Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you ever wanted to know, or didn't know you wanted to know about in360 and a Living Vista Experience™.... or were too afraid to ask!
General
It’s both! And more!
For applications where typically a virtual tour would be desirable, our LVX technology offers a whole new dimension by bringing a normally static 360° panoramic space to life. We can put YOU inside the 360° space to engage directly with your visitors making it personalised and more engaging.
Our standalone in360.co product allows the creation of a new exciting kind of website. Instead of a flat scrolling page of text and images, why not teleport your website visitors to be actually inside your business!
This leads to a far more personalised and natural experience, much like if they were to visit your premises for real! ….which they might be more inclined to do after seeing the virtual version. They can engage with real items and access the same kind of information they would be able to within a standard website, but in a much more fun and natural way.
Yes! We’re a ‘Google Trusted Pro’ which means Google has verified the quality of our work. Google ‘Look In Side’ tours integrated with Street View on Google maps are the basic stepping stones towards our LVX interactive virtual tours. We can make these for you and look after publishing them to Google’s servers. There is no ongoing hosting charge for this service. Because we use the same high quality image capturing technology that we use for our advanced interactive tours, your Google ‘Look Inside’ tour will be of exceptional quality.
Yes! We can provide very detailed live and historical data for how visitors interact with your Living Vista Experience virtual tour and the exploration path they take. This means that you can see exactly what does and doesn’t interest people, with a geographical breakdown too.
Compatibility
Today, we expect most visitors to your LVX virtual tour will be using either a desktop, laptop or mobile device. All that’s needed is a standard web browser such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox etc. No special software is required. The Living Vista Experiences are responsive to the kind of device being used so as to optimise the experience. The viewer can pan around with a mouse or touch screen and interact by hovering over or clicking on objects. Mobile devices can also make use of gyro’s if desired, to allow movement by the orientation of the phone.
A Living Vista Experience is compatible with most modern VR headsets as a VR optimised downloadable App, allowing a fully immersive experience. Please note that there are some features, including the Skin / Menu items and Quizzes & Assessments, that are not currently available in a VR version. These features are in the development pipeline.
Sales
Fear not wallet. Although there are obviously costs involved in filming and creating the 360° panoramas, they form the underlying structure of your website, so the website design itself is simplified. Think of the panoramas as different website pages and a blank canvas on which to build. So the net design cost is likely to be very comparable with a traditional custom designed WordPress website, yet you are getting something truly unique and way more fun! … So much fun that we can’t be responsible for your visitors getting over excited and becoming addicted to being immersed in your 360° website.
Yes! We have a studio that also specialises in product photography and video production, including aerial filming as we hold a PfCO (permissions for commercial operations) from the Civil Aviation Authority. Photography can either take place at our in-house studio in Lancashire, or we can come to you.
Well, that would be a new one…but the world is a small place these days and our kit is portable, so as long as we can reach you by air / boat / train / Yak pack, we’ll be there!
(We are currently encouraging requests from the Maldives and Caribbean islands for large virtual tours…requiring the whole in360 team 🙂 )
Hosting
Sadly not. Your wallet really is a doomster! If you ask us to be the data host, hosting costs are on a par with those for a standard website. We give you the option of hosting the Living Vista Experience virtual tour with your current provider for no additional ongoing cost, or we’ll host it for you using our high performance network for a small monthly fee. If you do choose to host it yourself, it’s important that your hosting service provides a robust and fast performance to ensure a good user experience. Our recommendation is to let us handle the hosting as this also ensures easier and faster future modification and updates together with optimum performance. We also include a world-wide CDN (Content Delivery Network) ensuring exceptional performance wherever your customers are located, for no extra charge.
Of course, it’s also possible to mix and match the above options. For example, you might wish to embedd a Living vista Experience virtual tour or multiple tours in your current website, hosted by your current provider, but also have a separate in360.co stand-alone ‘microsite’ which you can direct traffic to via social media and focus attention on one particular virtual tour.
Production
Unlike many producers of standard 360° virtual tours, we don’t use point and shoot single shot 360° cameras. Each 360° HDR panorama is constructed typically from 42 images with each image being over 50 mega pixels each! This means that the master composite images are of incredible quality and ‘Gigabit’ resolution. If the experience is to be delivered over the web, we’ll scale these down to ensure a fast and efficient data transfer. Starting with such a high resolution means that the scaled down images still look fantastic.
For web delivery, we also implement a multi-resolution technology to significantly improve loading times so that it is possible to still include higher resolution panoramas in your tours than would normally be possible.
You might wish to deliver the experience via a kiosk-type environment and perhaps display it on an 8K screen, where the data transfer speed is not an issue as it’s not being delivered over the internet. In this case, the full mindblowingly_deliciously_gorgeous quality option is available to you. This means being able to quickly zoom in on distant objects and they’ll be super sharp. However, we can’t guarantee being able to see Neil and Buzz’s footprints on the surface of the moon…. just yet.
Much depends on how many 360° vistas are required and whether they contain live presenter video elements. However, the production process is very efficient and a basic panorama only takes minutes to shoot. If we’re putting a presenter into the panorama, then we film them at the same time which will take a little longer as we’ll likely be filming several takes to ensure adequate coverage for editing purposes. Once we’ve discussed the requirements with you, we’ll produce a schedule and shoot plan so you have a good idea of how long we’ll be in your hair…and drinking your tea….maybe sharing your chocolate hobnobs?
Support
That’s not a problem. We can provide fast turn-around updates charged at an hourly support rate, or negotiate an ongoing contract for situations that demand more regular content changes. Please note that the live presenter video process of putting people into the actual space means that to change this particular content means re-shooting that particular vista. However, there is an option to ‘green screen’ insert other forms of live animation that don’t require filming at the time of producing the original vista. We’re also now offering some amazing new ‘AI’ features which permit presenter dialogue replacement without re-shooting or green screens being necessary in certain situations.
Features
Huh? We’re guessing you’re from a different part of our Galaxy and are asking about language support? Multi language is supported and can either be selected from a menu item, or auto-detect from the users web browser configuration. You can either supply us with a translation or we can sub-contract the work to one of our translators. (Klingon currently not supported – expected 2055)
New for 2023! – We can provide automatic dialogue translation for presenters using the power of ai – Now your presenters can look fluent in more languages than we have fingers or toes.
Absolutely! Your ‘guests’ have nothing to fear (so long as they are carrying garlic and pointy wooden sticks). We have a floorplan map that shows a real time radar of the viewers position and which direction they are looking in. The map can also be used as a quick short cut to hop to another location..probably the exit in this case! It’s an optional feature.
E-Learning
It is! A LVX is great for training, interactive tests, exams etc. and using our API, your tour can be connected to your LMS so you can fully integrate virtual tours in your schedules and classes.
Why aren't there more faq's? I was enjoying this!
We’ll be adding more soon, so check back, or even better, give us a call to ask your question! +44 7898049553 or email info@in360.co