Some real estate professionals may want to add 3-D home tours to their marketing repertoire but aren’t ready to cough up the cash for the necessary hardware.
Realvision Tours has been trying to remove this barrier by making it possible to capture 3-D tours with off-the-shelf cameras. The company recently bagged $1.3 million in a seed funding round to fuel this effort.
Photogaphers can use Realvision technology to capture a 3-D tour, listing photos and a floor plan in a single shoot with one of several DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) cameras.
Screen shot showing sample Realvision image and 3-D tour viewer.
Collecting content for a 2,000-square foot home takes about one hour on average, according to the company.
The company renders 360-degree photographs captured on a shoot into a 3-D tour and floor plan, while photographers use an image editor to extract high-quality 2-D photos from the 360-degree photos.
Realvision then builds the 3-D tour, 2-D photos and floor plan into a single-property website. Viewers can saunter between 360-degree photographs in a fluid 3-D experience while tracking their position in the floor plan.
They can also can experience the tours in virtual reality (VR) by using a Realvision app for iOS or Android in combination with VR goggles Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard. By the end of the month, Realvision will release apps for two other headsets, Samsung’s Gear VR and HTC’s Vive.
Realvision will use the seed funding to “to focus on machine learning, computer vision image processing, new user capabilities and aggregate data collection within virtual reality.”
The company has formed special partnerships with some real estate marketing firms, such as Spacecrafting, which Realvision says serves nearly 4,000 real estate professionals in the Twin Cities.
“While any photographer can harness our technology, our partners share our high standards and help us maintain the industry-leading quality of our tours,” Realvision Co-founder Bryn Erickson said in a statement.
Realvision’s funding round was led by Dundee Venture Capital, with participation from Brightstone Venture Capital, Loup Ventures, Sandalphon Capital, Bridge Investment Group and 701 Angel Fund.
