360 Virtual tour editor and hosting solution

The real estate business is about how places look and feel as much as anything else. There are countless solutions to virtually transport potential buyers to the location and give them a chance to “experience” being at the property.

At the time, there were no dedicated 360 cameras, and panoramas were usually captured by taking multiple images manually to be later stitched using dedicated desktop software.

The project was initiated by a German company that was trying to differentiate itself with quick turnaround times and end-to-end service for real estate agencies. To this end, they procured special lenses for their DSLRs that allowed the capture of panoramas in a single shot, saving significant time compared to contemporary solutions. They needed custom software to decode these single-shot panoramas captured as toruses.

The problem

The customer needed a hosting solution for virtual tours along with a desktop application to distribute to the real estate agencies, enabling them to produce the tour content.

Core requirements for the desktop authoring tool:

• Windows XP target platform. Full version and demo version installers.
• Multi-language support, including full online help
• Fully or semi-automatic toroidal panorama unwrapper, with initial orientation selection
• Map and floorplan editor, with the ability to place panoramas, images, hyperlinks, and annotations
• Ability to place annotations, panorama, image, and general hyperlinks on the actual 360 images
• Full undo/redo support
• Export as local HTML panorama or upload to the CMS, with login/account management

Core requirements for virtual tour CMS:

• Scalable CMS for virtual tours
• Multi-level access controls (i.e., agencies, the customer, end users)
• Batch upload/update capabilities
• Backup/restore features
• Basic hosting requirements (e.g., no VM on the server)

The solution

We developed the desktop and server applications in parallel. The delivered package consisted of three binaries:

• Desktop Demo installer
• Dekstop Full version installer
• Server installer

The desktop authoring tool was developed in Delphi with an embedded, custom, file-based database to manage the local state. Image unwrapping and panorama rendering algorithms were written in x86 assembly. We included high-quality filtering with lens parameter auto-detection.

Multiple wizard workflows streamlined floorplan/map authoring, panorama import, gallery export, and tour upload. A full set of keyboard shortcuts, intuitive, “magnetic” tools, and custom widgets assisted with more interactive tasks like hotspot or hyperlink editing and annotation.

The server CMS system was built on PHP/MySQL/Apache to manage the tours, with a single instance able to handle one or multiple agencies based on the isolation requirements. Since panorama rendering was handled on the client side (ptviewer java applet), most of the content on the server was static and hence both resource and technological requirements were minimal.

The database contained mostly metadata, permissions and similar information, while the tours were hosted as file collections in an intuitive directory struction. This approach made data backups easy to perform with the hosting provider tools and also maximized scalability, since panoramas were viewable by everyone (i.e. no database access for the main use case) and only editing required heavy server-side operations.