Virtual Tours

Here you can manage your virtual tour scenes. Scenes are the main entities in virtual tour contents. A scene means a stage that holds a background view and lets users to navigate and see its content. For instance, for creating a virtual tour for a building with 3 rooms, you can create 4 scenes - 3 scenes for showing contents in our 3 rooms, and 1 scene for showing the whole building and creating the ability of navigation to the rooms. The most important thing is every scene must have a graphical background (a simple jpg file for instance) before any further action. You can update scene titles and the order of their appearance. Every scene must have a title, which will be shown in the right click menu to navigate between scenes. If you don’t assign a specific name for a scene in the languages section, these titles also will be shown in the navigator menu. The order field defines the order of scenes in the right click menu and the navigator menu.

Scenes can have a “Panorama Viewer” that lets users see your panoramas. Add Panorama Viewer only to the scenes that you have panorama content on them. If you add Panorama Viewer to a scene, you can specify its location in the scene designer section. Panorama Viewer default size is 200x450 pixels that you can change by contacting your administrator.

Users can navigate between scenes with hits and the right click menu. Scenes can also have a “Navigator Menu” that lets users navigate between your scenes. Also, you can select its look by using the style dropdown list. If you add a Navigator Menu to a scene, you can specify its location in the scene designer section. Please remember that Navigator Menu is vertical menus that extend in height by adding new scenes.

Users can navigate between languages using the right click menu. Scenes can also have a “Language Selector Menu” that lets users navigate between the virtual tour’s languages without any server side action. Furthermore, you can select its look by using the style dropdown list. If you add a Language Selector Menu to a scene, you can specify its location in the scene designer section. Please have in mind that the navigator menu is the horizontal menu that extends in width by adding new languages.

Attention: please note that all the changes will take effect only after you save the changes by clicking in “Save changes”

Here you can manage the hits of your virtual tour scenes. You can simply select a scene that contains background and load it to stage. Then drag and drop scene, booth, information box and Panorama hits to the scene from the TOOLS panel and resize, move and rotate them; then you can specify their target and customize the way they look to visitors. You can customize them in 3 layers:

• CENTER ICON:

  by changing the first numeric stepper, you can find an icon that defines your subject better. The selected icon will be shown where you place your hit center shown with a little blue rectangle. Selecting 0 causes no icon shown in the center position of your hit.

• RECTANGLE:

  by changing the second numeric stepper you can assign a simple rectangle shown whenever the user puts his mouse pointer over this hit. Selecting 0 will cause no rectangle to be shown in your hit mouse over.

• BORDER:

  by changing the third numeric stepper, you can assign a simple border that is shown whenever the user puts his mouse pointer over this hit. Selecting 0 causes no border to be shown in your hit mouse over.

Furthermore, you can modify the location of the language selector , navigation menu and panorama viewer. Note that you can put panorama hits only on scenes that contain a panorama viewer.

Note: Changes do not apply to your scene until you save them, so always remember to save a scene before quitting this step.

Here you can manage Information boxes for your virtual tour. An information box is a mixture of all available data types for presenting something in virtual tour. Using an information box you can do a wide range of actions such as: showing a simple comment, opening a new URL in a new browser, showing a box of data and images, playing a sound, playing a video, playing a shockwave flash file, opening search popup for searching virtual tour content, opening contact form popup for letting user contact you and … You can create all the information boxes you need and manage their detail by clicking ‘manage details.' Finally, you can place hits in scenes and panoramas in the “Scene Designer” and “Panorama Designer” to target your information boxes.

Here you can define virtual booths for your virtual tour and manage them. Virtual booth is an independent content management module for presenting a business in your virtual tour. For example, for a shopping mall virtual tour, every store can be represented by a virtual booth. Every virtual booth is associated with a user that can independently manage its contents and looks using the “Virtual Booth Designer.” You can design some hits to virtual booths that you create here in “Scene Designer” and “Panorama Designer.” For managing virtual booth owners’ access to “Virtual Booth designer,” you can reset their password here. Moreover, you can make every virtual booth inactive or active according to it contents as a supervisor.

Here you can manage your virtual tour panoramas. Panorama in this system is a flat landscape image that shows a horizontal view from a specific location. Panorama can fully cover a 360-degree view from a point or just cover a part of the horizontal view. This section contains two main parts: Panorama Manager and Panorama Designer.

• In Panorama Manager you can simply create, modify and delete panoramas of your virtual tour.

• In Panorama Designer you can manage hits in your panorama just like Scene Designer.

Note: You cannot use files like Quick time panoramas as panorama in this system; you must have a flat image (jpeg, gif or other known simple image types) for creating panorama. All simple digital cameras provide options to create such images and you can use tools like “Adobe Photoshop (File->Automate->photomerge),” “Panorama Maker,” panorama factory or ... to merge little images and create horizontal images.

Note: For the best experience for your visitors, your panoramas must not be bigger than 110 percent in height from your panorama viewer of 200 pixels height by default. Besides you can change the size of your panorama viewer by contacting administrator.

Here you can assign a title for every Scene, Booth, Information Box and Panorama in all your virtual tour languages. These titles will be shown as a comment when user put mouse over hot spots. If you don’t enter a title in a specific language for an item, the main title will be shown when the user point to them. If you wish no comment showed to user in a specific language simply place -1 for its title or place your title inside [].

There is lots of ways for you to customize your virtual tour. You can change its size, color, background image and many others. Lots of these properties gathered in this tab:

Resources Every virtual tour is limited in using resources such as number of scenes, virtual booths and panoramas. In this table, you can find how much of the resources are used by your virtual tour and how much you could extend it. In addition, every virtual tour has limitations in using host space. Virtual Tour Manager can monitor host space used by every virtual booth outside the “virtual tour designer panel.” If you need some resources more, you can contact your administrator.

Languages Every virtual tour could be presented in an unlimited number of languages. Here is a list of available languages for your virtual tour specified for you by your administrator. The first language on the list is your virtual tour’s default language and your virtual tour content is shown in the first language by default. Please note that you can change the default language by a little change in your virtual tour URL/HTML and make it show contents in other languages from the list (see “URL/HTML Generator” in the virtual tour administration home page). You could also extend the languages of your virtual tour and change their order by contacting your administrator.

Background Color Every virtual tour has a background color which is black by default. Background color is filled everywhere in your virtual tour -- especially if you don’t specify an html tile -- and a background. You could simply change your background and see its effect by clicking Preview.

Size You can specify your virtual tour width and height in pixels. For best result all the scenes should have the same size with virtual tour size. If visitors see your virtual tour in a free-size browser, bounding space will be filled with background color or html tile. In URL Manager (virtual tour administration main page), you could find a simple script that opens a fixed-size browser window in a specified size.

Background And Introduction Animation You can simply make a background and intro for your virtual tour. The background file always seen during loading scenes progress. If you use images with transparency (such as GIF or PNG) or SWF (shock wave flash) files as scene background, and they have some transparent areas, this background file will be seen in transparent areas. This file only downloads to the client system once. This file could be an SWF (Flash file) either and it will be played before viewing your first scene and act like an intro. If you use SWF files, you must note that:

• Simply place a stop actionscript command in the last frame to make it work correctly and not repeat.
• The last frame of your intro will act like a background to your scenes.
• The system does not involve in intro loading progress and you can make some custom loading progress or skip intro button for it.

Title Your virtual tour has a title. This title will be shown in the browser header and while loading content. Please note that you can not use special characters like #, %, ”, ’, and & in your virtual tour title.

Contact Email There is a simple contact form for every virtual tour that users can access to it by the right click menu or “information boxes” that assigned to open the contact form. If you enter a valid email address here, filled forms by visitors will be forwarded in that email address. If you want the contact form not to be shown in the right click menu, you can just leave the contact email empty.

Description And Keywords for Search Engines Both description and keyword are not shown to your visitors. They are merely for helping search engines to find out the subject of your virtual tour. You can place a brief description of your virtual tour content in the description field and some keywords that define your virtual tour subject and main topics as a comma separated text in keyword field. Please note that you can’t use special characters like #, %, ”, ’, & , etc in these fields.

Default Loading Policy People that attempt to visit your virtual tour will come from a wide range of internet connections, so it is important for an author how long a user should wait to visit his content. Actually, you must optimize the size of files like scene backgrounds and virtual tour backgrounds for better results. Here you have an option to decide how and when your virtual tour resources download to your visitor’s client. If you choose “dial up” loading policy, every scene content loads only when user selects it; but in “DSL” loading policy, when a scene is loaded by the user, all the scenes that has a reference in the loaded scene start to load and a little loading progress bar shows the user percentage of contents loaded from its content. By this, the entire user’s option starts to preload and this makes user’s navigation faster and less interrupted by loading progresses. Please note that you don’t have to decide here for all visitors; you can simply create two different URLs for dial up users and broad band users using “URL Generator” (see virtual tour administration main page) and let the users choose the matter. Your selection applies only when you do not choose a policy for loading in URL.