Three to five working days — except the one that took two weeks
Three to five working days for most tours, from the capture day to the files landing with you, and never less than three. Station count barely moves that. What moves it is the information layer: a hotel with forty positions and no popups shipped in four working days, while a university building with forty-eight positions, eighty-one information popups and two tracked floor plans took two weeks. Eight more photographs, and two and a half times the elapsed time.
Why never less than three
Because there is a fixed sequence and it does not compress usefully. The panoramas have to be stitched. Colour and exposure have to be corrected to a consistent look across the whole building, which is a comparison job rather than a per-image one — a room that looks right on its own can look wrong next to the corridor it opens onto. The connection graph has to be built and then walked, position by position, to make sure every route lands where the arrow said it would. Then the folder gets packaged and checked on a phone, a desktop and in a headset browser.
We do not sell a rush tier. A shorter promise would either be a lie or a decision to skip the checking pass, and the checking pass is where the mistakes are found.
Two real jobs, eight photographs apart
| Job | Stations | Overlays | Information popups | Tracked floor plans | Elapsed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel Nertili, Sarandë | 40 | 231 | 0 | 0 | Four working days |
| Canadian Institute of Technology, Tirana | 48 | 271 | 81 | 2 | Two weeks |
Counts read out of the delivered tour files. Elapsed times are the studio’s own record for these two jobs.
The hotel is not a simple building. Forty positions covering the parking road, reception, the restaurant, the gym, a bar, the beachfront and seven guest rooms shown by their own room numbers, tied together by 231 overlays — of which 229 are navigation arrows and not one is an information popup. There is nothing to write, nothing to lay out, nothing to check for accuracy against the client’s own facts. It shipped in four days. Read the log at forty stations, seven room types, four working days.
The university building took two weeks with eight more positions, and almost none of the difference is photography. Eighty-one information popups is eighty-one pieces of content to place, position, style and then verify against what the institution actually wanted said about each room. Two floor plans with live position tracking means every one of the forty-eight positions pinned to its point on a plan, and both plans tested as you move. The photography was a fraction of that fortnight. Eighty-one popups and two tracked floor plans is the full production log.
What moves the date, in order
| Thing | Effect on the date |
|---|---|
| Information popups | Large. The single biggest driver, and it scales with how many and how much text is in each |
| Floor plans with position tracking | Large. Every panorama has to be pinned and the result walked through |
| Words we have to write for you | Large, and unpredictable. Content creation is quoted separately for this reason |
| An extra language | Moderate. A second information layer to build and proofread over the same capture |
| Audio and video | Moderate. Placement is quick; getting the files and the rights to them is usually not |
| Descriptive photographs | Small. Shot on the same visit and attached in the build |
| Station count on its own | Small. Twice the photographs is nothing like twice the elapsed time |
| Floors, or building size | Negligible on its own. It is what is built on top that costs days |
What moves the date on your side
- Access. One visit that gets into every room beats two visits that each get into most of them. A locked door is a return trip.
- Decisions about content. If eighty-one popups need eighty-one pieces of approved text, the tour ships when the text does. This is by far the most common reason a build waits.
- Sign-off. One named person who can say yes is worth several days.
- Readiness of the space. What can and cannot be fixed after the shutter closes is set out in prepare your space for a capture day.
What we do not publish, and why
We do not publish days on site per project, or an average capture-to-handover figure across the archive. We have not recorded either consistently enough to stand behind a table of them, and a number invented for a blog post is exactly the thing this section of the site exists to refuse. Two real jobs with counted features and stated elapsed times are worth more than an average derived from memory, so that is what is on this page.
Questions people ask
- How long does a virtual tour take to produce?
- Three to five working days for most tours, from the capture day to the finished files being handed over, and never less than three. Larger or more feature-heavy builds take longer: a hotel with forty camera positions and no information layer shipped in four working days, while a university building with forty-eight positions, eighty-one information popups and two tracked floor plans took two weeks. You get an estimate for your own job with the quote.
- Does a bigger building take longer to deliver?
- Much less than people expect. Station count is a weak predictor of elapsed time; what actually drives it is what gets built on top of the capture — information popups, floor plans with position tracking, extra language layers, and any text we have to write. Two of our tours differ by eight camera positions and by more than a week of build, and almost all of that difference is the information layer.
- Can you deliver a virtual tour faster if we pay more?
- No, and there is no rush tier on our rate card. Below three working days the only thing left to compress is the checking pass, where every route is walked to confirm the arrows land where they should and the tour is tested on a phone, a desktop and in a headset browser. If a date is tight, the productive conversation is about which features to leave out of the first build, since most of them can be added later without re-shooting.
- How long does the capture visit itself take?
- It depends on the station count, and you will have that number before we arrive. Most spaces stay open and trading while we work — we shoot around you rather than closing the building. Larger jobs that need more than one day away also carry accommodation at cost, which appears in the quote before anything is booked.
