{"id":3671,"date":"2016-06-10T01:52:27","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T05:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tlsrv.net\/three-use-cases-for-a-virtual-store-using-360-images\/"},"modified":"2022-12-01T07:53:54","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T11:53:54","slug":"three-use-cases-for-a-virtual-store-using-360-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/three-use-cases-for-a-virtual-store-using-360-images\/","title":{"rendered":"Three use cases for a virtual store using 360 photos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Retailers are looking into virtual reality and wondering what\u2019s in it for them and when should they jump in. Should you invest in a shopping experience where a virtual person tries on virtual clothing?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Let\u2019s be clear on one thing: When you start using 360 and VR to engage your audience on a regular basis, it\u2019s important that you will be able to test different ideas to see what works best with your customers. This means that you want the average cost of a story to be closer to a thousand dollars rather than a hundred thousand dollars.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Secondly, when you invest time and money in creating a virtual store, you want to maximize reach, and make sure that the people who don\u2019t happen to have their VR headset handy, can still view the story on their laptop or mobile phone. 360 images can be easily shared, and viewed on desktop and mobile, bespoke virtual reality implementations can\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most brand and retail-related 360 and VR examples are still more about sharing the brand\u2019s story than actually driving conversion. But why shouldn\u2019t you have both? Annotating 360 photos allows users not only to experience an environment, but to interact with it and take action. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Here are three use cases for a virtual store using 360 images:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><strong><span style=\"font-size: 18px;\">1) VIRTUAL 360 STORE OR SHOWROOM<\/span>\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><br \/> <iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/mediacard\/797612622114455552\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The easiest way to get started is to take a 360 image of your store or showroom, and enrich it with\u00a0detailed information of\u00a0products in the picture. For this purpose, we\u2019d recommend a professional photographer, that comes to your location at an agreed time and takes a hi-res photo that can be used directly on your website. \u00a0The average cost per image is somewhere between $400 and $800 per photo including some\u00a0hours of post production, and the delivery time is typically a couple of days. In this example, we had a darker interior that showcases items from Restoration Hardware, and it would have been hard to capture this properly without a professional photographer. He used a remote contoller to take the image and in post production\u00a0adjusted\u00a0the contrast\u00a0and edited out the tripod so it&#8217;s all nice and clean. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Alternatively, for a quick DIY version, use a camera like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Ricoh-Theta-Digital-Camera-Black\/dp\/B014US3FQI\/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&#038;qid=1465518681&#038;sr=8-2&#038;keywords=ricoh+theta\">Ricoh Theta<\/a>\u00a0and your phone for closeups. The below picture is taken at the Marimekko store at the Stanford Shopping Center. Although the quality is not nearly as good as in the previous example, you still get a good idea of the store and its selection, and this photo would work perfectly as a social media update. After I had taken all images, I just\u00a0sent the 360 image and the closeups\u00a0from my phone to my\u00a0email, download them to computer, and combined the images in the ThingLink 360 photo editor.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/mediacard\/795435460821254146\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 18px;\"><strong>2) INSPIRATIONAL 360 BRAND EXPERIENCE<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/mediacard\/795744282622296066\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Let\u2019s say you don\u2019t have an actual physical location at the moment (maybe you are an online-only business or your brick-and-mortar store is under renovation) but you still want to showcase products in a 360 environment. \u00a0Here you can get creative and choose any photograph that aligns with your brand identity.\u00a0You\u2019ll be making a custom world for users to explore. \u00a0In this example, we licensed a 360 degree image of a birch forest form 360cities.net, and annotated it with a collection of Marimekko products. \u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Depending on the provider, licensing cost for one 360 image is typically around $250.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"font-size: 18px;\">3) INTERACTIVE 360 FOR DESIGNERS<\/span>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/mediacard\/797630816615137280\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For home decorators who want to impress their clients, you can use 360 experiences to really immerse clients in your vision. Bring your 360 camera to their house and when you follow up send a link with your 360 rendering, \u00a0complete with annotations showing paint swatches, suggested dinnerware, furniture and more. This is a perfect case for using a consumer facing 360 cameras such as Ricoh Theta or the new Samsung 360 camera. Unlike in the first example, the items are not in the actual photo, but we use annotations to bring them in.\u00a0Here we have selected products from Heath Ceramics to match a client&#8217;s\u00a0kitchen. How much work does it take to create an example like this? When you have the image, the annotation takes about 15-30minutes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-size: 20px;\"><strong>How to get access to ThingLink 360 Photo editor?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sign up to ThingLink\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/signup?buttonSource=fpPricing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Premium account<\/a> on ThingLink.com. The Premium account also includes a service to locate a professional 360 photographer in your area.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">{{cta(&#8216;e53b1a8d-c55d-4c7f-9a71-6ee1d7803e16&#8242;,&#8217;justifycenter&#8217;)}}<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ThingLink 360 images can be embedded on websites, shared and promoted on Facebook News Feed, and viewed with mobile VR headsets like Google Cardboard.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Retailers are looking into virtual reality and wondering what\u2019s in it for them and when should they jump in. Should you invest in a shopping experience where &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3672,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[375,423,270],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3671"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6624,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3671\/revisions\/6624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinglink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}