With the coronavirus lockdown, people are staying at home. Many of us are thinking about how we’d prefer a different house.
However, in person viewings are not allowed in many countries, including where I live, Scotland. But from experience, physical house viewings are really useful for getting the feel for a house. For example, when looking just at individual photographs on a website, it is sometimes hard to understand how the rooms all fit together.
So to scratch this itch, I put together a fully panoramic, click through, tour of my house. This was substantially inspired by functionality on a famous mapping website.
It took several weeks of evenings and weekends to polish, but I am quite proud of the result. I think the tour is really slick, and gives a good feel for the house.
I suspect few of you are looking to buy a house in Scotland. Moreover, people care about technology on this site, so let’s talk about the tech.
At the very start, I found this requires a 360 camera. I tried stitching panoramas together from individual photographs, but that did not have good results. Then, once the images are converted into the right format, we need a panorama viewer. We settled upon Marzipano, which is a brilliant, as are a few other contenders. Marzipano also has a decent tour generation tool.
This is where the customization, polish, and value added began. For example, I wanted a clickable mini map, which would moreover show both your position and orientation. So I integrated Leaflet with the Marzipano tour, in both directions. I also added the ability to zoom into places such as cupboards, which is more appropriate than navigating full scene change.
Separately, I think there’s the open question of whether this could be commercialized. Can money be made from creating tours like this for other house sellers, as a service? Perhaps. Estate agency fees can be quite high. However, it would require some more up front work to the make the whole thing, end-to-end, a much faster process. For example, cross referencing the scenes together, and setting the orientation information, was quite time consuming.
However, in person viewings are not allowed in many countries, including where I live, Scotland. But from experience, physical house viewings are really useful for getting the feel for a house. For example, when looking just at individual photographs on a website, it is sometimes hard to understand how the rooms all fit together.
So to scratch this itch, I put together a fully panoramic, click through, tour of my house. This was substantially inspired by functionality on a famous mapping website.
It took several weeks of evenings and weekends to polish, but I am quite proud of the result. I think the tour is really slick, and gives a good feel for the house.
I suspect few of you are looking to buy a house in Scotland. Moreover, people care about technology on this site, so let’s talk about the tech.
At the very start, I found this requires a 360 camera. I tried stitching panoramas together from individual photographs, but that did not have good results. Then, once the images are converted into the right format, we need a panorama viewer. We settled upon Marzipano, which is a brilliant, as are a few other contenders. Marzipano also has a decent tour generation tool.
This is where the customization, polish, and value added began. For example, I wanted a clickable mini map, which would moreover show both your position and orientation. So I integrated Leaflet with the Marzipano tour, in both directions. I also added the ability to zoom into places such as cupboards, which is more appropriate than navigating full scene change.
Separately, I think there’s the open question of whether this could be commercialized. Can money be made from creating tours like this for other house sellers, as a service? Perhaps. Estate agency fees can be quite high. However, it would require some more up front work to the make the whole thing, end-to-end, a much faster process. For example, cross referencing the scenes together, and setting the orientation information, was quite time consuming.