New to 360 Virtual Tours for Real Estate

[Rob Thomas]

Believe it or not, I’ve really spent hours researching this topic but still unsure about a few things.

Here’s my situation. I’m a web developer and have a client that is a property management firm. Someone did some tours for them abou 5-7 years ago. Half the files are missing and I don’t know what to do with most of them though I can tell some would be useful for recreating the pano. However, I can tell they were not 360. The person that did it before is gone but used PTGUI.

I do not know how to use any of them but I’ll be in a position to put together these tours and probably will even shoot them. I’ve got about 15 years of experience as a hobby DSLR photographer with plenty of lenses and equipment. So I want to get good at them and potentially add this a service to my business.

If I dive down this rabbit hole, I want to produce the best results possible. I’m not limited by a budget either. Questions:

1. Should I learn to use PTGUI or do you pro’s use different software? Pano2VR looked interesting. I’m concerned with ptgui putting out adobe flash files. That doesn’t seem ideal for mobile views and mobile will be huge as this client has a lot of student apartments.

2. I want to be able be able to make nice tours, multiple rooms in one presentation that I can upload on a web page. But might have 60 properties and seems like it could eat up resources. Do you ever host on roundme or kuula? Or is self hosting better?

3. Should I use my DSLR or is just better to use those 360VR cameras like the Theta Ricoh?

4. What is the best lens to use? 8mm, 12mm, 17mm? Ultimately I would think less distortion is better but I don’t know.

Any other tips or advice for real estate or even some links to guides or resources would help. I’ve read a lot and will continue to read this forum so think you in advance for any advice.

[Sam Rohn]

ptgui is for stitching panos, pano2vr is for building tours (from already stitched panos), these are 2 different things, also note that adobe flash is obsolete as a 360 pano display method and all modern 360 tour apps produce html5 output

sounds like you may end up with some big tours, you will probably want to experiment with a few hosting options to figure out which works best for you, self-host gives more control, roundme etc ease of use

dslr and good lens will give much better quality vs one shot 360 camera, but also a lot more work for you, try both and see what best suits your needs

lens distortion is not really a factor in stitched panos, longer lens means more images, more chance for stitching error, longer stitch time etc, you can stitch with any lens but most pros use a 8mm to 16mm fisheye for typical non-giga resolution panos

please see this page for info on basics of shooting, stitching, creating tours, etc

https://ivrpa.org/about-ivrpa/360-vr-photography-360-video-resources/

thanks

sam

[Rob Thomas]

OK. That makes sense. I noticed a lot of people talking about ptgui but was looking for a way to make the tours so that makes sense. I’m going to try an 8mm lens and see it how it goes. Thank you for the link and taking the time to set me in the right direction.

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