More About Me and Virtual Tours
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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 for that to catch on.
Screen grab of my first multi-pano virtual tour.
My first virtual tour was for a Morris County ad agency I worked at in the early 1990s to the early 2000s. It involved using one of the first digital cameras. Each panoramic image would involve taking 12 photos, one every 30 degrees while rotating the camera on a tripod.
The laborious task of lining up the overlapping images wasn't ideal. 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 dial-up internet back then.
With all that, the end results were very rewarding. The tour lived on the company's website for quite a few years.
A couple of years after agency life, I began using a Kaidan 360 One VR lens attachment (which you may still be able to find on eBay). Use of this piece started with pointing the camera straight up. The attachment was then added to the lens of the camera.
Mmmmm... Donut-shaped photos. From a Kaiden 360 One.
The ensuing photograph was of the image captured on the bell of this attachment. That doughnut-shaped image was stretched into an equirectangular photo using software. Back into authoring software, I would then assemble the tour. This method was easier and yielded better quality than that first digital camera.
In 2006, I started working at a video production company and facility. In 2009 we'd moved into a new facility that the owner had gutted and redesigned, creating a great space for film, corporate, commercials, and television. This was a perfect opportunity to create an incredible virtual tour, complete with a blueprint-style layout that allowed you to jump from one room to another.
The tour for the production facility would be the last time I would use the Kaidan lens. That lens can't compare to what I have today in an 60-megapixel dual fish-eye lens camera.