VR-tour vs. virtual tour 360⁰ | what’s the difference

You can sit in an Austrian confectionery with a cup of coffee and at the same time “travel” to the Netherlands, viewing the best collections of the Tropics Museum from your phone. Or you can walk through your potential apartment, negotiating with a real estate agent wearing Apple Vision Pro glasses.

Timid attempts to touch the simulation? No. Just our new reality where people buy “star” plots of land in metaverses, build luxurious houses there, and along with them a new life. And all thanks to virtual technologies. And what are they and what is their difference, we discuss here.

Attachment of point and space

A 360⁰ virtual tour is an interactive project. Conditionally, to understand which windowsill is better to place your favorite flower, you can “rotate” this digital model and choose a suitable place for the green zamioculcas.

The “world” is quite limited. More precisely, the cramped conditions of the 360⁰ panorama do not allow you to feel the space, immersing yourself in it one hundred percent. However, a virtual tour allows you to zoom in on a place with a pouf or carefully examine a table from a corner angle, on which a vase is displayed.

The presence of interactive points in the panoramic tour is its distinctive feature from VR tours, for example. In addition to the fact that this technology makes you rotate your neck 360⁰, it is endowed with the rights of a “guide” who can take you on a tour of the entire apartment or country house. An exciting journey through the walls is carried out precisely through “hot spots”, by clicking on which you instantly “jump” from the bathroom to the dressing room to study the markings of the machines in the electrical panel. However, sometimes in such cases, due to poorly developed pixelated image and simply weak internet on the smartphone, the client can easily “get stuck” in the panoramic landscape.

Sometimes in order to save the client’s “clicks” some 3D artists place a plan with links in virtual tours. Having a general idea of the room layout, the customer will be sure to end up in the bedroom when clicking on the highlighted point.

In some 360⁰ virtual tours 3D artists add multimedia elements to make them “complete”. For example, studying the space of a child’s room, the client noted the high quality of a wooden chair, but realized that one would not be enough. From this moment on, the thought of purchasing a lacquered twin brother arises, but wandering around the vast internet in search of a piece of furniture is not desirable. For this case, directly in the 360⁰ panorama near the chair, 3D artists can place links to the manufacturer’s website. By clicking on it, the customer will quickly receive the contact information of the company, contact its representatives, and order the necessary goods. The list of multimedia “hints” is not limited to this. It can be supplemented with additional texts, music, videos, files of different formats – everything that will facilitate the client’s experience in studying the semi-real space.

Immersive Breakfast

Unlike panoramic tours, VR tours provide complete freedom of action: you can take an elevator, stroll in the inner courtyard, and even use the products from the refrigerator to prepare breakfast. Furthermore, the client can accompany the project from its conceptual stage – that is, when the property is not yet built. Architects and developers create virtual models of future houses or apartments and allow clients to explore them in a VR environment. When decisions are ready, but the client is unsure about the color scheme of a room or the practicality of stretch ceilings, virtual reality comes to the rescue.

With VR tours, using a computer, smartphone, VR glasses, or a headset, one can even observe the frequent change of store owners in a location where the house of the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant once stood. Moreover, watching the proceedings while being fully immersed in the process – that is, diving into the history headfirst – is effortless.

Among the clear advantages of VR tours, there are also drawbacks: when it comes to real-time light and shadow calculations, the output may be resource-intensive – a good computer will be required, which is likely to be expensive. However, it’s not worth regretting these expenses, because it’s impossible to connect VR glasses to a “basic” computer to launch the image, even when a 3D artist has optimized the image to reduce the processor load. And if one were to choose a “basic” computer, it would need to have at least an Nvidia RTX 2070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 graphics card.

Thus, a 360⁰ panoramic tour can be described as a flat, looping image, where the other side of the screen can be an obstacle to complete user immersion. On the contrary, a VR tour guarantees a 100% sense of presence, where any action is possible: from opening a kitchen cupboard to moving a mirror from the hallway to the bathroom. It opens up broad horizons for the user, and the presence of an Oculus Quest 2 headset is not always necessary. VR tours can be created for the client’s “independence” based on handheld gadgets. A mobile application with a VR mode, without the need for glasses, is installed on them.

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Real estate services at a distance

Swedish writer Fredrik Backman has an engaging book that one would want to read in one sitting, where the characters would like to remain children forever, because in adult life, they constantly have to run away from reality. Reality seems unbearably harsh to them – every second, they have to make decisions: which swimming pool to send the child to, how to write a review for IKEA tape, and how to rob a cashless bank, threatening an indifferent cashier.

The last ill-considered and absurd idea belongs to the main character, who, after an unsuccessful attempt to appear as a gangster, gets caught in a whirlwind of absurd events. The result of such a blockbuster is a hostage situation, where the hostages are in one of the houses on New Year’s Eve for a viewing. Some are there to resell the “squares,” some find it an amusing pastime, and some are ready to agree to the offer, but are hindered by “competitors.” However, the topic of purchase quickly fades into the background when the present are alternately threatened with a gun.

In such a situation, most people would probably want to pinch themselves out of fear and find themselves beyond the “limits” of the new advanced Quest-3 headset to verify the simulation of what is happening. The most daring might enjoy such an unusual interactive experience – completing a quest with a demonstration of their soft skills to maintain “hp” and, as a result, experience intense emotions.

By analogy with the main problem of Backman’s story, though not in such extreme conditions, one can draw a parallel and imagine being an adult burdened with millions of questions about the layout, interior, and design of a future apartment, because you are planning to buy it for the first time. You urgently need to find answers: how to make the kitchen as functional as possible, how not to hit your pinky toe on the bed corner, and how to understand where to place the switches. You are very busy, so you are not eager to spend time meeting with a meticulous real estate agent.

Here, VR technologies can be an alternative, allowing you to access real estate services remotely, even if you are on the other side of the world. This is also a significant advantage for foreign buyers and tenants for whom visual assessment is important.

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