Virtual Tour Photography Services
Shoreline Pixels specializes in Virtual Tour Photography. For our purposes we separate the Virtual Tours into two broad Categories.
- Google Virtual Tours – These tours are designed to be posted up onto Google’s servers Worldwide, and adhere to Google’s quality and specification guidelines.
- Custom Virtual Tours – These tours are the next step up from the basic Google Tours. Infinitely adjustable, and capable of hosting multimedia types (stills, 360’s, video, sound, etc), right up to and including VR (Virtual Reality) imaging.
But What is a Virtual Tour? How are these scenes created?
At the heart of both types of Virtual Tours is the equirectangular image. That’s the fancy name for what are popularly called panoramic or 360-images. A single image that contains a full sphere of pixels! If you’re standing in the center of that panoramic (also called “panos”, for short), you have the ability to “see” in every direction. Right, left, up, and even down.
In order to capture a 360 image, we have to first record images of every direction. It could just be 4 images (North, South, East, and West), or it could be hundreds of individual photographs. The full collection of images that comprise of all the digital information required to reconstruct a full spherical panoramic image are processed together in a computer. If you’ve got one pano, say you’re standing in the middle of the field, or in a doorway, you’ve essentially captured one single node or scene in a virtual tour. Now you have to move on to the next position, and do it all again. This is the practical baseline of Virtual Photography. A photographer walking around, methodically picking useful vantage points, or tripod positions, from which to build the collection of images necessary to complete the virtual tour.
A full “Tour”, is a collection of panoramic images that make up enough enough digital information to accurately reproduce an entire scene. The Scene may be an Office, a Restaurant, an Amusement park, an Art Gallery, or even an entire City! The possibilities are limited only by the world around us.
Jump to Google Virtual Tour Page
Jump to Custom Virtual Tour Page