Updated on 29.12.13 The virtual tour of a house or interior such as that of a shop, office or hotel is an elegant and detailed way to present an interior and show it entirely to the visitor, as if he were inside it.
The concept of virtual certainly refers to websites, so it is about publishing the tour on a web page and making it available to everyone to be watched.
Conceptually, creating a virtual tour is very simple, just take 360-degree photos and compose them with an automatic application that adds the commands to turn left and right, to go back and forth and to go around a fixed point showing the entire surrounding environment.
To get an idea of the virtual tour, you can go to Google Street View and go around the streets of the cities of the world, standing in front of the computer.
What Google is doing by photographing all outdoor environments, you can also do it for free with your Android smartphone using your mobile phone camera, through the Photo Sphere function included in Android 4.2 and above.
You can read the guide to Photo Sphere to use it better and to upload photos directly into Google Maps.
Virtual interior tours can also be created with the free web application provided by the MapWing website.
The result we want to achieve is the creation of 3D maps composed of photos, drawings and images composed together within an interactive navigation system that allows you to explore, look and explore the environment.
This type of presentation of spaces can be useful, for example, to show all friends who cannot come to see the new house, to sell the house and to show it immediately online, to advertise a hotel, to explain the locations of an office or for many other purposes.
In fact, each map created can be shared on the internet and, if you have the possibility, it can be brought to your website or to a simple blog.
MapWing presents the virtual tours with a two-dimensional map in which there are dots, each of which indicates a resume point.
To create a tour from scratch then you must first choose the angles from which to take the photos, then from each of these points, take 4 photos for each cardinal direction: one that looks forward, one to the right, one to the left and one back.
Navigation becomes interactive when you move between the various shooting points which, presumably, coincide with the different rooms that you want to present and show.
The difficulty therefore lies only in positioning the photos correctly in order to be able to give that feeling of exploring and looking at the environment at 360 degrees, turning around a point, virtually but as if you were really there.
The navigation can take place using the mouse and the arrows placed in superimposed on each photo or by clicking play, automatically.
MapWing is free, but there is also a paid version which is intended for more professional or continuous use of the service.
The main difference is that, with a paid and non-free account, larger photos can be uploaded to the site, with higher resolution, the advertisement is removed and the virtual tour created can be downloaded to the computer.
