Boundary Hotspots – Technical Tuesday
Boundary Hotspots were not the first feature created for TourDash but none the less it is one of my personal favorites. The idea behind a boundary hotspot was to have a ‘smart’ hotspot, a hotspot that would appear based on where a user was looking within the virtual tour.
In order to create this effect we allow the person editing the tour to specify and set boundaries within a panorama. Whenever a user is navigating within the boundaries that have been set, they will be shown the hotspot, the boundary hotspot. It’s that simple.
In the earlier version of TourDash we required users to complete 7 steps before they could get started with their hotspots. With the release of TourDash 2.0 we brought that number down to 1, with a single click you can start editing hotspots.
What boundary hotspots allow you to achieve within the Google Maps Business View virtual tour is a seamless integration of your marketing efforts that does not disrupt the experience of the visitor.
A great example of a business that has mastered the art of boundary hotspots is our ‘TourDash Tour of the week’-virtual tour, the CODE Student Accommodation. This tour was created by our very own TourDash Reseller, Chris Jones.
So if you’re looking to utilize hotspots just like Chris and CODE Student Accommodation, sign up and register for TourDash. Offer your clients the exclusive ability to integrate hotspots within their virtual tours via the only official Google Partner, TourDash.
TourDash 2.0 is now live!
Today we announce the release of TourDash’s latest version: TourDash 2.0! The one and only enhancer for Google Maps Business View, has evolved into a more intuitive content editor. A revolutionising way to add boundary hotspots, a more flexible advanced navigation menu and a richer hotspot editor introduces a new standard for adding and editing content within your virtual tour.
We are very curious about your experiences! Later this week we will reveal short demonstrations of the new opportunities but first we want to go ahead and give you the time to play around.
Here’s a small list of what we’ve changed in TourDash 2.0
Advanced Navigation
Reordering your navigation items has never been as easy we with TourDash 2.0. Add and label your menu items and decide what goes where, later. Now you have complete freedom to work in a manner of your choosing and still get the end result that you want.
Boundary Hotspots
The process of adding Boundary Hotspots has been completely revamped.Initially it would take you up to 7 clicks to start editing your boundary hotspots, we’ve lowered that to 1. With just a single click of the button you’ll have added a boundary hotspot and can start editing it freely.
Dynamic Hotspots
The biggest change to dynamic hotspots is without a doubt how we handle the visuals, the hotspot markers/icons. You can now individually update/change the hotspot marker to suit your need. Display a separate icon depending on whether you’re showing information, want people to look at a photo or intend for them to fill in a form.
Visuals / Hotspot Markers
– We’ve updated the visuals tab, you can now change the default hotspot markers for all the dynamic hotspot
– It is also possible to assign individual hotspots markers per dynamic hotspot
Hotspot Animations
That’s right, we’ve put some attention to detail with this update. No more boring disappearing hotspot. These smooth babies slide away as you click the close button, talk about style! Left, right and ‘Houdini’-vanish, we have an animation for every hotspot position.
Rotation
Rotation is more or less the same, we’ve optimised the code and have added the ability to ‘never stop rotation’. Once enabled the default option for rotation is to ‘Stop rotation on tour hover’ opposed to ‘Stop rotation on tour controls hover’.
Hotspot Editor
We’ve completely revamped the editor for both the boundary and dynamic hotspot. In the spirit of WYSIWYG you will immediately see all of your edits live within the hotspot. No more hassle with uploading your images through separate services, simply drag and drop them inside of the editor and store all of your hotspot images inside TourDash.
TourDash Tour of the Week | Week 21
A new week: a new Tour of the Week!
An industry that is highly suitable to use TourDash is the hospitality industry.
If a consumer/guest is looking for a nice restaurant or cafe it is not just the menu or drinks that are of interest; the guest also want to sit in a nice surrounding with a fine atmosphere.
A smart business owner shows his restaurant or café using TourDash. By doing this the online guest, who is looking for a table that night, already can ‘taste’ the atmosphere of the establishment and is also able to make a reservation or to view today’s menu.
Stadscafé De Spaarbank in Tilburg (The Netherlands) is using TourDash since January 2014 and it helps them in their online marketing strategy to tempt the online visitor to visit De Spaarbank for a drink or a meal.
TourDash Tour of the Week | Week 20
We proudly present you this week tour of the week. Our attention was drawn to a tour that makes each room in the tour vividly through a hotspot which contains both image and text in order to describe the space. This tour allows students from all over the UK & Overseas to orient remotely and contact CODE if interested. The tour is only a few weeks online but already there is an increase in the average visit time of the website!
TourDash Reseller Spotlight
Chris Jones – LeicesterPhoto LTD
In May 2012 Chris Jones was approached by Google and trained to supply Google Maps Business View into businesses and venues.
After a very successful 2012 and With continued expansion, LeicesterPhoto became incorporated in March 2013.
If you’re located in the Leicestershire area and you want to work with a Top Performing Google Trusted Photographer, contact Chris Jones!
Sign Up for TourDash Today!
Good news for all Google Maps Business View Photographers, Agencies and Resellers! You can start with TourDash today! Simply head on over to our TourDash Reseller Program page or visit the registration page directly at https://live.tourdash.com/signup.
We’ve made the application process a lot quicker asking only for the bare essentials. Once you feel you’re comfortable with all the amazing features that TourDash has to offer you can go ahead fill out the rest of your profile information and purchase your first license.
If you’ve used the old information form we will send you an invitation today!
TourDash makes great effort in ensuring that you have a complete platform available so that you can offer TourDash to all of your existing and new Google Maps Business View clients. In the same manner we listen to all of your questions, suggestions and even complaints! If you want to voice any of the aforementioned simply email us at support@tourdash.com, even if it’s just to say hi and show your appreciation!
The team here at TourDash is looking forward to seeing your creative work! We’re always looking out for examples such as DIY-Kitchens that was awarded the first TourDash Tour of the week. Think you can make something just as good? We would love to see it!
One last friendly reminder when you’re going to register for TourDash, please remember that you can only do this using the email for which you are publicly known on the Google Maps Business View website.
TourDash Tour of the Week | Week 19
Since TourDash is out of BETA numerous TIPs and Agencies are supporting TourDash and registered themselves as an authorized TourDash reseller. We are very pleased to have more than 500 resellers at this moment!
Also what makes us happy is that more and more examples are appearing of how companies deploy TourDash as part of their online marketing. At TourDash we believe there should not be a strict distinction in online and offline. We believe in cross channel marketing, were clicks meet bricks and were online and offline channels can reinforce each other.
With many new Google Trusted Photographers and Google Trusted Agencies that use TourDash to enrich the Google Maps Business View of their clients, we come in recent weeks against some good examples of how the functionality of TourDash can be used. We would like to share this experience with you, so that you can gain new ideas and you can use those ideas on one of your tours.
We have a winner this week. We invite you to take a look at the tour of DIY-Kitchens. With a simple, but smart menu structure, they are using the advanced navigation to guide visitors through the showroom. The boundary and dynamic hotspots are used to provide the tour visitor with additional information about the kitchens and the hotspots also provide links to the company website for more detailed information and possible amenities on the specific kitchens.
Click on the image to experience the DIY Kitchens ‘Tour of the week’ yourself!
If you need to, type “letmein” in the white box at the bottom of the page to get access to the website.
Reseller: Local Exposure
Client: DIY-Kitchens
TourDash on your mobile device
Whenever you’re looking at TourDash on your desktop or laptop you’ve got yourself an amazing interactive experience. Right now we’re working on improving the experience on your mobile device but this is a two-step program.
The first step towards ‘TourDash on your mobile device‘ speaks to how Google Street View and Google Maps Business View performs on your Android, iPhone or Windows mobile/tablet device within a mobile-browser.
At the moment it is still lacking. The high-end range of Android and iPhone devices seem to manage quite well with showing these virtual tours, but even on these devices the performance does not match the quality of your desktop experience or the Google Maps apps. Anything below that will show you a questionable experience unless you’re looking at a virtual tour in an equirectangular projection.
On the left you see what the tour looks like on your desktop and on the right what it looks like on your mobile device, an equirectangular projection. A distinct difference, it is possible for TourDash to force a 3D-projection instead of an equirectangular projection, we do so now, but this will result in a slow and delayed experienced when navigating through the virtual tour on your mobile device.
We’re always looking for ways to improve on this experience and at the moment we’re doing it together with Google. However, it’s wise to keep in mind that to a certain extent you’re dealing with hardware limitations which you can’t always overcome.
The second step of this process is how TourDash works on your mobile device which. Right now this is the exact same as your desktop, that’s what we’re going to change.
We’ve hidden the navigation panel behind a familiar icon that’s common with a navigation panel.
Boundary hotspots appear as you swipe around in the virtual tour, they grow and fully appear once you’re looking within the predetermined area.
Last but not least, here’s a quick video of showing you a VERY brief example of TourDash mobile.
Hello 500!
It’s been a while but we’ve finally gathered enough material to surprise you with a blog post. Since our initial beta launch well over 3 months ago we’ve made a lot of improvements to TourDash as well as adding some new features. But let’s be honest, our primary goal was to rid ourselves of bugs which I am happy to say we’ve successfully managed to do.
TourDash is out of beta, we’ve still not fully launched but not for any technical reasons. Right now we’re focusing on better understanding our current resellers and not to forget, our future resellers, all of you.
TourDash and supported languages & applicants
As it stands we have a long list of applicants interested in selling TourDash. We’re going to start giving more and more resellers access to TourDash but we want you to keep in mind that at the moment we are only capable of offering TourDash to English speakers. There are no country restrictions, as long as you have no problem with the English language. Whether this is the case, we’ll let you be the judge of that.
With this we are not saying that we will not support other languages but the biggest factor to take into account is that whilst we could translate support documents or even the application, we can not respond to your support questions in languages other than English.
TourDash, the future
So we’ve got a great looking future ahead of us and with this closing chapter beta I would like to share with you some of the improvements we have in mind for the future of TourDash.
- TourDash Mobile Interface
- Hotspot Templates
- Guided tours
Currently we’re developing a complete stand-alone mobile interface for anyone viewing TourDash. But rather than trying to quickly summarise what this is all about, we’ll be giving you a look into the development of the TourDash Mobile Interface through its own blog post, stay tuned!
Creative freedom is very important to us but we completely understand that some people have different areas of expertise and are quite content with pre-defined design standards. In order to accomodate everyone we’ll be introduce a new way of creating hotspots that will allow you to add custom completely styled feature-rich hotspots with just a couple of clicks.
Define a path within your virtual tour that will automatically be ‘walked’, show off hotspots containing text and videos and key moments or have audo playing to make it a complete package.
The future looks very promising, I can assure you that I’m very excited and I hope all of you are too. As always, you can email us regarding any pre-sales questions you might have at support@tourdash.com and we’ll respond to the best of our abilities.
Sincerely,
Roswell Balentien & Team TourDash
TourDash Closed Beta
Truth be told the closed beta has been going on for close to a month. We’ve got some wonderful Trusted Google Photographers from across the world that are currently experimenting with and integrating TourDash within their workflow.
As of right now TourDash is limited to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. We have a total of 45 closed-beta resellers and are looking to expand on a weekly basis at a yet-to-be determined rate.
We appreciate any and every comments we get so do not hesitate to email us with questions at info@tourdash.com. At the same time I want to point out that if you’re interested in joining the closed beta you are better off heading to our TourDash Reseller Application page. We’re looking at all signups but this does not mean that everyone can join. If you have additional information you want to pass along but feel that application has no room for, contact us.