Kori Covrigaru is a young entrepreneur, currently CEO of PlanOmatic, an online real estate marketing company providing interactive home tours. Kori grew up in Michigan, went to school and Western Michigan University, and currently lives in Colorado, enjoying the mountains in all seasons.

You remember Homestore, right? “Leverage the Power of the Red Spinning House”.

Over the last five years or so, 360-degree panoramic virtual tours have slowly decreased in popularity. This has happened for various reasons, but the one that sticks out to me the most is the increasing popularity of mobile web browsing, and the lack of support by mobile platforms for Flash. Yes, you can thank Steve Jobs for that one. Based on a study by StatCounter, as of November 2010, mobile web browsing makes up for approximately 4.02% of the total Internet traffic.

You may not find that number to be impressive, but take a look at the trend in 2010 alone.  This past January, mobile browsing was just 1.56% of web traffic. That’s a growth rate of 157.69% over less than a year, and trust me folks, that growth rate is only going to get higher, faster.

Thanks to Larry Lohrman’s blog, I recently came across some interesting technology that brings mobile browsing and panoramic virtual tours together. The team at PTgui has developed PTgui 9.0, a viewer that displays panoramic virtual tours at a remarkably high quality, both functionally and aesthetically. When viewing these panoramic virtual tours on an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad (any Apple iOS device), they use HTML5 to display and interact with the panoramic scene.  Try it for yourself. If you’re using an Apple iOS device, you will be viewing in HTML5.  On a desktop computer, the scene will be displayed using Adobe’s Flash. The video below is a demonstration I recorded of my interaction with PTgui’s panoramic scene on my iPhone 4.

As you can see, it runs very smoothly and looks pretty sexy. The fact that they shot the Louvre helps a little too J. This technology has the capability to change online real estate marketing in tremendous ways.

As of today, it’s been cutting edge for virtual tour providers to offer a mobile version of their tours.  Many have, but none (to the best of my knowledge) have found a way to incorporate panoramic scenes into their mobile tours directly in the browser.  I have seen tours that utilize Quicktime and YouTube videos, but the experience is not the same because Quicktime and YouTube don’t allow you to interact directly with the scene. Furthermore, having the entire presentation self-contained in the browser makes for a far superior user experience.

The PTgui viewer now opens the door for virtual tour companies to provide panoramic scene tours, while keeping the mobile presentation experience completely in tact and interactive. It will be fascinating to see how virtual tour providers incorporate and reintroduce this technology into their suite of services.  Will panoramic scenes make it back into the mainstream and be viewed as cutting edge once again? Have you seen any other HTML5 viewers that display panoramic scenes? Please share your thoughts on panoramic scenes, and if and why you have stopped using them to market your listings.

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A couple of years ago I postulated that video would eventually kill the virtual tour (see Inman Connect Highlights Real Estate 2.0) – and, for the most part, that seems to have happened. The seemingly ubiquitous (at the time) 360 spin-and-puke photo tour has largely been replaced these days by Ken Burns-like slide shows and full motion video walkthroughs.

But, I could have spoken too soon.

Yellowbird is a Dutch company (who, incidentally, win the most awesome URL award with www.yellowbirdsdonthavewingsbuttheyflytomakeyouexperiencea3dreality.com – perhaps kicking off a new trend?) which has just pioneered the 360 spin-and-puke, inside full motion video.

Yeah, it’s as crazy as it sounds…

Check it out.

Most definitely this has implications for real estate marketing. Two years from now, could this be the norm in online tours? Will we be seeing 3D scrollable Street View videos from Google on their Place Pages (see Google makes yet another big move into real estate territory) any time soon? It’s something the Swiss already seem to be working on (see The Swiss Give Us A Peek At 360-Degree VideoStreetView Maps)

In all seriousness however, I kind of like this. It puts me in control of the watching experience in my browser. Something I find natural with the lean-forward nature of the web. And I like the idea of being able to virtual “drive” down a street and see a home from my browser.

In the meantime however, while I’m waiting for all this to transpire, I think I have some mighty big URLs that I need to go and register.

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What is the matrix? by t-mix

Virtual tours are on the verge of becoming just that; more virtual.

Up until this point, they have been well, frankly, disapointing. Greater adoption of video by real estate marketers could help this situation in the short term (see Inman Connect Highlights Real Estate 2.0), but thankfully there is some cause for optimism in the long term as well.

Google’s Street View (see Google Maps Hits the Streets) is just the tip of the iceberg as more and more technologies are deployed to bring ground-level context to individual locations.

EveryScape is another company that hopes to “bridge the gap between the physical world and the virtual one”. It allow you to navigate a two-dimensional image as if it were real. Essentially, it’s a 360 virtual tour, with depth.

Playing around with their demo and it’s pretty easy to see that someone could build a pretty cool virtual tour product on top of this. The ability to create tours or let users “drive” manually is a pretty slick feature.

But that’s not even half as cool as what’s being cooked up in Redmond.

Context and quality have been the critical factors in undermining most web based virtual tours today. Figuring out where in what relationships exist between photos (which hallways link to which rooms etc.) is very hard to accomplish in the current web environment.

Photosynth is another emerging technology (based out of graduate research done at the University of Washington and now being incubated at Microsoft labs), which first came to light late last year.

Photosynth allows you to “stitch” together photos in 3D space and assign relationships between them. The effect is you can navigate through a series of 2D images and get a sense of how they relate to one another. It’s pretty amazing stuff – you can see a demo on the Microsoft Labs site.

The blog istartedsomething says:

imagine a real-estate house tour with Photosynth. It would be light years ahead of slide-shows or even more complicated Quicktime VR presentations.

Quality is far more difficult problem. The need for fast load times have, to date, necessitated low quality or low resolution images on the Internet – unfortunately, this does no justice to the presentation of real estate properties.

Another Microsoft project called Seadragon aims to make the resolution and corresponding size of image irrelevant, so that images can be browsed smoothly in any environment.

A presentation at the recent TED conference demonstrates these two technologies can work together. Check it out, it isn’t hard to imagine how these could be the next generation of virtual tours.

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A few weeks back I posted on using Windows Photo Story and YouTube and as a creative, easy way to create your own virtual tour for your listing presentations. A novel idea – or so I thought. But like so many other good ideas, I’ve found it has been usurped by a much more efficient method of accomplishing the same result.

One True Media is a site that aims to give its members a easy and effective way to create and share multimedia presentations on the Internet. It gives you the ability to upload and edit your images together into a brilliant animated montage or photo book without the need for yet another program to clutter your hard-drive.

Once you’ve uploaded your pictures to the site, you have the option of creating a montage or photo book with your images. To create a montage you choose the photos you wish to include, arrange them in a specified order, add animation and transitions and overlay a musical soundtrack (over 50 songs are provided on the site and you can also upload your own MP3s). This is all done through a Flash based interface that’s incredibly intuitive and easy to master. Creating a great looking presentation was truly a breeze using One True Media.

Best of all, once you’ve finished your masterpiece, One True Media gives you a number of online options to share it with others, either by e-mail or posting it to a blog through some generated HTML code. You can also order DVD copies or even hard cover books of your photos. Premium members can even download their creations to their video-enabled iPods.

Here’s the presentation I put together for this blog:

The virtual tour providers that are out there should be very worried about sites like this one. As it becomes easier and easier to create your own content, their services will be increasingly marginalized. One True Media just received $5 million in VC money which is hopefully going to push this site even further into the mainstream.

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