A virtual tour
The dream of each visitor is to ending up in the heart of a property, with the possibility to cruise around it without being limited with some little pictures.
Also improved by a research of the “Yesawick Pepperdine and Brown”, leader of the communication agencies for the tourism and leisure, resulting that 57% of the touristy travellers and 46% of the business travellers consider that a virtual visit on a web site from a Hotel is “very desirable”.
From a research of Best Western international, first World hotel chain with over 4100 hotels spread over 80 lands, virtual visits produces 46 % more reservation in comparison of traditional photography.
94% of the future buyers would like to find more virtual visits on real estate web site (source: Benchmark group 2008).
According to a released research in “le journal du net”, an advertisement including a virtual visit is 40 times more consulted than a classical advertisement.
Because of this increase, Hotels, real estates and also companies choose an interactive virtual visit for their
web site.
Our objective is to immerse the visitor in a natural environment on his full screen with the liberty of angle of view and each detail in his mind like he will be on the field. And this, on each platform like Windows, Linux, Apple (including Iphone, Itouch or Ipad), just as on multimedia Smartphones.
To reach this target we need to apply different technique like among other the stitching to realize a 360° picture or the HDR (High Dynamic Resolution). It will introduce a natural picture on the screen in spite of big lights differences for example between the inside and outside light or the multi-resolution to get the possibility to see the picture in high resolution without possess an fast internet connexion. All remaining invisible for the visitor.
Most importantly, the visitor should be able to move easily. For that reason they are several surfing possibilities. To start with, an assistance is available for the visitor. By clicking on the question mark, an appropriate window will open.
To turn around himself, the visitor can use the mouse or the control panel:
On touch-sensitive screens, multimedia Smartphones witch possess a touch-sensitive screen (Iphone…) or electronic tablet (Ipad…) simply need the use of fingers.
To indicate to the visitor that it's a 360° picture, it will start,
after a few seconds, to turn automatically and can be stop
at any moment.
To make this experience unforgettable, the visitor can display in a full screen mode for an exceptionally view in high resolution.
For the virtual visit, several options are proposed to the visitor to move easily from one room to another:
- Quite naturally, like he will be on site, the visitor follows the pointer
to get in the next room.
- To be informed of its current position, a pull-out plan is available.
A flashing point indicates his position.
By clicking on a spot the visitor can directly go to the desired
localisation.
- Helped by a pull-out picture gallery, the visitor can get easily to the desired destination.
- Or with a group of pictures retractable or not, either horizontal or verticall:
- Win more trust from your visitor, by offering him the possibility to locate your estate to find it more easily. Integrate a road map and/or a satellite picture in your virtual visit and this either in horizontal or vertical:
A natural rendering of pictures.
The current technique still meets some obstacles. While the human eye masters easily the contrast range that appears in the nature (the simultaneous perception of very light and very deep areas), we find limits to the extreme exposure.
Modern camera controls a scale between 8 and 10 apertures. The human eye, perceives an average of 20 apertures. To restore the magnitudes of contrasts visible on the screen, we use a technique named HDR. The 3 following pictures shows clearly the contrasts range by a classical camera. The fourth picture shows the result obtained by the HDR technique:
Generally up to 9 pictures, taking with different exposures, are necessary to compose a HDR picture retransmitting the full range of light visible by the human eye.
In order to immerse the visitor in this virtual world, several pictures will be assemble to each other to create a full panorama at 360°. This technique is called stitching. With a full panorama from 360° x 180°, it becomes a complete sphere. From there the visitor can now advance freely in this virtual world.
And now if those two technique, HDR and stitching, are joint, more than 100 pictures are going to be necessary to create a sphere.
It requires a large quantity of data. A complete panorama from 360° x 180°, before being compressed, has a size of nearly 800 Mo. If this picture is converted to high quality jpeg format, it still result a size from nearly 112 Mo. To visualize an overview of this size; a computer would need a RAM from 930 Mo, which would be too much for a small computer and too long to load for an Internet connection. Fortunately there is a technique for it named multiresolution, we can then visualize a virtual visit in high resolution without having a fast internet connection and requiring more and more RAM. The picture is divided in several small resolution parts and different sizes, therefore only the necessary parts to the current view will be downloaded.
We hope we have been able to give you a short overview of our work and are open to any questions or suggestions from you!
