Comment Try PhotoVista(formerly LivePicture) from MGI Soft (Score 3) 9
If you're not against using Java in your virtual tour, I'd suggest you take a look at MGI Soft's PhotoVista Virtual Tour product. You don't need to hand code anything, however. Their software will provide you with an HTML page with all the needed code in it for you to cut and paste into the pages (or database) that you want the tour delivered from.
I've worked on a project team that used the PhotoVista product, which seems to be a bargain at under $200, to create virtual tours of hospitals. One of the tours that we did resulted in a tour that expanded to almost 1000 rooms, which was a lot easier to do than it sounds because we were using a piece of equipment that's no longer being made (at least not to my knowledge). It was the BeHere parabolic still image lens that gave you 360 degree shots of an entire room with one shot from a standard manual camera using 35mm film.
You won't need that piece of equipment to use PhotoVista though. It comes with image stitching and optimizing software, which from what I understood from my graphics guy, was pretty decent. There are quite a few packages floating out there that do stitching and just evaluating those programs can be a task in itself without even considering the rest of the tools you'd need to publish 360 VR type of images, hotspot them, or make them "zoomable" in full detail through something like FlashPix.
If you really want to save some time and are willing to sacrifice a little bit of detail, there's another kind of lens out there that's similar to the BeHere lens that we used to use to get the whole room in one shot. Some other company has a similar kind of lens that's a lot more portable. From what I could tell of it, it was a decent piece of equipment, but I've never used it and can't vouch for how good the quality from it is. It's made by some security systems company. Anyone out there able to fill in for me the name of this company and it's parabolic lens product?
You'll no doubt also run into the name iPix, which will give you 360 x 360 virtual tour shots, which I've never been a big fan of. Those are nice for some shots and for product showcases like the inside of a car, but most of the time it's a bit disorienting and adding 360 of vertical panning compounds problems with image distortion. I'm also not a big fan of the iPix interface.
