About two years ago I built an interactive 3d flythrough of a Gatwick hotel. The new Gatwick Hotels virtual tour will work in much the same way making this original experiment a dry-run for this more polished, more successful project.
Functionality wise it was a success. The user was given a 360 view of the Gatwick hotel and the ability to navigate about at their leisure. File size was a concen so the hotel was presented in a stylised, limited coulour palette. The orignal plan was to render directly to vector but my PC couldn’t perfom the renders quick enough so I ended up with JPGs. Download times were border line acceptable as preloading was seperated by rooms.
You can see this demo here: http://gatwickhotels.info/gatwick-hotels-demo/gatwick-hotels-demo.html
The new Gatwick hotels virtual tours will work in a similar way to this original model. The user will enter the Gatwick hotel, look around at their leisure and click on the different roms they want to visit.
Fundamentally the final version will be photorealistic. Where I used block colour in the dry-run I will be using realistic modeling and rendering techniques to raise the production values imeasurably to create the definitive virtual tour.
Tags: Gatwick hotels, virtual tour