As I’ve been given the responsibility of uploading most of everyones’ work and the panoramas to the platform of choice, I thought it seemed relevant to note why we picked it, and what features it offers. As I’ve mentioned before YouVisit offers native VR support for VR tech such as the Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard which I think is really neat and should make our project pop. It has a very simple graphical interface (although it does sometimes lack intuition, as we had to email their support team regarding file sizes, ratios etc.) and for the mot part it works well.

It took some fiddling with the panoramas though, to get them to work properly. First I tried stretched the image to fit into the ratio specified by YouVisit for panoramas (6000×3000) which didn’t work, then I tried cropped them to fit, which obviously didn’t work since then the panoramas were not complete, finally I realised that since YouVisit automatically stretches the images into a photosphere (something they also did not specify), the image must be kept at it’s normal height and simply scaled down to fit into the 6000×3000 canvas in photoshop. This means that in YouVisit the panoramas are essentially letter boxed, but for the most part this isn’t too detrimental to the experience, and if you zoom into the image, it can almost entirely hide the black borders.

I feel like this was a good choice as this platform is well suited to modern technology, specifically VR technology, and it’s a clean enough interface that it can be well presented to an audience, something terribly lacking in other virtual tour platforms. I am also compressing all of the images so I don’t have to wait another 8 hours to upload all of the stills material to their website which can, at times, be a bit weird with uploading and processing images. I ma yet to notice any degradation in quality of the images because of this.