Kelowna Virtual Tours, Okanagan Virtual Tours and Aerial Photography

	our Virtual Tours are different!
	You've probably seen the simple '360 tour' type of spin round scene - now see everything in full sphere 360x360!
VIRTUAL GALLERY see tour examples...
Unique designs to match your existing web pages
Interactive maps and floorplans that make sense of your virtual walk-through
Contained within your own website to preserve your web traffic
Cars, real estate, city centres, tourist attractions, cathedrals, wedding chapels

Not just a collection of 360 scenes, these tours are:

comprehensive
interactive
unique to you

Take a look at the difference....

Kelowna Virtual Tours, Vernon Virtual Tours, Penticton Virtual Tours

Choose the company chosen by many key Kelowna establishments including the Kelowna Museums Group, the Kelowna Art Gallery, the Rotary Centre for the Arts, the Downtown Kelowna Association, as well as respected commercial concerns including Boyd Autobody, Hawthorn Park Retirement Community, Kelowna Volvo Hyundai, Remax Commercial, Avalon Rentals to name just a few.

Panorama Photography

Producing any kind of virtual tour involves photographing a panorama. The Virtual Tour format (eg Flash, Java, Quicktime) uses these panoramic images to generate the dynamic ''virtual tour scene' that we see in online Virtual Tours. A panorama is the stitching together of 2 or more photographs to produce an image that could not normally captured by the camera in one shot. Many of the latest compact digital cameras come with software to help you do this yourself and by simply taking a number of overlapping pictures in a full circle you can produce a simple 360 degree panorama. Canon cameras for instance have a PhotoStitch program included that will do this for you. This method works OKish if you want to stitch 3 photos of a fairly distant subject, and may even be OK for a full 360 spin (each photo overlaps and the last one overlaps the start of the first) again as long as the image is distant and you use a tripod. You will achieve a 'cylindrical' 360 degree panorama, cylindrical as you might imagine the panorama being pasted inside a cylinder with the end joining the start and you stand inside looking around. You can't look up or down because there's a hole at the top and bottom.

Downtown Kelowna Waterfront
Limited edition of 10, canvas print, incredible detail, 10 feet long!
Contact us

Panorama Parallax

Parallax is a perspective issue that comes into play with stitching photographs of closer subjects (eg. inside rooms) and of subjects with both close and distant elements. Without boring everyone with a full description of parallax, it will cause the unhappy position that part of your photo-to-photo overlap is in line, yet other parts are out of line. This is because if turning around to shoot multiple images, the camera will not not quite stay in the same place. Using a tripod will help (for distant subjects) but will still not solve the issue. In order to combat parallax, each photograph must be taken from a precise point in space and that means revolving the camera around a specific point in the lens called the 'no-parallax point' (aptly named huh?) This point is hugely complicated to explain and often referred to as various other (sometimes incorrect) things which doesn't help either. The no-parallax point will also vary with lens aperture. Professional Virtual Tour producers like ourselves employ special methods to find this precise point and use specialist offset rotating camera mounts (panoramic head) in order to rotate the camera around this point and hence defeat the evil parallax!

Cylindrical or Spherical Panorama?

Most virtual tours you will see are cylindrical. That means you can look round but you can't move the scene up to see the ceiling or down to see the floor. Most are this way because it's much easier to do! However there are other reasons: scenes may have negative or simply zero features on the ceiling or floor. Many virtual tour producers simply don't have the capability of producing spherical tours for scenes where it is an advantage - rooms with cathedral ceilings, outdoor shots with glorious skies, inside cars etc.
Spherical Panorama of The Rotary Centre for the Arts theatre

In this picture you can see every single part of this theatre - if you could soften this image and wrap it round a soccer ball and then get inside, you could look round as if you were sitting right in the middle. So get back out of the ball and have a look at a cylindrical panorama:
Cylindrical Panorama of Gallery 421 at Kelowna Rotary Centre for the Arts

Cylindrical Panaorama of VQA Wine Shop, Kelowna Museums

You'll see that the cylindrical panoramas are 'narrower' than the spherical and do not include the ceiling/floor directly above/below. The cylindrical panoramas produced by Virtual Aerial do however produce a much greater field of view than many other companies by using specialist fisheye lenses rather than just wide angle. The fisheye lens can produce a maximum field of view of approximately 183 degrees - that means that the edges of the image are actually slightly behind the camera! For maximum quality and scene coverage, Virtual Aerial uses a method to create 'full-frame fisheyes'. The resulting image demonstrates 180 degrees field of view diagonally across each image and we use a number of these images to create the panorama.

Where's the camera?

This is another spherical panorama - that means you can see every part of this showroom from a single point in space. (Note here also that a spherical panorama is always exactly twice as wide as it's high, called an 'equirectangle'). The camera was of course standing on a tripod all the time between the two tables so when the shots toward the floor were taken it was very clearly in view, so where did it go? It's not in fact magic, just Photoshop and a lot of experience - it's another reason why many Virtual tour producers pass on the full scene spherical panorama. Virtual Aerial will advise you about the options and give you the choice.

Panorama stitching errors

This is a classic example of stitching errors which, having thwarted the parallax demon, are enemy no1 for the panorama producer. You can see that the lines in the wood seams do not join up correctly. It can be the result of parallax, tiny knocks to the tripod position during shooting, but more often mis-selection of stitching points, usually by an automated software process. We see these errors often in other tour scenes on the web - usually along the top line of a wall or door frame - even in clearly expensive hotel projects etc. It's a matter of due care by both the photographer and stitcher and hand stitching the images where necessary. We'd like to say that you won't find this issue in our tours, and really we've had a good look, but just in case you see one, please let us know! Just in case you're wondering, we artificially generated this error by offsetting the stitch points.

Remember: Every Virtual Tour starts with professional, accurate photography

Want to talk Panoramas?

If you would like to discuss the options for your Virtual Tour needs, please contact us. Virtual Aerial will also supply panoramic photography service for web designers who want to use their own virtual tour software. We are delighted to talk on the phone, converse by email or visit your prospective location to advise on the options, costs and possibilities with no obligation. Also, if you're the type who might write multiple paragraphs about panoramic photography and want to 'talk pano' contact us too, we're always happy to share experiences and help solve issues.

Look for the swallow silhouette:

You can reach KelownaCamera anytime on 250-575-6950

gallery | site plan

chris@kelownacamera.com