You can see some of our immersive tours in our gallery:   Immersive Tour Gallery.  Some of these tours are awesome and I’m not blowing our own horn as it is our members who are creating the immersive tours – we just enabled the solution.

As the CFO here at 360 Cities, I have a particular reason for being an immersive tour fan, which goes beyond my aesthetic appreciation of the immersive tours.  My tastes, you see, are colored by my commercial sensibilities.   Supporting our members to monetize their panoramic photography is worthwhile and makes me happy, especially as the immersive tours are helping 360 Cities to pay our bills.  It’s a great feeling to be part of a win-win situation and that’s why I’m an Immersive Tour Fan.

The Immersive Tour Fan can be contacted at bruce.pales at 360cities.net