Transcript | iGUIDE Webinar: User Panoramas | Video courtesy of iGUIDE YouTube Channel | 26 September 2021

Transcript | iGUIDE Webinar: User Panoramas (Video above)

User panoramas. I'm going to describe what a user panorama is. Then I'll just show you one. I'm going to turn off my screen share for a second. I'll load up a different thing. I'll show you guys an example of a user panorama. I hope you guys can see this. It's an image of a city. It's an aerial image.

A user panorama refers to any 360 degree image taken by any camera, mostly not the iodide camera, usually a separate camera, but it can be iodide cameras as well, what you want to put into an eye guide for reasons which we'll get to. On screen right now, you should see an aerial image of a city. You can see it's distorted. It's like a stretched out weird rectangle.

The reason that it's distorted is that this is what's known as an echo rectangular, spherical image. When taken and loaded into a viewer, which I'll actually I could do that right now, now that I think about it. When loaded into a viewer, it should, in theory, if it looks up, turning to a 360 that you can, like you can navigate, you can move up and down and left and right, just like you would with an iodide. See if this works.

There's an update. Let me just fix my screen sharing and you can see my 360. Just to clarify, the image itself they're just JPEGS, nothing fancy here, no raw images or whatever. It doesn't matter, it's just a JPEG, but they're like that stretched out. The actual aspect ratio is one by two. It'll be 10,000 by 5000 pixels or something like that.

But essentially, it's a stretched out at the bottom and stretch out at the top image. That can then be that switch but stretched into a sphere. Let me show you what it looks like as a sphere. It we'll stop the share and start it again. I think this is the one. I hope you guys can see this. what I've got here is I've got the same image, but now I've put it in the Ricoh Theta viewer and it's like the bottom and the top arc stretch team are there.

They're turned into their proper whatever it's called spherical representation. A user panorama can be from, like I said, any camera. A Ricoh Theta an insta360 1x, I don't know, Bill pro hero, whatever their 360 cameras called, even one of the really fancy ones that's got like 20 lenses on it. It's a giant basketball or whatever.

We went to a trade show a few years ago and they had a lot of, I want to say prototypes, but I guess they may be wearing productions hard to say, of spherical cameras because VR was going to be the next big thing. They were like, Oh, we need cameras to capture VR. There's still some around, I'm sure, but you know, they'd have 25 lenses all around this big sphere and it costs like $14,000.

They'd have like a cylinder and it has cameras around it. Most people don't use the stuff. It's too expensive. I mean, if you have that, go for it. But a typical panorama and not from the egg camera's going to come from something like pick up Ricoh Theta, two lens camera that sort of snaps one, 360 and ago, all of those cameras make that image that I showed you earlier, the equirectangular image.
What they do to get it varies. But typically they're going to take the images, one from each lens. They're going to stretch those out. We're going to stitch them together and I'm going to turn it into that rectangle image. Then that image later can then be turned into a navigable 360.

The reason that I keep harping on that one by two aspect ratio is that you need to have your images in that format in order to load them into stitch/. If I were to describe this whole webinar in one sentence, it would be like, what's it about, about describing user PAN-OS and what they're good for and then showing you how to load them and stitch.

I mean, that's all there is to it. Then what you want to do with that, I'll give you some ideas, but it's totally up to you. Now you guys know what that is. It wasn't very long description. You might want to know why they're important, just in general before I give you a demo. The reason they're important is that they open up the eye guide to any type of 360 degree content that you can create.

That's going to vary. It's going to be all over the place most of the time and what led to it being there this ability was Ariel panoramas. I don't have a drone. I'm not an expert, but I will describe the process as best I can so that you know how this works. But in order to get an aerial panorama, you take your drone.

Don't judge me is what I'm saying, you take your drone, fly up in the air, you set it to like if you have a DG, I don't set it to like sphere mode or whatever and you push a button and it takes a series of images, how many, I don't know, 20 or 30 in all directions. Then the software either on your phone or maybe you later and post-processing, I can't recall, is going to stitch all those images into kind of like what you see on screen here.

A 360 degree image that you can navigate where you can look up and down. But that's up in the sky. Super cool. That is amazing because what that does is that gives the eye guide something that a lot of other tourists can't have. You can't do that with a Matterport to refer example that I know that could be run. Their stuff changes all the time, but it gives the property or the listing, I should say, contexts.

When the tour is a regular, will say residential house, you almost always start inside the house. It's really hard to know what the outside of that house is like without taking your camera and shooting tons of panoramas around the neighborhood, which is a little bit unrealistic. You could certainly do it. There's nothing stopping you.

But for privacy reasons, most people don't really do that. Sometimes they'll do one or two out front, maybe one or two outback. That I would say just from my experience, that's probably the most common way people use the camera outside to a couple of couple of back. Which is great, but that still doesn't really give you a whole lot of information, shows you what the outside of the house looks like, but you're going to get that from the still photo anyway.

Aerial panorama, super cool because it really allows you to get that bird's eye view looked down. In some ways it's better than something like a site plan. Because if you think about it, the floor plan is a bird's eye view, but it doesn't show you anything outside of the property, or at least not much. You might get a deck or a patio drawn in by the graphic, but really that's about it.

Being able to see from an aerial perspective is, I think amazing. I really like it when I see it, I'll list it.. That's super cool. That really opens up the tour to having just a lot more functionality on that I think people really like. The other reason it's important is that this opens up the potential for creativity on your part. You can put whatever 360s and you want. I'm going to give you some suggestions for some weird stuff you can do. I mean, sky's the limit. If you can think of something that's more clever than one I can think of, go for it and please share it with me. I will credit you. I'll give you an official credit.

I don't know where that goes, but some are cool. I'll give you a few, a few uses. Ariel panoramas that we've talked about that take a drought and fly up in the air. He shoots and images. Turning to 360 put that in and eye guide. Now, one of the panoramas on the eye guide, it's going to have the ability to look down at House. Awesome.

But if you have a 360 degree camera of some sort, you could do all sorts of wacky stuff. Let's suppose you don't have a drone, that's too expensive for you. You can take a 360 camera and you can put on a pole. You can get like a ladder shot repulsion. I don't really know if people still do that pull photography, but I mean, 360 cameras are tiny.

They're so small so you can put it on a pole and put away there and get an approximation without having an aerial photograph, without having to fly your drone and maybe get arrested for not getting the proper permissions. That's cool.

You can also put the cam, put a smaller 360 camera in places. You wouldn't want to put an eye guide cameras. GoPro is a good example. Let's suppose you have a waterproof enclosure for your 360 camera. They throw it in the pool to do a half underwater Thy. That would be killer actually, please, please can someone do that? That would be absolutely amazing.

I mean, those are some weirder ideas. You can put the camera into small spaces. For example, if you really wanted a shot on top of a cupboard or maybe on a countertop, you can do that with PLANIX anyway. It's not a big deal. But that's another cool thing you can do with it. You can put it in a weird spots, in a closet or in spaces you wouldn't want to put the camera for some reason.

Then you can also take images and put them after the fact if they're not part of the property. This is an interesting idea that I"ll give you. It's cool. Let's suppose, and you can just use the iGUIDE camera for this as well, by the way. It might not be super obvious, but if you take the PLANIX camera, for example, and this really just works with PLANIX more than IMS-5, in case you use IMS-5.

But PLANIX, it's going to shoot everyone. It has a Ricoh Theta camera on top, and you can take those images and you can just insert those as user panoramas. Even though I said usually use a separate camera, you don't have to because I got camera. If you put your iGUIDE camera on pull, you're on your own. I didn't suggest that.

Either way. I'll give you the last suggestion before I give you the demo and show you what we're talking about. In theory, you could build and you could capture data in a condo building that has amenities and that data has value from multiple shoots. What I mean by that is you go to the building, you're shooting unit 1a. You shoot the pool and the weight room and the movie room or whatever party room.

You have those panoramas and you have that data, and then when you go back to the building six months later to shoot unit 3c. Well, if you've already shot the amenities, it didn't change, so why would you go shoot them again? Just take the panoramas you shot the first time, insert them as user panoramas. Bob's your uncle at the scene and you didn't have to go shoot. It save some time.

That's awesome. That's one thing. Another thing that's similar is that sometimes people will ask for photos that are outside of the property in some way, like maybe down the street, show park. [inaudible 00:11:43], show that our downtown that's two minutes away, and those have value for multiple properties as well. If you're in a residential areas, maybe single or two-story attached homes, but there's a nice little downtown park area.

You can shoot that, an then every time you shoot a property in that area, you could just add in the downtown like almost a POI, point of interest floor on the iGUIDE for all of those properties without doing any extra work. If you really wanted to, you could charge for that as well, and you could just do the pictures once and then charge for every single time you do a property, which is quite cool. User panoramas are just to sum it all up.

User panoramas are 360 degree data, like an image that you can take, now move this around again for visual interests. You can put in an iGUIDE and it can be any image you want. They need to be in that format though, that equirectangular is greater than 360 degree rectangle thing I mentioned, and that can sometimes be the biggest challenge is getting it in that format when you have a drone. But the uses are many.

Typically, Ariel ones are great, but you can use it for anything you want. It's good for stuff at the iGUIDE camera, you wouldn't typically use it for. That's a lot of talking. I'm going to give you a demo now and show you how this works. Turn that off. I hope you guys can see this. This is a property I shot ages ago. It's a beautiful landscaping. There's my car. Well, I've got this property.

Now let's pretend for a moment that my wife let me buy a drone and then I took it with me and I flew it up in the sky and I shot an aerial panorama. I'm going to and I want to add that to this property. What I would do, I hope you guys can see this, I right-click on the floor in stitch. I've loaded the property in the stitch, just skip that part. Then once it's loaded up, I'm going to do whatever normal stuff I do in stitch.

You don't skip anything, you'll move things around your edit Images or whatever. But then I think to myself, okay, now is when I want to add my user panoramas, so I'm going to right-click on the floor. I want to add it too. I'm going to choose "Add user pano". Then I'm going to find my image if I can. I don't know if you guys can see this, but this is a fairly big JPEG, 17 megabytes. It's cool.

I hope you guys can see this. Now in stitch, I've got all my normal panoramas and there are a little folders with all the numbers. Then the last one says, user pano and it is the city. If I click on the little preview, it might take a second to kick in. Look, now I'm looking at the city. It's going to look a little distorted because this is just a preview. It just doesn't generate a forest for you to make it faster.

But yeah, so now when someone goes to the tour, they're going to see a dot that represents this that they can click on. Now here's the trick, especially with aerials. When I added it, it put the dot here. That might not be a good place to put it. Where is the front of the house here, I have no clue.

Here's the front of house. If you didn't know this in stitch, you can figure out what it is you're looking at by selecting a panorama, either by clicking on the folder or just hovering your mouse over and tapping the space bar and then moving your mouse cursor around.

I hope you guys can see that green line emerging from the pano center there. By pano center, I mean this little compass. I've got this green line here. That's what's known as a radar tool. The radar tool shows me the orientation of the panorama and what it is that was measured. If you look at this one, you can see that if I hover my mouse over this green data over here, that represents the front door. I know that this data is the front door, so that's the front of the house. Here's the trick with the aerial panorama. I have to put the dots somewhere, but it's very flexible. I can put it wherever I.

Wish the drafters when they draft now, we would just leave it wherever you put it. If I shot my aerial pin panorama in front of the house, then that is where I want to put it. I know this is the front of the house, because I just figured out from this panorama that this is the front door.

Now if you just shot it, this might be a lot easier because you will just have worked with the data, so you'll probably be familiar, but I haven't seen this medium, so I forgot. But once I've got it where I want it, there's another trick. Now it's not going to be super obvious with this because clearly it's not a real panorama.

But let's pretend for a moment that this building, I don't know if you guys can see this, but in the image there's a horizontal, vertical line. What that means is that if I were to face that direction on the tour, that is what I would see, and it corresponds to that radar tool. It's a very complicated way of showing the way the panorama is rotated. What you can do is you can rotate it.

Now if you don't rotate it, it's really not a big deal. We can always fix it later, but it's harder to fix later. What I'm going to do, this is not going to be super obvious, but I'm going to hopefully show you this. I'm going to right-click with my mouse and I'm going to rotate this. Now you'll notice the pano center has this little dark cone that represents the initial pano direction that you see.

It doesn't matter what that is, but for now we're just going to use that as a reference, so we can see what rotation we're getting. I know that based on the radar tool that in this direction from the panorama is that building that we're going to pretend is the house.

I'm going to right-click and rotate until the thing that I'm pretending is the house is lining up at the front door. It's a very fancy way of saying if I'm looking at this panorama and I'm looking at the front door, and I click "Forward", I'll go into the house as opposed to having the panorama be facing in the wrong direction. This all seems very complicated now that I'm explaining it, but I'll summarize.

When you're adding a user panorama, you have to select the image. Right-click on the floor, choose "Add user panorama", select the image. That's your first step. The second step is to put the dot where you want it to appear, like around the floor plan data, then measurement data, so that dot will appear on the iGUIDE in the correct location.

Then the third step is to rotate it so that it more or less roughly corresponds with the actual direction you would be facing when looking toward the property, relatively speaking. If you skip any of the last two steps, not really a big deal. if you forget to place this aerial panorama, the drafters are going to be confused.

It's been probably just appear somewhere around the property, which isn't a huge problem. But that's probably a bigger problem than if you'd forget to do the rotation. If you forget the rotation part, not a big deal. You can always fix it after the fact by modifying the management. But either way, if you follow the steps, you don't have to use it. It's not a big deal.

Let me show you one more time what it looks like to add it. Make sure I got everything. [inaudible 00:19:31] space is pool. I missed one, here we go. Here's the last thing. Let's suppose hypothetically, you have a DSLR Rig for shooting 360s, but some people do, and they are much higher resolution than what the iGUIDE camera can do, the Thetas add one. What you could do is you could create some panoramas with that and add the men as user panoramas anywhere you want.

They can even be inside that property. I'm going to add one of those now. I'm going to follow the same process. I'm going to right-click on the main floor, choose "Add user panorama", figure out where in heck I saved my images. Then we go, found it. I'm going to choose this image and this is a 25 megabyte interior. There we go.

Now here's a user panorama. This is not actually from the house. I would do the exact same process. I would place it where I think it should go. Let's just randomly pretended it goes here and then I would rotate it so that it faces in the right direction. If you just happen to have an extremely high resolution solution for creating 360, you can use that to add content to an egg. There's nothing wrong with them.

We have to follow the same process. You're going to take the image on-site using a different camera. You're going to then take that and load it into the stitch software, adding it to a floor. Then you're going to rotate it and you're going to place it where it needs to go. The last thing that I will mention, this is like a side thing.

A lot of people don't know this. If you right-click on main building, you can choose add a floor and if you add a floor, I think it appears at the bottom. Yeah, there it is add floor. You can then add user panoramas to your new floor. Let's suppose you went out and you shot a whole bunch of point of interests photos are in a neighborhood.

Then you want to add that too and iGuide as an upsell, to show off the local downtown in the parks and whatever is around the property and whoever your client is, ''Oh I'll totally pay you 20 bucks for them.'' You don't need to go shoot any and add them, you can just right-click choose, Add a floor, and then just put them in. You don't have to shoot anything with the iGuide camera. In order to add that floor, you can just do it here.

Then you can add user panoramas as new floor, you can rename it. I don't know, neighborhood or something. Then in the floor selector, it would be called neighborhood. These are like extra tricks. I'm going to give you one extra trick. That's fun. Let's suppose that you go out and you shoot a property on a Tuesday. But your sub-contracting the drone for aerial panos or you don't have clearance to fly it until Wednesday.

Well, you going to wait to submit the iGuide before so you can add the user panorama for extended or no, you don't want to do that. Here's the cool trick. What you do is you go out and shoot the property. You obviously don't shoot the aerial panorama because you don't have your drone yet or whatever reason there is. Then what you do is you add the user panorama anyway, even though you don't have one.

Here on watch I should add user panorama and we're going to pick anyone. It doesn't even matter. We're just going to pick a panorama from that randomly download off the Internet. What I'm going to do is I'm going to place it approximately where I think I'm going to be shooting my aerial then the next day or having somewhat uniform.

Then what you do is you label it. This is just to eliminate confusion with the drafters. I've added this panorama. Maybe it's like an interior one or something, but I've had it outside the property. It doesn't match. When the drafters see it, they're going to be like, what is this? Rather than ask you a question about it, you can put a little note and then just put it's your aerial there you go.

Future era. When you do that with the drafters, you'll see is Oh they're adding that because they're going to upload the aerial panorama after the fact. Think of this like Oh it's a place holder essentially, you're adding this panorama so that you can then update the image later with your actual aerial. Here's the easy part. Here you go.

You choose Hide in iGuide and it will be hidden, so no one will ever see it. Then when you're ready, you can go back into the portal. Find that in your iGuide, upload the proper aerial image, and then just turn it on. You won't be able to change its location, where it's positioned, and you're going to have a tough time changing its rotation.

But it's still better than trying to, or paying for an update. The other option is that you could shoot your area with two days later. Then you could send it to the drafting team and ask them to update the IRA, but they ding you for that. There's a feat. If you know ahead of time, you're going to be doing this, saved the money.

Add it here as a place holder, disable it, and then later add your image in and you get it for free. How cool is that? Are we 30 minutes? Perfect, 30 minutes. Now you can ask any questions you want. If you don't have any questions, I will just sip my tea and hang out. Watch a clock tik tok. Maybe I should play guitar. Fun fact, I gave ratings product if you guys want a little head start on, that, can be messed around with. I'll find that website for you guys.

It is insurance and restoration. I'll put the link here. You guys are keen on learning about that because there's always information about that more or less here. Oh, another fun fact, since no one's asking any question. If you haven't yet had a look the iGuide Knowledge Base is amazing.

The knowledge base is or support I should say is full of articles about how to do stuff. There's a lot of information in there that you might not need right now, but you might need it like 2:00 AM randomly on a Wednesday when the support isn't reachable. That makes any sense? You can always go there and look stuff up. It's fantastic. Cool.

I don't see any questions coming in. I'm going to summarize and then we're going to end it there if that's cool with you guys. There's a question. Thank goodness. Thought you guys are going to leave me hanging. Are there any plans to upgrade the IMS-5 camera? Upgrade in what way? Upgrade in terms of hardware? Probably not. Upgrade in terms of software? Possibly.

There might be software, Oh new DSLR? Yeah, I don't know. Unlikely, but maybe. Anything is possible and I'll give you our standard boilerplate answer. iGuide and Planitar are always working on new technology because we want to make our hardware and software better. There's always something in the works. Specific plans. I don't know. They didn't tell me things.

I have a big mouth. How about the more bracket control? Well, that's interesting idea. IMS-5 has a significant amount of bracket control, we're referring to specifically more brackets. Instead of three and maybe having 5,7,9, something like that. That's my guess. You don't even need to answer. I'll just tell you the answer. Probably not now. There's a very good reason for that. That's exactly right. Yes.

That's a good answer, Peter. The camera is really just a sensor and a box. It doesn't really do much. Upgrading the DSLR wouldn't have any great benefit. The best way to look at it is if you think about the camera, frame is five anyway, the lens is fixed focus. The ISO is fixed.

The apertures fixed, everything is fixed. Upgrading to a fancier camera with fancier autofocus metering would be just like throwing money away. We'd be like what, flushing it down the toilet because it wouldn't benefit anyway. The lens is also crop sensor, so were made for crop sensor. If you've got a 5D Mark III, not going to help you.

You'd just be thrown away resolution, meaning that point. But in terms of bracket numbers. We did a lot of testing for many years and there wasn't enough of a difference with the sensor and lens combo between say, 3579 to matter, it just didn't make enough of a difference. That's not to say it's impossible to do anything. It just it wasn't valuable enough to include. That's why there's only three brackets.

Mainly it was, the development was focused on making the HDR algorithm better and the funny thing is that the HDR in IMS-5 in many ways. Maybe because I'm used to it, this is very subjective, but anyways is much better than the processing that you get from, say, a RICOH THETA by default. RICOH's a pretty big company.

They're not messing around. There are plans to bring that HDR processing that's really good from the IMS-5 to the newer planning system. That's definitely coming down the pipeline at some point, which is quite cool. If there aren't any other questions. We're going to call it there. I will answer that question. Everyone wants higher dynamic range.

That is something that is definitely being looked into because that's a software solution. How they get there, I don't know. Maybe it's my brackets, I don't know. Maybe it's fancier AI algorithms, AI for everything else will probably. But higher resolution is a tricky one. That's a hardware solution that I know nothing about, but that's, IMS-5, there's never going to be. The lens is limited, the sensor is limited.

You can't really get any more out of that without maybe using AI. That require a pretty big hardware changed, that's not possible. Thanks. Bye. Cool. Anyway, thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it. Thank you for joining me in my basement.

I'm recording will be available on the website at some point, I'm sure. Have a great rest of your day and please attend next week as well. Myself, esteem is really based on how many people show up to these things. It'd be really nice for me if you did. Thanks. Have a great rest today. Cheers.