Some early work using the INSTA 360 one X camera and how to display on your web site.
The image below was taken via a table-top tripod and a selfie stick from the centre of the dinner table to capture our 4 diners in the restaurant atop the cliffs outside Carvoeiro, Algarve.
The ‘free’ WP VR – 360 Panorama wordpress plug-in was used to display the resultant rectangular view with controls allowing the viewer to rotate the image left to right, up and down and zoom in/out.
Alternative from momento360.com They store your pictures on their server and provide controls, viewing via their local software…
Regarding a Virtual Tour the following trial shows what can be acheived using the WP-VR plugin. The limitation here is no control on the starting magnification of a scene and cost. ‘Free’ is limited to 5 scenes per website. Thereafter for one website with no limitations its 50$ per year or for 149$ for 5 sites/year ie 30$ per site per year with all bells and whistles.
The functionality is OK just a bit of getting used to. Is it worth the money or are there better options available? I certainly wouldn’t pay for anything more than 1 year as someone could provide this for free tomorrow. Will update with more info soon but if a virtual tour of your business is of interest, let me know and we can chat about the options.
Momento 360 allow the formation of collections. This resutlant slideshow is actually very good, double-click to zoom in, zoom further and then zoom out to original view.
Momento works through a link to their server holding your images and viewing same through their software. 2Gb of space is ‘free’ thereafter the charge is something like 5$/month to extend this allocation by 50X. The only downside here really is the branding…with the images bearing their logo and not yours. To remedy this…the cost goes out to 15$/month with a 250Gb allocation. At 10Mb or less per image of a decent standard this is a lot of images and even 2Gb (2000Mb) should be good for a couple of hundred 360 panoramas.
No ‘Tour’ is currently available and this may or may not be important to you. The array of thumbnails along the bottom will ‘work’ for many people just as well or even better.
Virtual Tour in Google Listing
For a Google Maps supported tour it is possible to attach your 360 images of your business to your Google Maps/Business listing such that a potential customer can walk through your premises and see the goods on offer. An early example of this is a basic walk through of a holiday villa in Portugal listed as Casa Luessa, Carvoeiro. If you go into Street View on Google Maps you should be able to navigate througout the villa following the arrows and scan around the individual rooms. Due to the haphazard geography of the villa this is not as clean cut as a standard business location might be …but you get the idea.
The next post will go through the camera and its operation. If you have any interest in recording these images or constructing a virtual tour please get in touch.
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