How to choose a company to create a 3D tour: 7 criteria and a checklist

The guide will be useful to those who order a virtual tour for the first time - a hotel owner, a realtor, a museum director, a developer's marketer. In 7 steps, you will understand the difference between a studio for 30,000 rubles and a studio for 300,000 rubles, what questions to ask before signing a contract, and where contractors most often save to the detriment of the result.

We at 360° Space have been filming tours since 2019, and almost every week we get calls from clients who were already burned at the previous studio. The tour turned out to be dark, the link stopped opening after six months, the files for the VR glasses were “lost somewhere.” Let's figure out how to avoid this.

Step 1. Look at the portfolio - exactly in your niche

A website with a hundred projects doesn’t mean anything. It is important whether the company filmed properties similar to yours. A restaurant with dim lighting, a warehouse 12 meters high and a typical two-room apartment are three completely different tasks. Equipment, exposure settings, route logic - everything is different.

Ask for links to live tours, not screenshots. Open from your phone and laptop, rotate the camera, go to distant points. If the picture “floats”, the seams between the panoramas are visible to the eye, and the transitions last 4 seconds - this is the level of the performer. A client from Kazan recently brought us a tour of a sanatorium for remodeling: the studio filmed everything on an Insta360 household camera, the panoramas were stitched crookedly, guests complained of motion sickness after 30 seconds of viewing.

Step 2. Specify the equipment and filming technology

A good question for a contractor: “What are you shooting with and why?” The answer “which is cheaper” is a bad signal. Professional options today are Matterport Pro3, Ricoh Theta Z1 cameras in conjunction with a DSLR or a DSLR with a panoramic head and HDR shooting. Each technology solves its own problem.

Matterport is good where precise measurements and a dollhouse look are needed - real estate, commercial premises. Panoramic head + DSLR provides maximum picture quality and captures complex light - museums, interior catalogues. Ricoh - fast and affordable, suitable for realtors with a flow of objects.

Step 3. Figure out where the tour will live

This is a criterion that 8 out of 10 customers forget about. But in vain - it depends on him whether the tour will work in a year, whether it can be built into a new website and what will happen if the studio disappears.

We have three options for storage and delivery of the tour, and we honestly discuss them before the shoot. The first is the 360° Space cloud: our servers with high upload speeds and technical support, you don’t need to think about anything. The second is the customer’s server: the tour is deployed on the client’s infrastructure, full control over files and domain (relevant for government customers, banks, large developers). The third is offline: a standalone build for a PC for an exhibition stand or a separate version for an Oculus/Pico VR headset, works without the Internet at all. Ask the contractor what formats they offer - unless it's just a "link to our site", that's a risk.

Step 4. Check the conditions for edits and retakes

The contract should be in black and white: how many iterations of edits are included in the price, what is considered an edit, and what is considered a rework for separate money. We usually give two iterations for free: replacing the shooting point, adding hotspots, editing descriptions. Re-renting an entire floor because the client changed his mind about the arrangement of furniture is a separate trip.

Step 5. Ask about interactivity and branding

The naked carousel of panoramas will not surprise anyone today. See what the contractor can add on top: a plan map with points, hotspots with photos and videos, built-in PDF catalogs, “call/write” buttons, application forms right inside the tour. For one developer client, we integrated a mortgage calculator into the apartment tour - the conversion rate to the application increased noticeably.

Find out if you can add your own logo, change the interface colors, or remove platform branding. For Matterport, for example, removing their branding costs some money, for self-written players it is usually free.

Step 6. Deadlines, advance payment and what is included in the price

The average period for an object of 200–400 m² is from 5 to 10 working days from the date of shooting. If they promise “ready tomorrow”, either this is a template without processing, or someone is not sleeping at night. Both options are bad for quality.

In terms of money: normal practice is 50% prepayment, 50% after delivery. Ask for details: what is included in the base price and what is an additional payment. HDR processing, hiding equipment and tripod, drawing a shot, adding background sound are often options. It is more convenient to calculate the exact amount for your object in calculatorthan guessing by price list.

Examples of our work

See what a normal real estate tour looks like - spin, go point by point, open the dollhouse view:

st. Arkhipova

Nine-story building

Iskona Dacha on Yandex Maps

virtual tour of the villa

Loft House

High Life Residential Complex

Venue

Signalny 16

Typical mistakes when choosing a contractor

• Focus only on price. The difference between 40,000 ₽ and 120,000 ₽ for one object is usually the difference between Insta360 “hand-held” and a combination of DSLR + panoramic head + post-processing. Savings result in retakes.
• Don't read the hosting agreement. The studio closed - the tour disappeared. Agree in advance on the transfer of sources and the possibility of transferring the tour to your server.
• Ignore tech support. After six months, you will want to change the phone number in the description or add a new room. Ask how much it will cost and through what communication channel it is resolved.
• Believe cases without references. A screenshot of a beautiful panorama in a presentation is not equal to a working tour. Always ask for a live URL and open it yourself.