Online Viewing of Virtual Tours

If you are looking to have a virtual tour created to be viewed on your website then read this section carefully.

Reputable virtual tour providers should offer to host your virtual tour for you. Some may charge for this, others may give a grace period of a number of months.

Revolution Viewing.com offer 5 different options for bringing your virtual tour on-line, each have their pro's and con's.

1 – Web page replication and virtual tour hosting

This option is the most popular and is opted for by the vast majority of Revolution Viewing.com's clients requiring bespoke virtual tours.

The in-house design team at RevolutionViewing.com create replica web pages that are similar to those web pages of the client's original website. The client's virtual tour is then embeded into these web pages and all the necessary assist buttons are added. When complete the client is sent a link (for example: www.revolutionviewing.com/dlyachts), the client's web designer then enters an appropriate phrase (such as “click here for virtual tour”) on the client's website. When a user clicks on this phrase it is set up to link direcly to the virtual tour hosted by Revolution Viewing.com (in our example it is www.revolutionviewing.com/dlyachts).

The benefit of this method is that the user is never aware they have left the client's website, yet because Revolution Viewing.com host and maintain the virtual tour the client can be sure it will always be on-line, working and that links are updated. There is no heavy involvement from the client's web team. The fact that adding the virtual tour link is no more than a 10 minute job for the client's web-designer means there will be no major additional costs for web design.

The only real negative aspect of using this method of hosting a virtual tour is that the URL will change from www.dlyachts.com (for example) to www.revolutionviewing.com/dlyachts this will not be noticeable to 90% of users, those that notice the change in the URL are likely to have an idea of why this is done (ie use a specialist to host a virtual tour).

2 – I-frames

Setting up an I-frame is a good way to ensure a virtual tour appears on web pages that are identical to the client's website pages. This requires the client's web designer to create a blank template. The web designer is then sent a line of code and this is dropped into the code of the blank template created by the web-designer. This piece of code in effect 'grabs' the virtual tour from Revolution Viewing.com's server (we still host the tour) and displays it on the client's website.

The benefit here (over option 1) is that the URL doesn't change from the client's URL. The negative aspect here is that the client's web-designer must have a lot more involvement. The client is advised to talk through everything with their web-designer and get a price for the work. The work isn't overly difficult, but if the client's web-designer hasn't dealt with templates or I-frames before it could end up taking them more time than expected and therefor costing the client more money than it should. Revolution Viewing.com can offer technical advice over the phone, but this willl be billed at £65 per hour with a £25 minimum, so clients must make sure their web-designers know what they are capable of before choosing this option.

3 – Pop-up Virtual Tours

This is very similar to option 1. Revolution Viewing still hosts the client's virtual tour, the clients web designer inserts a link on the client's website, but the URL doesn't change, instead a screen with the virtual tour pops up.

This has all the benefits of option 1 and 2 but with the big negative being that some computers are set-up to block screens that pop-up (people install and activate pop-up blockers) due to the countless adverts pushed onto users of the internet. So for accessibility reasons we do not recommend this option.

4 – The Revolution Viewing.com website

For no extra charge apart from annual hosting (provided it is a standard tour in terms of number of floors and a few other elements) Revolution Viewing.com can host a virtual tour on their website. The client is still given a URL to directly link to, (www.revolutionviewing.com/harley for example).

5 – Virtual Tours on a disk

Revolution Viewing.com can offer this service but do not recommend it. They state explicitly that if this is the option chosen then should technical support be required it can be available at the in-house web-designer's discretion and will be charged at £65 per hour with a £25 minimum charge.

BEWARE the virtual tour providers that tell you the virtual tours will be given to you on a disk and your web designer should be able to get them working right away. This option will almost always be cheaper, creating tours and handing them over on a disk effectively means the virtual tour provider can wipe their hands clean and leave you and your web-designer to embed the virtual tour.

Unless your web designer has knowledge of the specialist vrml language(language associated with virtual tours) they will struggle. Even if your web designer believes they can handle the task make sure they tell you how long it will take them, if they are reluctant to give you a definite time period (or price) then be prepared to get either a hefty bill, a virtual tour that doesn't work properly or both.

Please read on and this section will try to explain in the most straightforward manner why bringing virtual tours on-line requires a specialist.

Accessibility is just as important as the quality of the virtual tour itself, without the end user being able to see the virtual tour it may as well not exist. For this reason virtual tours should be able to be viewed using Java applets, almost all computers are able to 'see' java virtual tours. For more specialist projects Quicktime may also be used as a viewer, Quicktime movies are a little easier to work with and develope hotspots for full walkthrough virtual tours. A java version should still be available as a back-up for those who can't download Quicktime.

Embedding Java tours can be difficult. To ensure a professional look to a virtual tour many of the parameters must be adjusted in the coding. These parameters control the values for the field of view, pan, tilt, wait screen gif, movie size and more. Unless a web designer has dealt specifically with this type of code there is likely to be problems. There are so many adjustments to be made and ways of carrying out these adjustments it takes a specialist months of practice to become proficient. A professional virtual tour provider that can create good quality virtual tours and host them successfully is a useful commodity.

Quicktime movies themselves are not too difficult to embed in websites as they can be created so that the integrated movies are self contained along with all the coding. If you opt to get your own web designer to embed your tours you must remember that if people don't have quicktime you need to provide a link to the Apple website so they can download the quicktime player. If you link to the UK Apple website your end user gets Itunes (music software) as well, doubling the download time. So at present your link needs to be to the Australian Apple website where a standalone download can be found. This is likely to change in the near future, a specialist hosting your virtual tour should be aware of the latest complications with viewer (ie Quicktime) downloads and should therefor update your webpages appropriately as part of your maintenance package.

The decision is yours, just think about which option is most likely to suit you and your web team.

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