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The industry has come a long way from bulky Matterport cameras and days-long waits for finalized immersive 3D home tours.
Hardware and software product combos continue to emerge to seize on the opportunity to let home shoppers virtually walk, fly and experience homes from anywhere around the world.
New app Asteroom is a 3D tour product for both major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, that sells a panoramic mount in conjunction with a fisheye lens attachment and editing software. It states that tours can be finalized in 15 minutes or less after watching its three-minute video tutorials.
The rotating mount turns your phone into a 360-degree camera, and pairs automatically with your device via Bluetooth (BLE 4.0). A single tap of the “capture” command in the app starts the process. The device will stop turning once all the way around, and the user moves on to the next room.
The capture and tour creation modules are separate, meaning users link a finished tour after going through the “new project” setup. This is kind of clunky from a user experience perspective. Why can’t the physical capture process be part of the new tour creation? Footage will exist within a specific tour, not as a separate file, and tours could be more succinctly organized.
Tour hotspots that highlight objects and text data about a room can be added and edited after a tour is saved. This screen is also where you connect and link to additional room tours in the space.
The app allows for an array of text designs, links, information tags, floating still images — for detail shots, like appliance close-ups or a view through a window — and even logos to be presented for interaction within the app. You can also add 3D objects to virtually stage an empty space.
Asteroom offers rotating “dollhouse” views and floorplan capabilities. Finished tours can be shared to various social media accounts, emailed and embedded on webpages.
Browser viewing windows give users a hamburger (those three lines on apps that indicate a menu) to drop down into a map view and information card, which is a great place to enter listing descriptions.
A few tour samples:
358 Sunset Ave, Sunnyvale, CA
220 Corral Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA
2519 Whipple Ave., Redwood City, CA
The app also lets agents see who is viewing their tours, a nice touch for support in lead generation.
The Asteroom app costs $20/month for 10 tours and the Pano kit is sold separately for $59.95. Not bad.
There is also a 30-day free trial, but you’ll have to but the Pano Kit to actually test it.
For the sake of comparison, the Ricoh Tours kit can be bought, all-in, for $628, plus the $45 monthly subscription. Matterport offers quite a bit more for its $69.99 professional level account, such as print assets and image galleries, but it’s also best with the Ricoh Theta Vs and Insta360’s ONE X camera, which is $399. If you’re devoted to Matterport’s original camera, know that it’s well over $3,000.
In summary, for the money and mobility, Asteroom is worth a shot.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
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