Realtors have all the coolest TECHNOLOGY!

KingMoo

can anyone tell me how realtors make those 360 degree rotatable panoramas of the inside of houses on their listings websites?

Is there a program required to make them and a certain program that is required to play them server-side and or/ client side on the web?

Thanks

Echo

I used to do that with Quicktime years ago. Put a camera on a tripod, take at least 8 pictures distributed evenly around 360 degrees, and then stitch them together with Quicktime.

edit: and Quicktime can play them in browsers too.

Preacher

Well having dealt with realtors they pay someone else to do the whole thing, most of them can barely turn on a computer. In washington we call them virtual tours and they are done much the way Echo explained, though I have heard of other methods, I don't work in that side of the industry.

KingMoo

But if you do this in Quicktime then your "virtual tours" are just vidoes. the virtual tours that I have seen allow the users to manually scroll left/right and sometimes up/down to look around each room.

anable

That's still done in Quicktime. It's basically a widescreen image that wraps the two ends together. When you scroll left and right, you're basically just moving the image left or right.

Google action attack.

Rook

KingMoo wrote: »

But if you do this in Quicktime then your "virtual tours" are just vidoes. the virtual tours that I have seen allow the users to manually scroll left/right and sometimes up/down to look around each room.

Quicktime is more than just a movie format
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/qtvr/

KingMoo

Why thankyou very much!

RoundBoy

Rook wrote: »

KingMoo wrote: »

But if you do this in Quicktime then your "virtual tours" are just vidoes. the virtual tours that I have seen allow the users to manually scroll left/right and sometimes up/down to look around each room.

Quicktime is more than just a movie format
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/qtvr/

..its a dessert topping!

I thought there was also some special camera that they brought in to get the full up/down left/right panning? I do remember seeing the pedestal of it sometimes when fully tilted down

Gihgehls

Omni lenses are mucho expensivo. My buddy does panoramas for Remax, he just uses a really nice DSLR on a tripod. I don't remember the software he uses, but a search for image stiching should pull up plenty of gems.

blincoln

You can do stitched images with everything from a $10 webcam up to a professional DSLR with a super fisheye lens that costs a ton of money. Back in the 90s, there was a company called something like PhotoBubble that would make Quicktime VR-style images out of a single shot taken with a lens that basically captured everything except the camera it was attached to. Of course, specialized optics like that are out of the reach of most people.

I did panorama stitching of vacation photos using Hugin last year and it worked really well, even considering I was using an old point and shoot with no tripod. For indoor work I would definitely recommend a tripod to make the stitching work better, however.

The main benefit of using a better camera (other than the optics and resolution) is the ability to control the exposure length and aperture. Using a point and shoot generally means those will vary between the shots, so there will be noticeable changes in things like brightness across a panorama if you're outdoors in the sun.

Unless you plan on doing this professionally, I would recommend using whatever camera you have now, and a tripod. You'll probably need to make a couple of them before you get the hang of how much overlap between shots is necessary. It's really pretty easy though, as long as you make sure to get enough common elements between the adjacent shots.

embrik

You can do photo stitching in Photoshop. Also, Canon includes a photo stitching program with their digital cameras (which works very well, and saves right to a quicktime VR file.