How to order a virtual tour: step-by-step guide and questions for the contractor

Ordering a virtual tour is easy if you understand in advance why it is needed and how it will be used. The guide will be useful for marketers, realtors, restaurant and hotel owners, museum curators and HR managers who need virtual office onboarding for remote employees. Let’s look at the procedure and questions that should be asked to the contractor before signing the contract so that in a month you don’t have to redo the project at your own expense.

Step 1: Define the task and target user

A tour for a residential real estate sales department and a tour for a museum are two different products. In the first, integration with CRM, a branded interface, distance measurement and planning are important. The second includes high-quality voice acting, points of interest with long texts, support for mobile browsers and weak networks.

A client from Kazan, a network of children's centers, initially asked for “just panoramas for the site.” After half an hour of conversation, it turned out that the real goal is to reduce single visits from parents by 30%. The format was changed to an interactive tour with points where you can see the schedule, safety zones and the faces of the coaches. Panoramas would not solve the problem.

Step 2. Choose a shooting technology

Three basic options. Matterport — a photorealistic 3D model with a dollhouse view and accurate measurements, suitable for real estate, warehouses, and industrial facilities. Panoramic tour on DSLR with HDR mirror panoramas - maximum picture quality, flexible interface settings, any branding. Hybrid - Matterport for navigation plus separate HDR panoramas at key points where detail is important.

When shooting a 600 m² restaurant in St. Petersburg, we used exactly a hybrid: Matterport led through the halls and utility rooms, and the bar counter and open kitchen were shot in separate panoramas with manual bracketing - so that bottles, dishes and copper parts did not “float” and did not give overexposure.

Step 3. Agree on storage and delivery format

There are three options here, and this is an issue that many contractors try to avoid at the sales stage.

The first is the 360° Space cloud, high-speed servers with technical support and availability monitoring. Suitable when the tour is built into the site and you need a quick response from anywhere. The second is the customer’s server: the tour is deployed on the client’s own infrastructure, full control over the data, relevant for banks, government agencies and corporate facilities with NDA. The third is offline: a standalone version for PC or a separate assembly for a VR headset, works without the Internet.

We were asked to make an offline version for an exhibition at the Expo Center - Wi-Fi there is traditionally unstable, and it was necessary to show it to investors without delays. We put together a standalone build for a laptop and, in parallel, a build for Meta Quest, so that visitors could put on a helmet and walk through the facility themselves.

Step 4. Prepare your subject for shooting

The readiness of the object directly affects the final quality. Remove personal belongings, lay out the assortment, turn on all lights (including decorative and display lighting), close technical areas. For residential property - make the beds, remove magnets from the refrigerator, hide wires and chargers.

A studio apartment of 32 m² in Moscow required two visits - the first time, the owners forgot to remove the clothes dryer in the bathroom and the cat food in the hallway. The in-house retoucher did the job, but a couple of hours of post-production ended up being billed to the client. An hour of cleaning in advance is cheaper than any editing.

Step 5: Ask the Contractor the Right Questions

What to ask before signing:

• Who owns the copyright for the final files and RAW sources?
• Is it possible to get a copy of the tour for local deployment on our server?
• How is rework calculated - in hours, as a percentage of the budget, or as a separate technical specification?
• What formats are provided at the reception - only the link or including the original panoramas?
• Is there an availability SLA if the tour is hosted on the contractor’s cloud?
• Is offline assembly possible now or in six months, when needed for an exhibition?

Step 6. Acceptance and publication

Take the tour yourself from your smartphone, tablet and desktop. Check the loading speed on the 4G mobile Internet, the operation of points of interest, the correctness of captions and voice acting. Separately, watch the tour in a browser that you do not usually use - there is a chance to catch a bug with CORS, fonts, or video playback. Only after this - publication and announcement.

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 ordering

• Savings on site preparation. Retouching and repeated departure of the film crew are more expensive than an hour of cleaning before the photographer arrives.
• There is no technical specification for integration. The tour is done “in a vacuum,” and then it turns out that it needs to be built into a personal account with authorization and the events transferred to analytics.
• Refusal of the offline version at the start. In six months, the exhibition season or business trip to an investor begins - and the tour operates only through the cloud with the Internet.
• Selecting a contractor based on price without viewing a portfolio of nearby projects. A beautiful studio apartment in your portfolio ≠ the ability to rent a 4000 m² warehouse with high shelving and low light.