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How a Virtual Tour is Made

virtual tour camera

So you have been thinking of having a virtual tour of your healthcare facility created for a long time. Covid-19 further get you thinking that it’s time you had a virtual tour that would allow people with a computer or phone to “tour” your nursing home, assisted living facility, or hospital 24/7. But you aren’t sure exactly what it entails. Here is how a virtual tour is made.

Virtual Tour Photography

The first thing to realize is that a virtual tour is not a video in the traditional sense. Virtual tours are made using “still” images. We use a fish-eye lens to capture everything in the sphere that surrounds a tripod. It’s sort of like this – you know the peep holes in doors? Those are fish-eye lenses. So imagine holding one, looking through it, and spinning in a circle. That’s what we do with our camera on a tripod. Basically. We point it in one direction, take some photos, then rotate the tripod about 60-degrees, take some more photos, and so on until we have captured everything in the room or “scene”. It only take a couple of minutes to capture everything in a “scene”. The most time consuming thing is prepping for photography, cleaning and organizing, and making sure no one is in the room.

Virtual Tour Panorama Editing

After all the images are taken (using using just one camera on a tripod – not a bunch of lighting gear or anything), we process the images. That means we edit them to look as good as possible, use software to touch up things that might need it like scuff marks or chipping paint, and “stitch” the images into one large panorama that looks really weird if you saw it as it is.

Virtual Tour Creation

Those panoramas are then added to one of a variety of software that we use that actually makes the tour. The software makes the panoramas interactive so you can spin around, look up and down, click to see pop-ups, and zoom in and out. Here is an example of a hospital virtual tour.

After that is done, we present a draft of a virtual tour to you and go over it and tweak it until you love it.  Then you can add it to your website, social media, your email signature, a QR code, and more!

Virtualtech Design makes awesome virtual tours of healthcare facilities. Send us a text at 212-951-1010 to schedule a chat to have a virtual tour created. Or email info@virtualtechdesign.com.

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