After researching a variety of tour software and even testing a couple, we chose to go with Theasys. It offered a large variety of customization and options. I also thought it was fairly easy to learn and build with compared to some others. You can check out our tour at
https://ths.li/tdsTRJ . With our tour I tried creating a great deal of interaction with our website, past magazine articles, collections, audio/video, and various social media links.
If you want to learn more about 360 tour options available, I would check out this pretty good video from Ben Claremont,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKkQQ0aHRSc . You may also want to consider looking at Panoskin and 3dvista. Panoskin allowed you to upload your tour to Google Streetview and looked very nice. 3dvista is the Cadillac of tour software, offering more features than I would probably know how to use. I liked both, but I thought the user interface of Theasys was easier to use for me.
https://www.panoskin.com/explore https://www.3dvista.com/en/samples Matterport is well known for their dollhouse effect and popular with the real estate industry. Personally I was not a large fan of it and it didn't work well for our needs. Matterport wants you to take all of your photos with their app onsite and then upload them to the cloud so that they can be processed into a tour. Problem is that I had already taken my photos over a period of time and from what I had heard wouldn't be able to manually upload them. Beyond the dollhouse effect I think Matterport looks rather bland; always the same interface and circle hotspots, very little customization. I hate how they always blur out the nadir at the bottom and the zenith at the top. My museum also did not like how you lose your tour if you quit paying them and the price goes up dramatically if you build more than 5 tours, Theasys didn't limit the number of tours and allows you to download your tour and host it yourself if you ever quit paying them.
If you don't plan to stitch together the photos from a DSLR, you may want to look for a high quality 360 camera. The Ricoh Theta Z1 or the SC2 on the budget end, are the best consumer cameras for tour photography. The Insta360 One R or X2 are decent cameras if you want to take photos and record videos. I built our tour using my old Theta S which looks ok, but 360 camera's have improved a fair bit in the last 5 years.
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Cody Cook
Interpretation Specialist
Kalamazoo Valley Museum
Kalamazoo MI
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-10-2021 04:23 PM
From: Lesley Marchessault
Subject: Seeking Virtual Exhibition Software Recommendations
Our museum has decided to begin offering virtual exhibitions, and I'm wondering if there are recommendations for companies that offer this software. We'd like to do walk-throughs of the exhibitions, but be able to include links to pertinent educational content and archives. Thank you!
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Lesley Marchessault
Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Provincetown MA
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