Like any company, we’ve developed our own terminology to help our team and Creators understand the pieces that make up a Threshold Virtual Tour. Please read the terms below to help familiarize yourself with the terms we use.
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We capture in a specific, direct, artful, and intentional way, both on a location level and on a virtual tour level. When we say “capture” we mean the full process of capturing a location the Threshold way.
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When a Creator captures and publishes a tour, the next step is for our Content Production Team to finish the connection. This involves our proprietary software that the team uses to “connect” each pano to the next in order to create a finished virtual tour. CPT is looking out for quality issues along the way and delivers feedback flags to help Creators see where issues might be occurring and impacting the final virtual tour. Because Creators are separated from the connection post-process, it’s very important that a Creator uses that feedback effectively to continue to hone their capture process on the front end.
A Grandview shot is the first pano of the first tour of a location. Think of it as the exterior or streetview shot. This shot should give a clear lead-up perspective to the location, typically starting far back from the main entrance of the location, simulating a visitor walking or driving up to the entrance and going inside. Sometimes a Grandview shot starts at the entrance sign of a hotel resort, and sometimes is starts across the street from a venue. It’s your creative decision based on the location type and geography of the building/space. The Grandview shot will also serve as the default thumbnail for the location so we want this to be an impactful, click-worthy shot.
When capturing the Grandview shot, you need to think about the direction you are moving in relation to the location. The thumbnail that you see above is dictated by the second shot in the virtual tour. So, because both the grandview shot and the second shot are moving towards the building, the thumbnail nicely crops the exterior. That’s what we’re going for, and that’s how you can execute a quality start to a virtual tour.
<aside> 👨🏫 For a deeper explanation of Grandviews, go here.
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Key Aspects is how we break down a location into individual parts to be captured with individual tours. Think of the different spaces you might encounter at a restaurant: the entrance, a bar, a main dining room, an outdoor patio, and sometimes private dining rooms. These individual areas make up the whole of the location and are important aspects of a location that a visitor wants to know about when choosing a location to dine at. These key aspects translate directly into the individual tours you should try and capture: one virtual tour for each of the different key aspects present at the location.
A location is any uniquely identifiable property, typically designated by an address. A location could be a restaurant, hotel, park, a stretch of beach, or a convention center (and many more!). Locations consist of one or more virtual tours.
All locations should start with a virtual tour of the Main Entrance. This critical tour takes the user from outside of the location and crosses them over the threshold to inside of the location (see what we did there?). For outdoor locations, like a park, the Main Entrance Tour might start at the entrance sign and take the user inside of the park (see examples). All tours captured after the Main Entrance Tour are location dependent.