Hello

I'm quite new to all this and am still trying to get my experience up, which is why I asked my local medieval castle (I know the guy who runs it) if I could just do a tour of the bar and outside terrace for practice, and if he wanted them for his web site he could have them. Well, he had never seen a 360 pano before and when I went back to show him the results he nearly fell off his chair! I then went off and put the two panos into TW, set them to music, added a couple of hotspots and showed him this.

He's now very keen for me to produce a full on tour of the whole castle (chateau), with voice over commentary etc, to sell in the shop. Great...except it's a bit like running before I can crawl if you know what I mean. Our next meeting will be to discuss prices. I was hoping for any advice on the following please:

1. Do you think that producing a sellable CD-ROM like this is actually possible, I imagine it is. Has anyone done something similar?

2. The guy has mentioned the idea just in very general conversation that he might sell it for around 11 or 12 Euros (8 or 9 pounds, er...16 USD?) and that I could get say 5 Euros for each one sold. Does that sound like a good way to go do you think? If so would you charge a reduced fee for producing the tour in the first place? He seems to think that such a CD would sell, not thousands of course, but perhaps 10 or 20 a week in high season.

3. I have suggested that I myself produce the CD jacket and burn and print the CD's as required. It's not a huge commercial enterprise, in fact the shop is quite rustic so I think that the quality of design and printing I could acheive myself would be good enough. I could then sell them to the castle guy for a price, which then means I don't have to trust him to tell me how many he has actually sold!What do you think?

4. I think the whole tour might consist of about 7 panos. I would want to design a TW skin for the job, there would be commentary, plus still photos I guess. It could take me quite some time to put it all together, especially with my limited experience to date. But then it's that old problem isn't it, I don't want to charge too much (well I do actually ). Also, I don't think he can afford much either, it's quite a small enterprise. I'm thinking around max I can charge might be 500 Euros (350 pounds), then a cut of the sales. Comments?

Well, I think I would be pushing my luck to expect you guys to reply to any more questions at one time, so I'll leave it there for the moment. Please know that any info, ideas, opinions you might have will be gratefully received.

Thanks for your time
Glenn

Thankyou Thomas, lots of good information, which I will read carefully. I may be asking for some clarifications if you don't mind, once I have read through it a bit better.

Thanks very much
Glenn

Wow, thanks Thomas, your very kind to go to so much trouble. It seems, after looking at your info that I need to think about this project very carefully. But at the same time I think I need to keep it fairly simple to start with. So just produce the tour for Windows use (not Mac, not Linux) because we're talking very small scale here! It won't be worth the extra work to cover the minority Operating Systems.

I will need to look into having a Java install file on the CD, a good idea I'm sure, but how to implement it I wonder?

I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by what you said here: "Otherwise there is Virtual Tour from Easypano, but it would be fine to merge these two applications and to integrate also Quicktime in fullscreen." Could you explain please?

I have not yet produced my own TW skin (I haven't even looked at the TW Help file but I'll ask here now anyway), can a skin be any size? Can the viewer window in the skin be any size too? I think for this project the viewer will need to be large. Is it quite straight forward to create a skin using photoshop and/or Illustrator?

As for your latest reply Thomas, I will take a carefull look at what you have said and have a look at the FSP viewer and the other software you have mentioned. I thousand thanks again.

best regards
Glenn

Thomas

In my last post I said I did not understand what you meant by "Otherwise there is Virtual Tour from Easypano, but it would be fine to merge these two applications and to integrate also Quicktime in fullscreen."  Well I do now!! I see that Virtual Tour exe from Easypano is probably the solution I am looking for. If I understand correctly this is the application for creating stand alone executable tours, whereas TW is just intended for web based execution. Does this sound right to you? Looks like I may need to spend another $200 on Virtual Tour exe.

Glenn

Thankyou very much for your comments, it's great information and it won't go to waste!

Markus: I like your tour very much. I shall email you off forum to accept your vey kind offer.

Phoenix: Thanks for your time on this topic. Good info (I will email you off forum to accept your kind offer of help). Can I ask a couple of questions that come to mind having read your reply? Can I make a TW skin as big as I like? Maybe though, in light of your comment about keeping the viewer size down to 400x300, if the skin was made too big the viewer could look silly?

I had a quick read of Fulvios page earlier today but it doesn't support background commentary as far as I can tell. Could I incorporate the FSP viewer in to a TW skin?

The still photos idea is a good tip. I guess your suggesting good size thumbnails that can be enlarged by clicking on them?

Good tip about deciding on the text as one of the later steps. One text related question. If I want a TW hotspot to launch a window containing some text, for example clicking on an antique chair would display some text info about the chair. Can this be done? I have looked in TW and can only think that I might have to use a URL link to achieve this. Is there a better way?

Regarding what you say about VT.exe, it sounds like it isn't what I need. Can it do background commentary?

Thanks all very much for taking the time out to help me ( you need to get out more!).

Best regards
Glenn

Hi Glenn,

Skins... sure u can make them as large as u want. But as with websites... don't forget that around 45% of users still only have 800x600 resolution. This is the main reason I still tell my customers why they should build websites in this size.

FSP... hhmm... TW is designed to work as is. It has it's own integrated viewer. I'm not enough of a programmer to know the answer here. Maybe Fulvio should have a chat with the Easypano guys to see if compatability is doable.

Viewer size... 400x300 is the max recommended viewer size with TW. Many on this forum have done otherwise... however, I've experienced problems on some clients PCs when the image is to large. This is when QuickTime comes to it's own. What you can always offer is a TW tour with additional QuickTime Full screen images. These can be linked to via url. However... this will require a bit of QT knowledge and practice as well as good image quality.

Still Photos... TW allows you tro add stills in ur tour as well as panos http://www.wohnhauscelle.de is an example of a site that uses a virtual tour with photos as well. You can add hotspots to the pano to link to a photo so that you may highlight a certain element. (Don't forget that TW has the ability to allow thumbnails for panos and stills as an addittional element for user functionality.

Text... TW allows you to add text to any pano/still image which will be seen in a text box. http://www.wbg-celle.de and click on the blue box with "virtueller Rundgang Neubaugebiet Hugoweg"... here you'll see text in action.

Glenn... I highly recommend you try and make a few tours with TW and add all the various elements that TW has on offer to see what they do... you'll find that many of your uestions will be answered by trying it out.