What if I told you,
you could make a 360 virtual tour entirely on your phone?
Well, the tour you're looking at right now is exactly that.
I shot and edited this tour 100% on my iPhone.
Not only does it look similar to a tour shot
with a point-and-shoot 360 camera,
but I was able to generate a dollhouse, a floor plan,
and the shooting and editing time took less than 30 minutes.
So today I've got a cool discovery to share with you,
that will definitely give Matterport a run for its money.
And it's called Asteroom.
Which is a company that has been around for a few years now,
creating 3D virtual tours targeted at real estate.
And I came across some recently
and it seems like they're branding themselves
as a lower cost Matterport alternative.
And a great feature they've added,
I just love this feature; is you can shoot
the entire virtual tour on your phone and edit it,
including adding hotspots, navigation
and produce a dollhouse floor plan and so on.
So in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how it works
and whether it's any good.
So, I see Asteroom and the smartphone virtual tour workflow
as a great low budget alternative
to a conventional virtual tour set up.
It only costs $12 per tour,
or six months of hosting with Asteroom.
And there are some optional add-ons I'll talk about later.
And the coolest thing is you don't need a 360 camera
and you don't need a computer.
You can use those things, but you don't have to.
Basically everything is done in your phone.
So while you don't necessarily need a 360 camera,
you will need the Asteroom 3D Tour Kit.
This will essentially help us get perfect
360 photos using our phone.
The kit is sold on their website for 109.99 US dollars.
And if you're a member of my Virtual Tour Pro Course
you'll also get a further $25 off of that.
So in the kit, you'll find firstly, a tripod.
It's cheap. It's basic, but it does the job
and will keep your shots steady and level.
It comes with a phone cover.
And when you buy the kit,
you'll be asked which phone you own,
and they send you a case that is custom to your phone.
Then it comes with a super wide angle lens,
that you attach to the case.
This lens is somewhere between 160 and 180 degrees.
And finally it comes with a rotator,
that moves your phone around
roughly six times to create a full 360 panorama.
Now, when shooting with your phone
it is important to use a setup like this,
because if you were to try
to capture a 360 panorama handheld
there's going to be a high margin for error,
due to the lens being in so many different places,
when you take the various photos,
that it will create significant stitching
and parallax errors.
If you've ever been on Google Street View
you'll know what I'm talking about.
Whereas when you use the smartphone rotator set up,
it perfectly aligns the lens in the middle.
So it's barely moving from shot to shot.
So as the phone rotates, the lens maintains
a very close horizontal and vertical access
resulting in very minimal stitching errors
and parallax issues.
And yeah, that's important
if you want your photos to look like 360 photos,
and not a 360 photo taken with a phone.
And using this technique,
you can shoot up to 32 megapixel 360 photos.
As to which phone you can use,
they say that it works with most phones.
Basically, if you have anything of the last few years
you're going to produce pretty good image quality.
Basically, think about how good is your photo quality
on your phone already for flat photos?
Well, that's gonna translate into a 360 photo.
So if you have a really old phone,
the photos aren't gonna be good in 360.
But if you have something from the last four years or so,
then you will be able to get up close
to that 32 megapixel mark.
They do have a list of compatible phones on their website,
and it does also come with a fisheye clip
that works with most other phones.
So here's how you shoot with Asteroom and your smartphone.
Once you've set it up,
initially, you've put the cover on with the lens
and extended your tripod as high as it goes.
Place it roughly in the middle of the room you're shooting.
Open up the app, make sure HDR is on,
activate the self-timer to either five or 10 seconds.
It's also got this level feature, which is pretty cool.
Move your phone around
and it'll act like an actual spirit level.
Then press the camera button to activate the shot.
When shooting, you can either move
with the phone as it rotates
and make sure you're constantly behind the lens
or a better approach would be hiding out of sight,
just in case your shadow interferes with any of the shots.
As a rule of thumb, you should get one photo per room.
With hallways, it helps to shoot
in front of every door frame.
Just make sure there is a clear line of sight
from shot to shot.
Each photo takes around 10 to 15 seconds to capture.
So you should be able to do a full house
in under 15 minutes.
After every shot, the app will prompt you
to label the photo with the location.
It has a list of the most common rooms there; as presets,
which speeds things up considerably.
Now, if you do own a 360 camera
Asteroom is compatible with all Ricoh and Insta360 cameras.
So feel free to use them if you like.
Editing in the Asteroom mobile app is super easy.
Once you've downloaded it.
It's free for iOS and Android by the way.
What we're going to do under the My Tours Tab,
is hit the plus icon down the bottom right.
This will allow us to create a project
of our tour that we just shot.
So I've called it the address.
You can give it another address and a description,
but I don't feel the need to right now.
So I'm going to hit done.
And now what we're going to do
is construct our virtual tour.
So I'm going to upload the photos,
which are automatically saved within the Asteroom app.
Here they are.
Again, it's so handy to have those labels within the app.
So you can connect everything together,
that extra bit quicker.
And I'd suggest choosing your photos
roughly in the order that you want people to navigate.
And it's okay if you don't get them in the right sequence,
we can always change this later.
Okay, our photos have uploaded.
Next, we're going to connect them together.
And Asteroom do offer paid packages,
where they connect everything together for you.
You don't have to do a single thing,
including a dollhouse image enhancement,
a 2D floor plan and so on.
You can choose that if you like,
if you don't wanna do the editing yourself.
However in this example,
I'm going to connect everything up myself.
So we'll hit, Not now.
Now it starts with a Hotspot Tutorial,
which I'm going to show you right now.
So we're going to choose our first photo.
Here is my photo that I shot in the kitchen.
I'm gonna start adding some hotspots to it.
So the first one I want to add is going to be right there.
So down at the bottom left,
I'm going to choose the hotspots option.
And now we're going to choose the photo
that this photo links to.
And I want to link out to the balcony.
So I'm going to hit, Next.
And now on this screen,
we're going to choose exactly where the hotspot goes.
And I'm going to put it on the floor,
exactly where I know my next photo was placed.
Now in the window below it, we have the return path.
So we're going to identify where the first photo was taken.
So it can automatically be linked up.
And the kitchen photo was taken with the camera about here.
Okay, great.
Now I'm gonna hit, Done.
And as you can see, it's added that hotspot.
And when we go to our exterior photo,
you'll see that it's added the return hotspot.
Anyway I'm gonna go back to the kitchen,
because I wanna show you a few things.
First thing, is you can edit hotspots.
So if you want to firstly, change the placement,
maybe you messed it up the first time around,
you can always come back and change the location,
as well as change which photo it links to.
So now I'm going to add the other hotspots to this photo.
So I know I've got one here in the bathroom
and I've also got another one to the right
in the living room.
So likewise, I'll repeat the exact same process
by choosing the linking panorama,
next, then choosing the two hotspots on the ground,
in each direction.
And now I'm going to rinse and repeat that
with this entire tour.
And we're done.
That took me around 10 minutes
to connect up hotspots throughout this whole house.
So next, I wanna show you the next feature
within the Virtual Tour Mobile Editor,
and that is adding tags.
So this is a very common feature you see
in all virtual tour softwares.
If you wanna draw attention to one specific thing
you can create a hotspot with information.
So I'm going to add one here to this bedroom.
I'll say, sleeps two people.
You can add a link, if you wanna link anything external.
You can add a custom image to the hotspot.
You can add audio.
You can choose your icon style.
The most common one is the "i",
but you can choose any of these icons here,
or add a custom icon from your camera roll.
I'm gonna choose the i.
Now I'll hit done.
And I'll move this hotspot in line with the door.
Likewise, you can repeat the process
with any other informational based hotspots
you wanna add throughout your tour.
The next feature to point out is the Tripod overlay.
If you tap that, you can add a custom nadir,
which means you can come with the tripod
with a logo of your choice.
Also at the top right there's a preview button.
So if we wanna see a live preview
of what we've just created,
we can do so instantly on our phones,
and straightaway I'm able to navigate around the tour,
like this was my finished product.
And yeah, that's looking nice. Really nice.
Finally if you tap the More button,
you'll see a few more options for things you can add
to this tour, including a Straighten option
if your horizon is off level.
And you can also add flat images, videos,
update the thumbnail and add 3D text within the space.
But you know what?
I'm actually really happy with this tour.
So I'm going to hit the back button, and back one more time.
And there we go.
There's my tour.
I just assembled that in 15 minutes on my phone.
You can also edit with Asteroom
on your computer if you want.
It does have very similar features to the smartphone app,
but if you prefer a bigger screen
and a few more options overall
feel free to edit on Desktop.
You can log in the exact same way,
and the editor is so simple,
it doesn't even need explaining.
Okay, now let's take a look at my final tour.
And there's the dollhouse.
Nice.
Every time I see a dollhouse, I just totally geek out.
I know it's a simple idea, but it's super cool,
especially in the context of real estate.
It turned out well.
They did a good job of building my dollhouse.
Now in the bottom left, I can change modes.
I'm going to go into my floor plan.
So there's my 2D floor plan that they've generated,
based on the 360 photos from the virtual tour.
And that looks pretty accurate to the actual houses layout.
I'm sure it's not a hundred percent,
but it seems pretty close.
Here's a photo version of the floor plan layout.
And, this is something that you can access
from the published tour.
So if you wanna see the tour
from many different perspectives, this is another cool one.
And I like that when you rotate it
the title stay nice and horizontal.
Okay, now I'm going to go into the tour.
Let's do it.
And as you can see,
when you publish and preview your tour
the interface improves.
It no longer looks like an editor,
but you've got proper icons that hover,
and the navigational arrows look much better.
Wow. I can't believe this.
I shot this tour on my phone.
That's crazy.
This really turned out so much better than I was expecting.
And I've gotta say the dynamic range is surprisingly good.
Here's an interior, exterior shot
and it's exposed both sides of this image really nicely.
And it's also cool that you can see the dollhouse
and the 2D floor plan,
from the main navigational window as well.
So you've always got access to those
and you don't have to go searching for them.
Okay, so for you photo nerds out there,
let's talk image quality.
So with my iPhone 12 Pro Max,
I was able to shoot 32 megapixel 360 photos.
And I'm gonna be honest, when I first saw these
I was really genuinely surprised at how well it turned out.
I thought it would look terrible,
that the quality would be extremely low,
that the highlights would be overblown and so on.
But what I'm looking at right here looks like it was shot
on a consumer point-and-shoot 360 camera in HDR mode,
which right now is one of the more common techniques
for 360 cameras.
And yeah, it was done on a phone.
That's definitely something I find very cool.
Now is this amazing image quality?
No, it's not.
It's basic to good, but I'd say it's good enough.
Especially for real estate listings,
where extremely high image quality simply isn't necessary.
Would I shoot a high-end
multimillion dollar business using Asteroom?
No, I wouldn't.
Businesses like that need quality,
and should shoot with a DSLR
or a really high-end 360 camera.
But for real estate and small business shoots,
I definitely would be happy using Asteroom,
and the mobile workflow.
Now I wanna talk about how Asteroom
handles the nadir and the zenith,
which means the bottom and the top.
And obviously there's a tripod there at the bottom.
It's big.
And when you're shooting with this setup,
it feels like it's going to be
a really big presence in your shots.
However, within the Asteroom software
they limit the tilt for both up and down.
So you can't actually see it.
You can scroll down to see the bottom access.
But you can't look directly down or directly up.
Because the images do have the tripod there at the top,
there's often a black dot,
if your phone was even slightly out of line.
And obviously they're aware of that,
and they're trying to encourage people
not to look directly up and directly down.
That is however, unless you add a custom nadir.
If you do that,
then suddenly you have the ability to look down and look up.
Oh, and by the way, you can manually upload photos later.
If you wanna import it to your computer,
maybe remove the tripod or do some other kind of editing,
you can do that and just manually upload in the app
or the online software.
So who's Asteroom for?
I think it's pretty obvious by now, real estate.
Any kind of real estate tour,
where you need to shoot and edit and upload quickly,
and maybe you don't own a 360 camera.
Or, you wanna keep things super simple
and you wanna do everything yourself,
maybe you're a real estate agent or a realtor
and you need some kind of way
of turning around virtual tours quickly yourself.
For other types of virtual tours,
I would probably recommend the other softwares
I talk about on my channel.
Oh, and by the way, I'll link my Asteroom tour below,
if you wanna take a look at it and pixel peep,
and just see what the end result was like,
from a tour that was shot and edited 100% on my phone.
And I do also wanna point out,
that this smartphone rotator technique is not new.
It's been around for years,
and there are many softwares, rotators, phones,
and so on that can achieve this technique.
Why I like this one, however,
is this is the best I've seen it done so far.
Not only is the setup and shooting super smooth,
but also the app is fantastic.
I'd say Asteroom is the closest thing,
I've seen to a complete smartphone experience yet,
from a virtual tour provider.
Now I wanna elaborate a bit more on pricing,
because obviously this is an extremely important factor.
And as I mentioned at the start of the video
Asteroom are trying to position themselves
as a low or lower budget version of Matterport.
With Matterport you have to pay an ongoing subscription fee,
with Asteroom you pay per tour.
It's $12 to get started,
and you get six months of hosting with your tour.
However, you will have to pay a little bit extra
if you want extra things, such as the Dollhouse.
That is $10 for a Dollhouse for up to 10 panoramas,
then one US dollar per additional photo.
You can get them to make a 2D Floor Plan with dimensions,
which is $15 per tour.
They do Image Enhancement,
aka, colour correcting your photos for $1 per photo.
Oh, and if you buy the Asteroom 3D Kit
you also get this voucher,
which gives you one of each of those things for free,
for your first tour.
And then finally they offer 3D Staging, at $35 per panorama.
And what 3D staging is,
is simulating furniture being put into your location.
So if you've got an empty house,
what they do is, they stage furniture inside of it.
So if it was a house for sale
you could show people what the house would look like
with furniture inside, which is actually pretty high tech
when you think about. They're inserting 3D objects
into your 360 photo.
I have no idea how they do that or how it works,
but yeah, that is actually a really big value add
for the real estate industry.
And of course, all of those four things are optional.
You don't have to buy them.
If you wanna go with my basic package,
it's $12 a tour for six months of hosting.
And I do believe they offer a 24-hour turnaround time,
on all those things.
Although don't quote me on that.
And something I like about the service as well,
is they keep you up to date with what they're doing.
They send you emails,
and because it's an app as well for your phone;
you get mobile notifications saying,
that your tour is ready, your Dollhouse is ready and so on.
And, the final thing to mention
is that Asteroom is integrated
with two of the largest real estate portals in the US,
Zillow and realtor.com,
which again if you're a real estate agent, that's good.
And if you're someone that shoots
or aspires to shoot virtual tours professionally
and you don't wanna spend years
learning the hard way, like I did.
I put together a 16-hour video course,
called Virtual Tour Pro.
That will take you by the hand
and show you exactly what to do
to create professional virtual tours
and create your own profitable business in doing so.
You can enroll by following the link in the description,
and just a reminder,
that Virtual Tour Pro members receive $25 off
the Asteroom 3D smartphone Kit.
And that's it for this video.
That is how you shoot a professional virtual tour,
using your phone.
Hey, what do you think of Asteroom?
Did you like it?
Do you have anything else
that you wanna throw into the conversation?
Feel free to let me know down below.
And FYI, I am planning on making a comparison video
between Matterport and the various Matterport alternatives,
because there are now more and more.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
so you don't miss that.
And that's it for me, peace out.