There's no question that virtual tours
have become a trending topic in 2021.
Because of the pandemic,
everything's closed and you can't go outside
and have experiences, you used to be able
to have very easily.
Which is why there's been an increased demand
in virtual tours.
So, that is what we're going to be talking about today.
Because, if you're someone
that wants to get started shooting professionally,
but you haven't yet decided
on which virtual tour software you're going to use.
Today, I'm gonna give you a very convincing argument.
And if you saw my previous comparison video covering 16
of the top virtual tour softwares out there,
you have seen that Kuula was my software of choice,
even though it's not technically
the best software out there, it's not the most advanced.
For me, it shines through as my favorite,
for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the price.
It's one of the cheapest virtual tour software out there
that give you the full capability
of constructing a full professional virtual tour.
It has a great set of features included in the packages
as well as inside the virtual tour editor.
You can make your virtual tours at lightning speed.
I really loved the way Kuula displays the photos.
It has probably the best photo viewer,
of all the softwares I've used.
Comes with unlimited hosting,
which means you can make as many virtual tours as you want,
and you still pay the exact same price.
And the icing on the cake is that with Kuula,
even though I do consider it a virtual tour editor
for beginners,
you can do some pretty pro stuff inside of it.
And it doesn't require a steep learning curve.
There are so many softwares out there.
So many of them have so many great features,
but they do require a serious learning curve.
With Kuula, you can pick it up in just a few hours,
if not a few minutes.
So if someone just getting started with virtual tours
and you wanna level up your game quickly
without a steep learning curve,
you wanna pay close attention.
Okay, so here I am on the Kuula homepage,
I will link it down below.
And yeah, Kuula that is a weird name.
I have no idea why they called it Kuula, but there you go.
Maybe it's cooler
than the other softwares.
Anyway,
so going into the virtual tour editor,
once you've signed up for Kuula,
I'm going to go Upload, Create tour.
I'm going to give my tour a name.
It is The Newtowner.
And I've also given my tour a description,
and I'll upload my images.
You can rename your photos at this stage, if you so wish.
It's a good idea to reorder your shots roughly
in the sequence you want people to navigate.
So, I know, I'm going to start in the living room.
So, I'm gonna start at the living room photo there
and kitchen, balcony, and so on.
Next, I'm going to go across to Tour settings.
I'm gonna change the Privacy to Unlisted,
while I edit the tour.
Just in case, someone happens to be browsing
through Kuula and they click onto my profile,
and see the work in progress to it.
I just wanna make it not public for now.
Now, at the top right, I'm gonna hit Post.
And here we are inside the virtual tour editor.
By default, it starts in viewing mode,
where you can't edit anything or add hotspots.
So what we're going to do is, click the Edit icon
at the top right.
Now, we've got the ability to edit.
So now that we're in the virtual tour editor,
we can navigate through our shots photo by photo.
And in the right hand menu,
we have our photo editing options.
So, while I absolutely
wouldn't recommend colour correcting your photos
in a virtual tour software,
it can be handy for adding final little colour corrections
that you mightn't have noticed in your initial edits.
And you don't wanna have to go all the way back
to Photoshop or Affinity Photo.
But, so you want to make it a little bit warmer,
a little bit cooler, a little bit more contrast.
And, you can also change the intensity of the filter.
So, there's my original,
and if I wanted to make it a bit warmer,
I could set it to 40%.
Likewise, there's HDR Tone Mapping,
if your image is really contrasty,
and there's an option to increase sharpness,
I probably wouldn't recommend this,
but it does an okay job.
One effect that I really do like
is the sun and lens flare effect,
and this is exactly what it sounds like.
Click the button and choose a spot to place it.
And it simulates a real life lens flare,
which is really cool.
And this effect works well with any lights overhead.
And also, you can put it wherever the sun might be.
So there, we clearly got the sun coming in
through the window.
So when people are navigating this 360 photo,
it's just a nice effect to add to the sense of atmosphere.
You can customise it a little bit.
I always turn the intensity down to 0%,
because the lens flare is still there.
It just reduces the overexposure
in the area around the flare.
Next is Zoom settings,
and this is basically how far people can zoom in.
If you're shooting with a 360 camera,
that doesn't have a lot of resolution,
you want to discourage people from zooming in too far,
which is why adding zoom limits comes in really handy.
So if you want the maximum level of zoom to be there,
then you can set that to the maximum zoom.
Likewise, you don't always want people going all the way up,
because it creates that fisheye look.
Even though it looks good in the middle of the frame,
you'll see on both sides
that everything is highly exaggerated.
So, I found zoom parameters that I'm happy with.
This is all the way zoomed in,
and that's all the way zoomed out.
It's just a slight zoom,
but it's enough to get a slightly different perspective.
Next, you can set a pitch limit
and what the pitch is, is up and down.
So if you don't want people looking too far up
or too far down,
maybe you've got a tripod in shot
or the stitching wasn't so good down below,
you can stop people from looking all the way down.
So if I set the pitch limit to 80 degrees,
suddenly I can't go any further down.
I'm trying, but there's a limit there.
And likewise, when I look up,
I can't look all the way up.
Next is level correction.
And this one is really handy,
because if your shot
was even one degree off perfectly horizontal,
it can be enough to make your shot pretty disorienting.
Well, with this,
it basically straightens out your horizon.
Often, I might change this by one or two degrees.
I always make sure they're straight when I shoot,
but sometimes you accidentally shoot it off level.
Next is the fun part, and that is adding hotspots.
And doing this is super quick with Kuula.
So as you can see down here,
we have the thumbnails of each of our different rooms
and shots.
And all you need to do is find the shot
that you want to link to.
I want a link to the kitchen and put it right here.
So, all I'm gonna do is drag that over to here
and voila!
There we go!
Our hotspot has been created.
That took one second.
Likewise, I've got a view of another hotspot,
which is on the balcony.
So, I'm going to drag the balcony photo over to there.
Now, I'm going to hit Save,
and always make sure you hit Save,
on a regular basis by the way.
Rinse and repeat with your entire tour.
And we're done.
Just connected up 11 photos in about 10 minutes.
And each photo is connected to two,
if not three or four other shots.
So, that was really quick.
Normally, when connecting up hotspots,
it can take a long time.
Sometimes up to an hour depending
on the virtual tour editor you're using.
Now, we're going to preview our handiwork.
And to do that, we're going to hit Close,
and that moves us into viewing mode.
So now, we can click the hotspots
and it takes us around the tour
as if we were the end viewer interacting
with this virtual tour.
Now, here are two ways
to make virtual tour navigation smoother in Kuula.
The first one is, I don't know if you noticed,
but when navigating just now,
when I clicked the hotspot,
you would see the orientation of the photo changed.
So, that was not smooth.
I moved from one shot to the next
and suddenly the rotation turned around back
towards the door.
Whereas, obviously we want that to be a smooth,
consistent walk through experience.
Well, we can fix that.
In the bottom right, I'm going to choose Edit tour,
which brings us back to our original screen
with our tour settings.
And what we're going to do is enable Walkthrough Mode.
When I hit Save and go back to the editor,
suddenly, the orientation is consistent
in the direction we're moving.
The next feature for smooth navigation,
is Click Anywhere.
And what this does is it creates a bigger field
of clickability.
So you don't have to hit the icon precisely,
but I could click here and it navigates to the next photo.
And likewise, here, there you go.
This is definitely handy for fast navigation.
Say, I wanna go all the way here.
I can just click that.
And there I am.
Or another way of approaching this,
if I go back into my editor,
let's say this is too many hotspots,
but I still wanna take advantage
of this Click Anywhere feature.
What I'm going to do is keep that hotspot there,
but I'm going to change the opacity to zero.
So when I save that,
suddenly there's only one hotspot,
but when I click here in this general direction,
it takes me straight there,
without there having been a visible hotspot here.
So, if you wanna keep your hotspot options minimal,
yet still make your tour easier to navigate,
if people do click off into the distance,
you're still giving them that option.
It's just not visible.
Now, I wanna talk quickly about hotspot customisation.
Kuula has a bunch of inbuilt icons you can choose.
Maybe, you prefer an arrow there or something else.
Maybe, you've got a drone shot
or you wanna use a different colour.
You can use one of these inbuilt icons,
or you can upload your own custom icon if you prefer,
but I'm gonna go with simple one.
You can change the size, rotation, and opacity
of your hotspots.
So if you have a hotspot that alluded further away,
you might wanna make it a little bit smaller.
As you can see,
I've also selected Floor for all of my hotspots.
This means, it basically lays it flat against the floor.
But, you don't have to do that
if you want your hotspot, let's say here,
and you want it to just be a flat circle,
then you just turn the Floor off.
And you can also add text if you like, but I'm not going to.
I like the floor perspective.
So, I'm going back with how it was originally.
This brings me to informational hotspots
or informational cards.
So, let's say you want to draw attention
to one specific detail within your scene,
you add hotspots in a very similar way.
So obviously, we're not linking to another photo,
but let's say we want to add an informational spot here
and tell people that in fact,
this place does have Wi-Fi
and that this is just decorative art.
All I'm going to do is change the image
to an information icon.
To add basic text to this hotspot,
I'm going to write my message.
I've said, "Don't worry, the property DOES have wifi!
"This is just decorative artwork."
I'm going to change the colour to black,
so it contrasts the white wall.
And I'm going to choose Only hover.
So when I save that,
and I'm back in the virtual tour navigator,
when I hover, up comes my message.
Now, let's say we want
to add a slightly more advanced hotspot.
I'm going to follow the same process as before.
I'm gonna place it on the TV this time.
But this time, I want a photo
and some further information to show up.
So under my hotspot settings this time,
I'm going to choose a Click action.
And here, we can choose, Go to another post,
which is another photo, Open a card, Open a URL,
or Play a sound.
I'm gonna choose Open a card.
Now, Edit Card.
And I'm simply gonna add an image,
that I've already downloaded,
which is this logo of our local cable service in Australia.
It's called Foxtel.
And I'm gonna write a bit of text to explain what it is.
There we go.
Now, I'm going to hit Save.
So, when I go back to the navigator,
when I click this informational hotspot,
up comes the Foxtel logo,
and a little bit of information down there.
Likewise, you can also add a video URL.
Maybe it's a YouTube video you wanna link.
Basically, anything that is online,
you should be able to link into these hotspots.
So there, I've copied and pasted a YouTube URL.
So, there you go.
If you have any other interesting features
within your location, add a hotspot as I just did.
Okay, so once you fully edited your tour,
it's time to share.
And the easiest way to share is by hitting the Share button,
and it gives us the option to share directly to Facebook,
Twitter, Reddit, or save a snapshot for Instagram.
But first,
I wanna customise the final output a little bit more.
So, I'm going to hit Get link or embed code.
And that takes us to the Export editor.
So what this does is it customises the player
of your virtual tour.
So, if you want to add custom things
to the actual physical display window, you'd do that here.
And by physical, I meant digital, but you know.
So one of the more important things on this screen,
is branding.
And by default, it chooses the Kuula logo,
but if you're a pro member, then you can add your own logo.
So, I've uploaded my Virtual Tour Pro logo there.
You can increase the size, so it's nice and visible.
And there's also an option to show contact card.
You can show a contact card,
if you wanna add a few more details to the top left corner
like name, location, phone number.
If this was a place for sale,
you're adding those extra details,
that will show up at the top left,
every time someone opens and views this tour.
You can turn on Auto Rotate,
so when someone opens up the tour,
it starts rotating the photo automatically.
And you can change the speed for that,
can be really fast, really slow, or in the other direction.
And there are a few options
for customising the autoplay right there.
When you're happy with the appearance of the player,
all you need to do is copy and paste the link.
So, we've got an iframe embed code here.
If we wanna put it on a website,
there is a custom link that you can copy and paste
into an internet browser,
as well as an MLS sharing link.
I'll link my final tour down below,
because I'm sure you're curious to see how it turned out.
And that's it.
That's Kuula.
I really like Kuula a lot.
Like I said at the start,
I don't think it's the most technical,
advanced virtual tour software out there.
It's definitely not.
But I like it because, it delivers the most amount of value
and has the most amount of pro features,
in a really cheap and simple to learn virtual tour editor.
Can you use Kuula for paid work? Absolutely.
I've done many paid shoots using Kuula.
And, so have so many of my Virtual Tour Pro students.
They love it.
And it's a great entry point
into the professional world of virtual tours.
I wouldn't use Kuula forever,
but I would when you're in the beginner
to intermediate stages,
and you're starting to work with paid clients.
Then when you bring in bigger, high paying clients,
that's when I'd use more advanced softwares
like 3DVista, Pano2VR, and KRPano.
And, if you want to know how I use Kuula professionally
with real paid clients,
then I break down my entire workflow
for shooting, editing, pitching, and winning clients
inside my Virtual Tour Pro course.
I'll link that, down below.
And that's it.
Let me know what you think of Kuula.
Are you sold or are you gonna go with something else?
Let me know down there.
Peace!