Easily create a Virtual Reality Real Estate tour, no coding needed
Showing off a location or event by creating a VR tour is a great way to engage potential visitors or buyers. And a variety of virtual tour software exists today, each with a different focus. On the higher end of the market, you’ll find companies like Matterport using 3D cameras to capture images of hotels, retail, and other spaces. On the lower end, companies like iStaging create tours using monoscopic 360 photos (which most people don’t call VR). Both offer a similarly interactive but static experience of a home or other space.
Whether high-end or low, however, at eevo we believe these experiences are too limited. There is something about seeing a fire burning in the fireplace or clouds passing over a roof that more truly brings a space to life. And to create such an experience requires high-quality 360 video footage, a way to make the footage connect and interact for the viewer, and a way to stream it all. For that, you need eevo.
Creating high-quality 360 footage can be done in a variety of ways using many of the 3D 360 cameras available on the market. But that’s a topic for another blog post. Today, we’re going to talk about how to create a virtual-reality real estate tour using that 360 footage, and eevo, which lets you easily create VR tours using a drag and drop editor.
To show you how this is done, we’re going to create a 360 video tour with footage we’ve made of a Manhattan brownstone. This project will walk you through how we made the virtual tour. Keep in mind that at any point you can go to eevo.com and sign up to start building your own projects. To view the full experience in mono or VR mode, you can download eevo on iOS or Android.
1. Add 360 videos
When you’re using eevo, you’ll build your work in the Composer, our online tool for creating interactions between 360 videos. The Composer requires no coding. The first step is simply uploading files into the Composer, where they will automatically encode.
2. Connect 360 videos
By creating the connections you want between videos, you can pick the path your users will follow from room to room. The first GIF, below, shows you how we connected one video to another, and back again, allowing viewers to move in either direction. The second GIF shows the full room-to-room build, sped up.
3. Add VR hotspots
Hotspots are the locations in your VR tour where your viewers will look in order to load the next 360 video. To create one in eevo, simply open the 360 video in the preview editor, then choose to add a hotspot.
Once created, your VR hotspot can be dragged to the location in the scene where you’d like the user to look.
4. Save and publish your VR tour
Once all your hotspots are in the ideal locations, the project can be saved, published, and watched on any mobile device.
You can use the eevo app on iOS or Android to publish your new interactive experience locally, or you can launch your own custom VR app. To start publishing your own projects, sign up for an account, or reach out to questions@eevo.com to launch your own custom iOS, Android, and Gear VR applications. The process is simple and eevo takes care of publishing to the Apple, Google Play, and Oculus Stores in full.
That covers the basics of making a VR tour using 360 video content on eevo. So if you want to stop reading and start creating, you can. If you want to get fancier with the toolkit, there’s a lot you can do, so we’ll cover that in this next section.
5. Getting Fancy
eevo’s toolkit allows you to do a lot with both video and audio content past what’s seen above. Here are a few examples.
- You can use seamless video transitions to create interactions in your content, like a door opening.
2. You can give someone the feel for a room, like a music studio, by letting them see musicians in the space, and hear them in full spatial sound using ambisonics audio.
3. You can let viewers interact with items in the space, like the drum kit itself. Giving them the option to play a few beats in their potential new home studio. You’ll have to download the eevo app to see this one for yourself. This uses hotspots to trigger audio files instead of new 360 video files. You can read more on this project here.
Those are few options for getting fancy using eevo for your content, all of which let a viewer have a deeper level of interaction and intimacy with a space.
The tools are easy to use, free for personal use, and there’s a lot to explore within it, so sign up today to start creating!
Thanks for reading!
