Sunday, January 19, 2014

TourDash and Google Street View Indoors

TourDash is a new web-based application that takes a businesses' Google Virtual Tour built with Street View technology from being a neat thing to being an extraordinary interactive and engaging virtual tour experience.

TourDash uses a simple dashboard interface to capture a copy of a Google Virtual Tour and allows one to overlay navigation and information widows.

The navigation builder lets you create and name specific anchor points anywhere in the tour.  This enables the viewers the option to click to jump right to those points in the tour.  The navigation menu is always displayed in the upper-left corner of the virtual tour.  There is also the capability to add a sub-navigation expandable menu, which is useful for larger tours.

Information windows are what make a TourDash tour incredibly powerful.  The best way to describe an info window is to say they are web pages overlaid onto the virtual tour.  You can use the simple editor tool to place content into the info windows, or if you have some experience with web design and programming you can code whatever you wish into the info windows.  Basically, any web content or web application you want can be placed inside of an info window; i.e., text, images, videos, audio, animations, forms, widgets, maps, you name it!

Info windows are set to open in the tour by either a defined field of view boundary trigger, or a by drawing a shape or outlining around any object in the tour imagery to make it a clickable hotspot.   There are options in the info window creator tool that allows you to set the width and opacity of the window, as well as aligning it left, right, or center within the tour.

TourDash has built-in Google Analytics to enable tracking of viewer activity and engagement.  It is powerful to be able to see the total views and unique viewers of a tour, the navigation links they clicked, the info windows displayed, the average duration of viewers, the links click on within the info windows, and be able to filter that activity down to a single specific day or up to any range you specify in the calendar.

Displaying a TourDash tour is done through an embed code generated by the TourDash application.  You can set the width and height you wish by either pixels or percentage, then copy paste the code into your website or even on your Facebook or other social media pages.  When you go into the TourDash editor later you simply save your changes and they instantly are live on your pages you embedded your tour onto.

TourDash is sold as an annual renewable license fee.  There are three license options; Silver, Gold, Platinum. The primary difference between the levels is the number of info windows one can create.  The largest feature difference between the license options is that the Silver level does not include the Google Analytic capabilities.

Ways to utilize TourDash is only limited by your imagination.  Since you can put any web content in an info window and make objects in the imagery clickable, you can put your e-commerce shopping cart inside the info windows to make your tour a virtual shopping experience.  Place videos in the info windows to provide entertainment or information for greater attention grab of your viewers. Restaurant tours can put the OpenTable widget in an info window so that viewers can make a reservation from inside the tour.  Embed an online form in an info window to get viewers to signup for whatever you want them to signup for.  You get the idea.

Example TourDash Tour - This is live so interact with it!

TourDash licenses can be purchased  from PlacesMobile - email places.mobile@gmail.com to order your license.

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