360 virtual tours vs 3D virtual tours
What’s the difference, and which type should you go with?
When people talk about virtual tours, they usually mean either a 360 tour or a 3D tour. What’s the difference though?
A 360 virtual tour is very similar to photo slideshows.
Only in this case, the slideshow is made up of 360 panoramas, and you can point out particular spots in the pano and tag them with additional info, like text, videos, images, or links to other websites.
A 3D virtual tour is made up of 360 panoramas as well.
But in addition to what 360 tours can offer, they also have 3D navigation and depth, which makes for a much more immersive experience.
Now that you’re familiar with both of these types, the question is:
Should you make 360 or 3D virtual tours?
To help you answer that question, let’s go through some important considerations:
1. What kind of experience are you going for?
Think about the people who are going to be viewing your tour. What kind of reaction do you want them to have?
Let’s imagine you’re part of an archaeological society, and you want to share sites with people from all over the world. Your goal is to delight and educate visitors, and encourage donations.
If you want to give your viewers an emotional experience, then a 3D virtual tour would be best.
For one thing, 3D tours are more immersive. They can make your visitors feel like they’re actually at the site, exploring every single inch of it, especially if they’re viewing your tour through VR headsets. And the more immersive an experience is, the more emotional it is, and the longer your viewers are going to remember it. That should translate to more donations too.
Your visitors will also be able to appreciate the dimensions of the site more in 3D. They can look up and see just how high the ceiling is, travel through the room and experience just how massive the space is, and get struck with that feeling of awe when they think of how tiny they are in comparison.
But maybe you don’t need to make your viewers feel emotions like that.
Maybe all you’re trying to do is stand out from the usual deluge of images and videos on the internet. If that’s the case, maybe a 360 virtual tour will work well enough for you.
2. How much spatial information do your viewers need?
Say you’re a cafe owner and you want to make a virtual tour, so you can add it to your website and attract more customers to your store.
Thinking about it from a potential customer’s point of view, does it really matter if they can see just how big or small your place is? Not really, right? It should be enough if your tour can convey your cafe’s theme and ambiance, which a 360 tour can definitely do.
But what if your cafe is also an event venue, and you regularly rent it out for business meetings or student events? Then the size and layout of your space becomes useful information for potential renters. They’ll need that to figure out if your cafe is big enough for the number of people they’re going to invite, and if the layout is suitable for the activities they’re planning to do. In that case, it might be better to make your virtual tour 3D instead.
3. Do you need to generate a 3D model or floorplan of your space?
Say you’re a property developer with a new condo project. Besides a virtual tour, you’d like to have a miniature 3D model of the building for display too.
In that case, you could save yourself a lot of time by making 3D virtual tours instead of 360 ones.
3D virtual tour platforms like our own Metareal Stage app can automatically create 3D models while you’re making your tours.
If you need a floor plan, you can generate those from your 360 panoramas too.
360 virtual tours don’t have this option at all. So if you decide to make 360 tours instead, you’ll need to build your 3D models and floor plans separately.
4. How much time and money are you willing to invest?
360 tours require the least amount of time and money to make. All you need to do is upload your photos, type in which rooms they belong to, and tag them with additional media. Depending on how big your tour is, it should only take you a few minutes or hours to create one.
In comparison, 3D tours need a bit more time or money to make.
With Metareal Stage, for example, you can make a 3D virtual tour at zero cost. But the software does have a learning curve. It takes some time to get familiar enough with the software to make your first 3D tour (though after that first try, you should be able to make your next tour much faster).
If you want to get your tour made faster though, you can ask our production team to build it for you instead. But then you’ll have to pay for the service, which does cost more than a 360 tour would. And the turnaround time is still about 48 hours.
So which type of virtual tour makes the most sense for your situation? Is it 3D or 360?
If you’ve decided to go with 3D tours, we recommend trying out Metareal Stage. With it you can make affordable and VR-Ready 3D virtual tours, and automatically generate floor plans and 3D models from your 360 panoramas.
But if you’ve decided to go with 360 virtual tours, or you’d like to look into other 3D virtual tour platforms, here’s a pretty good video summarizing the alternatives:
We hope you found this article helpful. If you have any additional tips for choosing between 360 and 3D virtual tours, make sure to leave them in the comments below so you can help your fellow virtual tour makers out.
Happy tour building!
