All about Virtual Tours
This Blog will discuss many aspects of virtual tours, real estate virtual tours, virtual home tours, site tours and various other aspects of the virtual tour field. So, let's start out by defining "Virtual Tours".
Virtual Tours Defined
What is a Virtual Tour?
A virtual tour is a graphical presentation of a place, property or object that is simulated on a computer or network and displayed on a computer monitor.
What are the different types of virtual tours?
Virtual Tours come in three general types or categories and have many different styles, which are geared towards several different types of audiences. Real estate Virtual Tours are meant to showcase homes for sale. Commercial Virtual Tours are designed to feature the amenties, usually of a hotel, spa, golf course, or other service-oriented business. And finally, Travel Virtual Tours are designed to preview vacation destinations.
For this post, we will focus on Real Estate Virtual Tours.
The Real Estate Virtual Tour market has a wide array of virtual tour providers who create and publish virtual tours in the following three categories.
1) Panning virtual tours, also known as 360 virtual tours.
2) Virtual Tours displayed as slide shows and/or galleries of images.
3) Virtual Tours presented in video format.
Although these categories may be broken down further, we'll start with these three for now.
Panning or 360 virtual tours uses technologies, wherein 2 or more pictures are "stitched" together and the virtual tour display is thereby able to render somewhat of a panning effect to display the inside or outside of a home or property. Panning and 360 virtual tours enable the viewer to scroll and pan through the images, in the directions of north, south, east and west, wherein some of these tours also enable diagonal panning effects.
The second types of real estate virtual tour are slide shows, also written Online as slideshows. Virtual Tour slideshows are rendered to be viewed by a Flash Player, although other multimedia players can be utilized, such as QuickTime Player, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, along with others multimedia players, as well. Flash Player is used by virtual tour providers the majority of the time, because Flash Player is the most prevalent multimedia player found on the Internet, although each of the various multimedia players have positive and negative features.
Virtual Tour slideshows can also be rendered and be accompanied by Flash Galleries or JPEG Photo Galleries, to enable a more thorough viewing of the property, as well as enabling the viewer to be able to stop and study an image or images one at a time. Virtual Tour slideshows can be quite effective, as they can be loaded (displayed on the viewers computer) quickly. However, if the virtual tour provider does not render an Internet friendly virtual tour file, the opposite can also be true, thus providing a virtual tour that loads slowly or does not load at all. This occurrence can result in the viewer leaving the virtual tour before viewing it at all or before seeing it completely.
The third types of real estate virtual tour are virtual tours presented in video format. This type of virtual tour can be quite effective, although the opposite can be true, as well. Video virtual tours can render high quality motion and display a home or property in a beautiful way, giving the viewer a thorough and intriguing view of the home or property. However, video virtual tours can come with the following drawbacks. For one, they can be more expensive to create and can also be slow to view, as the download time will likely be increased, due to a larger virtual tour file size.
Above, we have presented the three main types of real estate virtual tours. However, there are newer technologies coming into the real estate virtual tour market place, bringing about other virtual tour viewing technologies. These newer methods of viewing virtual tours include that of the Podcast (also known as Podcasts or Podcasting), as well as viewing virtual tours on cell phones and other hand held devices. Another method of viewing a virtual tour is one of the oldest and is that of storing the files on CD and/or DVD.
Home Tours of Oklahoma offers virtual tours in 360 degree panoramic views, slide shows, and videos. Our tours can be place on any website, either as a link or embedded content, and can also be placed on portable media, such as CDs or DVDs for distribution. Our virtual tours are hosted by Real Tour Vision, literally the world's leader in virtual tour technology.
If you have comments, questions or suggestions about our blog, please feel free to post them on our site. In the coming weeks and months, the Virtual Tours Blog will provide rich and in-depth content about virtual tours and real estate marketing.
If you are a real estate broker or agent and wish to have your company or site discussed on our site, please let us know, as we may write a post about you and your services.
In the meantime, come back to our Blog soon, as we will be posting information for real estate brokers and agents, as well as virtual tour providers. To view an excellent virtual tour provider, visit Home Tours of Oklahoma.
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