More About Me and Virtual Tours
Click here to see other creative services I offer, like print, video, photography, and website design & authoring.
A Better Virtual Tour is just one of the design services I offer under Chris Sebes Design, LLC. I've been a Sussex County, New Jersey resident for more than 20 years and it's where my business is based. My travels take me all over New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. I'm also a member of the Sussex County Chamber of Commerce.
I've been in the marketing and advertising world since 1992. Back then, there was no such thing as a virtual tour. It would have to wait almost a decade to become a thing.
Screen grab of my first multi-pano virtual tour.
My first virtual tour was for a Morris County ad agency that I worked at from 1992 to the mid 2000s. It involved using one of the first digital cameras and mounting it vertically on a tripod. Each panoramic image would involve taking 12 photos – rotating the camera 30 degrees for each photo until the full 360 degrees were captured in overlapping images.
The laborious task of lining up the overlapping images wasn't ideal. Some images needed a bit of tweaking. Eventually, the images were dragged into Apple's Quicktime VR Authoring Studio, where the tour was assembled. Hot spots in each panoramic image indicated an area where you could click to go into another room, up or down stairs, or through a door. Of course, I had to compress the life out of these images to get smaller file sizes, since most of the world was still on 56kbps dial-up internet back then.
With all that, the end results were pretty rewarding. The tour lived on the company's website for quite a few years.
New Hardware
After life at the ad agency, a college friend and I started working together. He'd started a small marketing agency in the Buffalo, New York area. One of the services we provided to businesses was virtual tours of their spaces, but didn't necessarily link them together to allow "walk-through" tours. These were generally just panoramic images of individual rooms.
We began using a Kaidan 360 One VR lens attachment (which you may still be able to find on eBay). Use of this piece involved pointing the camera straight up at the ceiling. The attachment was then mounted to the lens of the camera.
Mmmmm... Donut-shaped photos. From a Kaiden 360 One.
The resulting photograph was an image captured on the bell of this attachment. That doughnut-shaped reflection of the area was then stretched into an equirectangular photo using software. Back into authoring software, I would then assemble the tour. This method was easier than capturing 12 photos and stitching them together and yielded similar quality than my previous method.
Without good lighting, these old digital cameras struggled to create decently-exposed images. Their dynamic range was pitiful. Looking back at them now, I shudder to think that we passed these off as acceptable. But it was something that no one else was doing, so I guess the clients thought it was acceptable, too.
The Last Hurrah... For a While
In 2006, I began working at a video production company and facility. In 2009 we'd moved into a new facility that my boss had gutted and redesigned, creating a top-notch space for film, corporate video, commercials, and television production. This was a perfect opportunity to create a very helpful virtual tour, complete with a blueprint-style layout that allowed you to jump from one room to another. He still uses the tour on his website to this day.
The tour for the production facility would be the last time I would use the Kaidan lens. Although it was faster than shooting and stitching 12 photos together, that lens can't compare to what I have today in an 60-megapixel, dual fish-eye lens camera that I can remotely preview and trigger from my iPad or iPhone.
Stuck in Time
Sadly (or maybe luckily), these virtual tours and panos will likely never be able to be natively viewed on modern computers. The codec that was used to interact with these images has long been abandoned.
However, for nostalgia sake, I'm able to interact with them on my old PowerBook G3 and iBook G3 laptops running MacOS 9.1. I will say that it's fun to see where this all started, remembering what I used to go through to make one of these and what I can do now.