LGT: Choose your Host

In Live Guided Tours, we know that we can have several hosts at a time. But is there a way to separate the hosts and to let guests choose whom to talk to?

An example: If a guest is interested in Property Development A, they can talk to their representative, agent A, if another guest is interested in Property Development B, then they can select to join Property Developer B's representative agent B. Or another great application is if you have guests from several countries with varying languages: Let them choose their host according to their language and lead them either to agent A who speaks English or agent B who speaks Spanish.

So basically, we want our guests to be able to select their host. 

Yes, it's possible.

In order to mount your own little "call center" you need to have one tour html per channel or agent group. For instance: You can publish the tour twice with two different passwords in the Live Guided Tour section. Once done so, instead of uploading both tours to your server, you can simply copy the html file of one of them to the folder of the other and rename to something like Agent2.html for instance. All the rest of the files can be shared and don't need to be copied. Upload the folder. Now you have 2 different URLs for the same tour, the standard index.html (that you can rename to agent1.html for instance) and agent2.

Depending on the URL used, your visitors will reach one host or another host.

Please notice that if you decide to change the password of one tour, you will need to republish the tour in VT PRO and repeat the process of renaming and copying the html file.

A little "Thank You" Feature

It's that time of the year. The time to conclude the year, to pause and reflect, to send greeting cards to your loved ones, to snuggle up at home and dive into christmas stories (and cookies). Yes, winter has arrived in most parts of the world now, and whether or not it is actually cold and snowy on your part of the globe, we still think we could all use a little bit of a "White Christmas" to add some sparkle to our virtual worlds. So that was our gift to you guys this year:   SNOW!

"Adding snow in my panoramas not only helps in telling a story – it actually adds depth and movement to the scene. So simple, but so powerful!"

The new sub tab "FX" – for Visual Effects

Some of you may have noticed: The "Lens Flare" subtab has gone. We renamed it to "FX" in order to add and organize more than just the Lens Flare effect under it. So the addition of our Snow Effect is  the start of a new line, where we will be adding more and more visual and special effects (FX) that you can simply add on top of your normal panoramas, to give it a completely new touch.

 Click below to open the white winter wonderland:

 How to use it

1. Use it with any panorama. Go to the Panorama tab and select the panorama you want to add the effect to.

2. Go to the sub tab "FX" (previously called "Lens Flare").

3. Click "Enabled" under the section "Snow Effect".

4. Use the two parameter sliders to decide whether you want a few, many and fast or slowly moving snow flakes.

Remember the big launch of our Live Guided Tour feature? It turned out to be definitely one of our superstar features. As you know, it was our big goal to keep this a free tool for everybody. So that's how we developed it: Using tech that allowed us to offer it at no cost to you and your tour guests.

Nonetheless, there were some users whose networks kept them from being able to access the free Live Guided Tour technology. Especially corporate networks and users behind strict firewalls found themselves unable to use our Peer-to-Peer technology. While statistically, that was only about 10-15% of all users (guests and hosts combined), we wanted to find a solution for them too. That's why we have developed this new TURN service for Live Guided Tours, which is based on relay servers. Without getting too technical, it basically lets you connect that specific user who was having issues connecting through the free Peer-to-Peer based Live Guided Tour tech. That could have been any of your session's guests, or even you, the host, if you were behind a strict firewall.

This new service is using external relay servers and comes with a subscription model. Here's how it works: You subscribe to one of the TURN Live Guided Tour plans, which will give you a certain amount of monthly bandwidth (10GB, 20GB, 50GB, 100GB). When hopping on a Live Guided Tour with guests, the system will always call the free Live Guided Tour tech first. If nobody has issues connecting, it'll only use the free Peer-to-Peer tech on your 3DVista Live Guided Tours. As soon as the system detects that there's a user (you or any of your guests) struggling to connect through the free Peer-to-Peer connection, it will automatically connect them through the TURN server. Only then will it consume the bandwidth contracted by you and only for that user's video and/or audio signal. That's saving you bandwidth and having to contract unnecessarily big TURN plans.

Questions & Answers

Which data is affected by the TURN plans?

If I have a lot of videos in a tour, is this data also routed through the TURN server? Will this count against my TURN bandwidth?

No. Your TURN bandwidth will not be used by the virtual tour itself. Everyone will see your tour as usual (through your tour's hosting). The TURN bandwidth will only be used for the audio and/or little video squares (if used) of your session's guests (and only those that cannot get through with the free p2p version). So if you don't have problematic users at all, none of the bandwidth gets used at all.

So, which plan's the right one for me?

We know you're gonna want to know this: How much bandwidth does this all take? The answer is (as you may expect): It depends. It depends on whether your ("problematic") user connects with video or audio only or even none of them (silent mode). It depends on that user's camera settings, so if his or her camera settings are set to high quality and high frame rate, it will consume more bandwidth than with lower quality settings. Many parameters that are hard to control or anticipate.

As one little reference: In our tests, one hour of video bandwidth with a user consumed between 700Mb's and 1GB. But, again, take that with a pinch of salt.

Don’t worry if you’re dealing with big tours: The tour size is irrelevant when selecting a TURN plan as the TURN bandwidth only gets counts against the audio/camera signal of your "problematic" users.

To read more about the different plans and to get your TURN service, click here.

Where can I see how much of the contracted bandwidth I have used up already?

In cloud.3dvista.com (available as of July 31st 2020) there's an indicator bar showing you how much bandwidth you have left for the month and you can also directly upgrade to a bigger plan if you consider it necessary.

3DVista will also send you two notification emails: One as soon as you reach 50%, and a second as soon as you reach 80% of your monthly TURN bandwidth. This gives you the option to react and upgrade your plan if you expect to surpass your monthly total. Remember that 3DVista will not upgrade or charge you automatically.

Can I get several TURN plans? One for each customer?

Absolutely. You can either get one TURN plan for all of your tours and customers combined or you can separate them and purchase individual TURN plans for individual customers or tours. That way, you can monitor the usage of each customer in more detail and potentially upgrade (and charge) those who surpass their initial plan accordingly. If you get one TURN plan, you currently won't be able to see which tour consumed which amount of bandwidth – it's going to be one global bandwidth bar for all of your tours. When using several TURN plans, make sure you insert the respective account data in the TURN section of the publish window inside each tour.

Can I still host my tours on my own server?

Yes, absolutely. That does not change.
It doesn't matter where your virtual tour is hosted (whether on 3DVista hosting or any other external hosting service of your choice). You will be able to use both the free and the TURN Live Guided Tour features alike -wherever your tour "sits".

Still having trouble?

It's important to note that the possession of a TURN plan, does not mean that the technical requirements don't apply. TURN or no TURN, a user's camera won't turn on unless they give permission in their browser! So double check the trouble shooting if any of your guests (or you) encounter any problems.

Creating interactivity in 3DVista, while very powerful, has always been a little bit click-intense. The wide range of options when it comes to hotspots inevitably entails a number of settings and steps that you have to go through when it comes to setting a hotspot.

Especially when creating large tours that repeat the same icon and action over and over, it might be a little tedious having to go through such amount of settings for each and every one of them (granted, you could just copy paste the first hotspot, but what if you needed a slight alteration?).

That's why the third part of our productivity revolution was dedicated to streamlining that process and limiting the number of clicks required to set a hotspot. May we introduce to you: Quick Actions.

Quick Actions

Quick Actions are our new way of optimizing the process of hotspot creation. They're an alternative way of setting hotspots, saving you many clicks when it comes to putting your tour together. The time- and click savings are tremendous and makes this update a big deal especially for those who create many or very large virtual tours with lots of interactivity.

A large project that previously could have taken you hours to create, may now be a matter of just 10-15 minutes.

Quick actions are drag-and-drop hotspots that can take different shapes and actions. From a list on the left hand side with different media (Panoramas, 360 Videos, Photos, Videos etc.) or non-media related hotspot actions (Open URL, YouTube Video, Map etc.) you can drop the required hotspot target or action onto the current media to automatically create a hotspot. You'll be prompted the most recent icons to choose from or you can open the complete library if you fancy one of the less used ones.

Quick Actions are the fast way of placing a certain media or action on your current panorama – automatically creating that hotspot. The semi-automatic return hotspot for connecting panoramas further reduces the risk of forgetting one of the "way back" hotspots. And the substantial decrease in clicks required to link your panoramas or add interactivity to them is much appreciated, we're sure!

In the past weeks, we've seen the launch of some completely new features and functions, such as the E-Learning Module or Live Guided Tours. These upcoming weeks are dedicated to optimizing what's already there, to make workflows more intuitive and effective – in short: to revolutionize productivity when creating virtual tours in 3DVista. 

We've already introduced one of those, which was the addition of a button that applies an icon change to all hotspots of the same design within the tour. This is the second one: Recent, Favorites and a Search field have been added to the Library Windows. This will allow you to quickly select those icons that you frequently use, that you've saved to your Favorites or you can search for an icon in case you haven't been using it much recently and it doesn't immediately appear in your list.

Saving elements to your Favorites is as easy as clicking the little star on top of the icon. It'll then be listed in your "Favorites" section, making it easier to find and quicker to select.

Stay tuned for more productivity perks to come this week

The icon library in VT PRO gives you many ways to customize your tour with different icons for different hotspots for instance. However, while customizing the hotspots down to each individual spot by creating them individually, it sometimes comes in handy to be able to replace all hotspot icons with a different or updated design of the current icon. Instead of having to do that for each and every individual hotspot in your virtual tour, you can proceed as follows: 

How to change a hotspot icon centrally so that each hotspot is updated.

Click on the orange icon when you select the HS that you want to change and when the library shows, just select the new icon and check the option  "Apply to all same hotspots".  

We receive many emails daily asking which parameters you can add to a virtual tour's URL, to control the language, position, media, hotspot or even field of view that it leads to. That's why we thought it would be handy to post a list with all possible parameters that you can add to your tour's URL to determine what exactly should happen or be opened. This is a great way, for instance, to send someone the direct link to the tour's kitchen (rather than have them open the tour in your first media and navigate all the way to the kitchen) or to a specific hotspot that explains an element in the tour – all with just one and the same virtual tour as your base, so that the user can continue to navigate through the entire tour freely.

Parameters that can define a tour's URL:

(replace the CAPITAL LETTERS with your info)

• media-name=MEDIA_NAME : Name of the media to load (with escaped characters). This would be our Kitchen example. Send someone the tour but make sure it starts immediately in the kitchen.
• media-index=INDEX : media index, or which media in your playlist to load. Another way to get to the Kitchen example.
• media=MEDIA_NAME_OR_INDEX : use the name or media index to define which media to load
• trigger-overlay-name=HOTSPOT_NAME : launches the action of a hotspot. Use this in conjunction with media-name, media-index, or media
• trigger-overlay-event=EVENT_NAME : defines the action upon which to launch a hotspot's action. By default that's "click". Use this in conjunction with trigger-overlay-name to define which hotspot it refers to.
• focus-overlay-name=HOTSPOT_NAME : takes the visitor to that hotspot, which will appear in the center of the screen (without launching it). Should be used in conjunction with media-name, media-index, or media
• yaw=YAW&pitch=PITCH : changes the camera position. YAW should be between [-180, 180], and PITCH between[-90,90]. The yaw degrees must be calculated in relation to the physical mid point of the equirectangular panorama. Should be used in conjunction with media-name, media-index, or media
• fov=value : Sets the zoom value. Its value can range between 1-150. Should be used in conjunction with media-name, media-index, or media
• language=LANGUAGE_CODE : forces to open the tour in the defined language, for instance: ?language=en-US
• index.htm?skip-loading –> To load a (different) virtual tour without showing the loading screen, for a more seamless switch.
• variant=NAME : Would be the name of the variant of the 3d model to load.
• show-object-ids=OBJECT_NAMES : Show 3D Model objects, separated by comma. Short code "sobjids".
• hide-object-ids=OBJECT_NAMES : Hide 3D Model objects, separated by comma. Short code "hobjids".
• hide-components-tags=TAGS : Hide skin components using tags, separated by comma. Short code "hct"
• show-components-tags=TAGS : Show skin components using tags, separated by comma. Short code "sct"
• hide-overlays-tags=TAGS : Hide hotspots using tags, separated by comma. Short code "hot"
• show-overlays-tags=TAGS : Show hotspots using tags, separated by comma. Short code "sot"
• hide-overlays-names=NAMES : Hide hotspots using names, separated by comma. Short code "hon"
• show-overlays-names=NAMES : Show hotspots using names, separated by comma. Short code "son"

Of course you can also mix and match these parameters to create a very defined URL. And you can put several of this codes separated by ",":

index.htm?language=en-US
index.htm?media=Kitchen%20Panorama
index.htm?media-name=Kitchen%20Panorama
index.htm?media-index=3    <– this is the playlist index
index.htm?media=Panorama2&trigger-overlay-name=GoToB (e.g. open stove hotspot in the kitchen panorama, Pano 2)
index.htm?media=Panorama2&focus-overlay-name=GoToB
index.htm#media=Panorama2&yaw=110&pitch=-20

Important Tip: You can use either ? or # symbol in the URLs. Here's how they behave. When you use the above parameters in your tour URL with ? the webpage will refresh when taking you to the indicated parameter. If, on the other side, you want to avoid refreshing the entire webpage use # instead for a seamless change. That means that it usually makes sense to use ? in links that you send to people or use outside of the tour itself, while the # sign makes sense to be used to link to other elements of the tour but from within that same tour itself.

Make sure you have a look at our post about Deep Linking, which shows how you can send someone a tour URL which will make the tour start immediately in a defined media or position, as well as the post on How to manage big tours with Deep Linking for more inspiration.

We've received quite a few requests from you guys asking how you can password protect the movement from one panorama (or room) to the next. Especially for virtual escape rooms and e-learning where you want to make sure your visitors solved a problem before moving on, that is a crucial feature. 

While there's not a general setting to request a password before moving on to another panorama, this will do the trick:

The way to move from Panorama 1 to Panorama 2 is by Deep Linking, so by changing the browser URL. For instance, if your tour URL is https://www.domain.com/tour and you'll automatically start in Panorama 1, you can go to Panorama 2 by setting the URL to https://www.domain.com/tour#media=2. That means you place your hotspot icon to move to Panorama 2, but instead of giving it the action "Open Panorama", you assign the action "Open URL" and insert the deep link leading straight to Panorama 2 (Ideally, you would also add to the URL that it'll skip the loading screen to make for a more seamless experience). If you use a JavaScript action to open the deep link URL instead of the Open URL action you can ask for the code 1234 with this JavaScript code:

if (window.prompt('Enter Code') == '1234') window.location.href = 'https://www.domain.com/tour#media=2';

And that's how you can password protect certain media or areas of your virtual tour to keep sensitive data protected or to add a gamification element to your virtual tour.

Note: Careful if you want to securely protect sensitive data with this. What's password protected in this approach is the hotspot that leads to the new media. Somebody who knows or guesses the deep link URL may be able to directly access the media by typing in that deep link URL. If you really need to properly protect sensitive data, it would be better to create a second tour, password protect that entire tour (either in VT PRO if you host with 3DVista or else on your server) and then deep link to that other tour. That way, the password is based on the entire tour and your server rather than on the click of the hotspot icon which could be circumvented.