Support, Helpful Information about our solutions, and FAQs.

What are Virtual 360 Tours & Visual Web Casts?

Aughts' Virtual Reality 360° Tours (VR360 & VT360) are immersive, interactive panoramic 360° (and full spherical 360°x360°) images. They are used for a number of commerical, government and institutional purposes especially with hospitality, property management, and tourism.

We digitally photograph and encode to allow you and your clients to be immersed in any location, to "step in, out and look about" real places. You can apply this to conference or business facilities, real estate amenities, travel destinations, inside/outside a vehicle, concert halls or sports facilities, TV studios or movie sets, or any open exterior space such as landmarks.

Aughts also can take objects, works of art or retail products, and map them into 3D virtual reality boxes for customers to "zoom in, feel, turn, and try" remotely.

Aughts integrates hotlinks to webcast videos, flash, high resolution images, narration, music, hyper links to websites to your virtual 360° tours. We can easily map and tie together all these 360° virtual tours to provide you a seamless virtual experience your clients will be able to enjoy from anywhere in the world.

How can we use a Virtual Tour to promote our property?
Through stunning full 360º panoramic photography and web digital videography, conference organizers, wedding/event planners, buyers, and your prospective guests/clients will be able to appreciate the amenities and ambience of your unique hotel, resort, facility and/or property. From the exterior view they are just a click away from the lobby, from there to the pool, guest suites, exercise room - as many areas as you wish may be included in your Virtual Tour. In addition we add Visual Tours (web casts, we stream videos online) of your executive manager's welcome message, interviews with your talented staff, and testimonials from your satistifed customers.

Why create a media-rich website?

• Travel is now the #1 online purchase by consumers (Source: Gomez)
• Virtual tours for property listings are no longer a novelty, but an industry standard (Source: Realtor Magazine, realtormag.com)
  
• 15% of all hotel bookings are made online, but 65% of bookings are researched online (Source: Gomez)
• Consumers expect rich media from hotels and resorts
• A web site is an online brochure, use all the tools available to sell your hotels
• Be better than the competition, make your site interactive, user-friendly and informative

• To provide information to your customer beyond merely text and one or two still photos (A photograph is worth a thousand words, a virtual tour is worth a thousand photographs, and an Aughts virtual & visual tour is worth millions.)
• Opens the hotel doors to the online public in a virtual reality environment (Showcase key features of the hotel and local destinations)
• People like to take virtual tours, it gives them the confidence to make a booking either online or by telephone
• Could be persuasive in getting customers to upgrade rooms if they can see how much more they get for their money
• Virtual tours are interactive, the future of the web is interactive: viewers can select which images they would like to view and navigate as they choose. Meeting planners may view just the meeting rooms and guest rooms, Wedding planners may view just the Ballroom and public areas
• Increases site stickiness: allows viewers time to finalise their decision to make a reservation (20+ min average visit vs. 2-3 minutes without a tour)
• Increase bookings (Carlson’s 135 Virtual Tours record an average increase in online bookings of more than 136% after adding an online tour) Source: Carlson.com
• CD-ROM sales tool for Sales & Marketing departments: provide to major clients, sales staff for laptop and digital projection presentations
• Keep up with the competition (soon every hotel group & management company will offer virtual tours)

• Completely immersive 360° X 360° degree views
• Don't be limited to just one viewer, but use what best fits your business and client needs.
• Fast download (3 seconds on broadband, 20 seconds on 56k)
• No hard-to-find plug-in needed (java based images with navigation toolbar)
• Special compression allows small file size with high resolution
• Images can be linked together with hot spots, text boxes and background music
• E-mailable images

• Hotels with a virtual tour achieved 135% increase in online revenue amounting to $7,200 per hotel per month over those without a virtual tour (source: Radisson.com)
• Return on investment (per hotel) = less than 4 weeks (source: Radisson.com)
• Average 2,000 views per month (All hotels)
• Radisson Aruba = Average 16,000 views per month (Resort Hotel)
• Radisson Lexington New York = Average 9,000 views per month (Major City Hotel)
• Radisson Edwardian Vanderbilt Hotel = Average 3,000 views per month (Major City Hotel)
• Radisson Adelaide, Australia = Average 1,400 views per month (Small City Hotel)
• 4% conversion rate = bookings made through the virtual tour page only (does not account for viewers who go to reservations page online or pick up telephone to make a voice booking after viewing the virtual tour) (Source: Radisson.com)
• Webcasts can leverage your visual presence online.
• Webcasts combined with 360 tours, allows you to have a complete immersive and interactive experience.
• Aughts is the only total solutions provider that allows the seamless integration of online digital videos, stream media, virtual 360 tours.
• Aughts dynamically and automatically provides you with real time statistics and feedback.
• Aughts solutions integrates with your current website and online investments.
• We allow you to refine your existing global marketing strategy and provides cost-cutting through business process improvements.

• Offices around the world (USA, Canada, UK, EU, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, Philippines, Australia, Russia)
• Experience (we are the only vendor to supply both public governments and private sector webcasts to major Fortune 500 companies.)
• We've served the US Congress, Senate, Library of Congress, World Bank, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, RealNetworks, realtors, restaurants, hotels, resorts, etc.
• Customer satisfaction and references (from many top tier businesses, realtors, home builders, government & management companies)
• Very High quality, Creativity & Professionalism (We never use network photographers, only Aughts professionals)
• One stop shop (photography, travel, stitching, hosting, tracking, CD-ROM, future additional images, after sales support, we take care of everything)
• 100% client satisfaction: images previewed onsite, any necessary re-shoots are free and completed immediately
• We have no bias towards any technology, we pick what's best for your business.
• Aughts publishes and hosts your virtual tour in multiple formats to suit all your clients, from Quicktime VR, iPix, IBM HotMedia, ISeeMedia MGI Java player, Microsoft, Macromedia flash, emailable files, etc.
• Low price

• 20 Shot Virtual Tour (additional images above 10 are $99 each), double the quantity for half the price of most vendors
• One Web cast Visual Tour included (additional online videos are $495 each).
• Lifetime web hosting and virtual tour page design
• (Optional $795) Promotional CD-ROM brochure with virtual tour, music, information text, web and e-mail links, and full reproduction rights
• Email format Images and Videos on CD
• Link to your hotel/business web site
• Professional Photographer/Videographer for up to two full days or more
• All travel costs included
• After sales service & support

Freedom & Versatility

Other vendors tie you up with proprierty software with hidden licensing fees; however, Aughts uses free, open source and a vast array of best-of-breed business solutions to bring you true return-on-investment and genuine business process improvements. Aughts is one of the only companies to allow you to view virtual 360 tours on wireless, mobile computers such as Pocket PC, Palm Pilots, Xybernaut, Fujitsu/Microsoft Tablets, etc.

Tips for better viewing:

1 - The recommended Web browser is Internet Explorer 5 for both Mac and PC.

2 - Set your monitor resolution to 1024x768 at millions or thousands of colors.

3 - Free up memory by quiting applications you are not using, except your Web browser.

4 - For webcasts, you'll need to download the latest free RealOne Player, Windows Media Player, or Apple Quicktime Player

5 - For premium web tours with fully immersive interaction, we recommend IBM HotMedia, IBM VideoCharger, iPIX or ISeeMedia MGI Java.

Vitual Tour images are larger and require more computer memory to function. For Internet viewing, a broadband connection is recommended.

Terms and Definitions

Panoramic VR is a general term we use to describe 360° panoramic images that are created to be interactively viewed. Using different types of viewers, (Java, and QuickTime) they all work to deliver an undistorted rectilinear image in a viewing window.

VR comes from the phrase “Virtual Reality”. VR360 images are viewed electronically with computers and will give the visitor a greater sense of being virtually there, conveying much far information about an environment and its relationships with its contents. A set of VR360 constitutes a VT360 (Virtual Tour).

• Spherical VR and Cubic VR images captures the full spherical environment: 360 degrees horizontally and 180 degrees vertically, (some of the marketing literature will say 360° x 360°). This is our state of the art, preferred media type.

• Cylindrical VR is a vertically limited view Panoramic VR image. It does not see fully above and below. The vertical field of view (vfov) is typically 120 degrees or less. This is suitable for scenes such as landscapes where the sky and ground may not be important.

For web sites, we generally optimize the VR file sizes to 200-300kb for broadband Internet delivery.

• High Definition VR are higher resolution panoramic images with optimized file sizes of 800k or larger. This allows greater degree of zooming for inspection of scene detail and for full screen presentations.


We author our Virtual Tours for both Java VR (IBM/MGI), RealOne 3D/SMIL and/or QuickTime VR delivery:

Java VR? (IBM/MGI)
Java™ is popular computer language (http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/J/Java.html) used to give web pages more functionality (like a plug-in does). Modern Web browsers like Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape Navigator 5/AOL 6 are Java friendly and should automatically play back Java delivered content without needing a plug-in.

We support many Java applet viewers: the IBM Hotmedia, MGI ISeeMedia Java viewer, iPIX Java viewer and PTViewer.

The iPIX Java Viewer is widely used on web sites for the tourism and hospitality industry. The iPIX brand name is recognized worldwide. Learn more about using the IPIX Viewer here: http://www.ipix.com/products/support/posting/postimages.shtml
We can also author in this player as well for a slightly higher fee.

PTViewer is an excellent highly scriptable Java applet that plays back on almost any computer (Win, Mac, Lynix, Unix, whatever). You can learn more about PTViewer here: http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/PTVJ/doc.html
It is also capable of handling QuickTime VR and CubicVR mov files.

RealNetworks 3D & SMIL?
RealNetworks uses open source 3D Open GL, which is the world de facto standard for open source solution for 3D modeling used by established Special Effects studios. This technology is applied to web based viewers using a integrated interfaces called Synchronized Multimedia Interface Language (SMIL), a subset of a non-proprietary, international data sharing paradigm called extendible markup language (XML). While most new Windows XP and Linux boxes have this build it, you may need to download the newest RealOne Player with 3D/SMIL plugins at http://www.real.com/devzone - excellent at merging both streaming rich media and dynamic databases.

QuickTime VR?
It is a part of QuickTime™ which is a high performance multi-media technology from Apple Computer for playing all sorts of digital media files including 360 VT images on your Mac and PC. A Mac computer will already have QuickTime installed while a PC computer may need to have this additional software installed.

QuickTime Plug-In?
It is additional software like a RealPlayer™ or Flash™ plug-in for your Web Browser that extends its capabilities to view web pages that contain rich media files like QuickTime VR Images. The QT plug-in comes with the basic installation of the QuickTime software. The current version is QuickTime 5 and has support for Cubic VR images. The basic installation is free and includes the QT Plug-In: http://apple.com/quicktime/download.



Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Should I choose QuickTime or Java for my web site?
Pick Java VR if you have to choose the single largest and most available Internet delivery solution for your web site audience. Java must be enabled on the client's computer and the playback is more responsive on faster computers with more memory.

Choose QuickTimeVR or MGI Java if you can control the hardware and/or software used to view your virtual tour like a company network , kiosk installation, CD-ROM or PowerPoint™ presentation.

QuickTime™ will easily handle larger High Definition-high resolution files much better than Java as well as streaming sound and video. A Mac computer will already have QuickTime installed while a PC computer may need to have this additional software installed.

You can offer to display both and give the visitor a choice: Java VR for the widest audience, QuickTime VR for targeted higher performance such as full screen presentation of High definition VR.


How soon after you take the pictures can I see the images?
Normally 24-72 hours after we leave your location. We will host your new VR360 images or VT360 package in our client review area of our aughts.com web site so you can see them as fast as we can get them up on the Web.


I don't have a web site. Can I still use VR360 Images?
Certainly. We can host your virtual tour or set up a new web site for you. If you don't need a web site, VR360 images can work with most software capable of playing QuickTime™. This means you can integrate 360VR images into presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint™ or MacroMedia Director™ for a CD-ROM project.


I do have a web site. How do I put these images on it?
When you review your VR360 images or VT360 package in your client review area of our web site you will also have the underlying client-side html code to integrate them into your own web site. Your Web designer can copy and transfer this code to your web site. If you need assistance in how this works we are here to help you also.


Our Basic Virtual Tour package is an economical way to add this exciting technology to your organization's web site. For tour package pricing, visit our Solutions Page