Show HN: Tour Spring Gardens

With the coronavirus lockdown, people are staying at home. Many of us are thinking about how we’d prefer a different house.

However, in person viewings are not allowed in many countries, including where I live, Scotland. But from experience, physical house viewings are really useful for getting the feel for a house. For example, when looking just at individual photographs on a website, it is sometimes hard to understand how the rooms all fit together.

So to scratch this itch, I put together a fully panoramic, click through, tour of my house. This was substantially inspired by functionality on a famous mapping website.

It took several weeks of evenings and weekends to polish, but I am quite proud of the result. I think the tour is really slick, and gives a good feel for the house.

I suspect few of you are looking to buy a house in Scotland. Moreover, people care about technology on this site, so let’s talk about the tech.

At the very start, I found this requires a 360 camera. I tried stitching panoramas together from individual photographs, but that did not have good results. Then, once the images are converted into the right format, we need a panorama viewer. We settled upon Marzipano, which is a brilliant, as are a few other contenders. Marzipano also has a decent tour generation tool.

This is where the customization, polish, and value added began. For example, I wanted a clickable mini map, which would moreover show both your position and orientation. So I integrated Leaflet with the Marzipano tour, in both directions. I also added the ability to zoom into places such as cupboards, which is more appropriate than navigating full scene change.

Separately, I think there’s the open question of whether this could be commercialized. Can money be made from creating tours like this for other house sellers, as a service? Perhaps. Estate agency fees can be quite high. However, it would require some more up front work to the make the whole thing, end-to-end, a much faster process. For example, cross referencing the scenes together, and setting the orientation information, was quite time consuming.