If you are considering ehouse tours - and in particular how to integrate them into your existing website / software - this section is for you.

BACKGROUND INFO

ehouse is a virtual tours (and photography and floorplan and brochure) service company. We have a central sales and processing office in London, and a nationwide team of photographers.

Our tours are supplied in 2 separate formats; web-based (a java applet) and as a self-contained emailable file (an 'exe') which is used to demonstrate at the desk, and to send by email to enquirors.

We deliver a complete service for clients, which normally runs as follows:

• We receive an order
• We confirm the order by email almost immediately
• We contact the householder / keyholder and arrange to visit the property (next-day if this is convenient)
• Our photographer visits the property, shoots the tour, then returns the images to us by email
• We make the tour, put it in draft emailable format and email it to the client
• The client checks the email tour and approves it for us.
• We then upload the tour to the appropriate webserver (depends on what arrangement is in place)

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The ehouse java applet and emailable file software has been developed by us specifically for our market. Both web and emailable versions require the Java Virtual Machine. This was fitted as standard with Windows until recently (end 2003). It is now available as a download either from our server help page (a link to which ususlly displays if a computer has no java), or from the Sun website. The applet works with version 1 java and is compatible with any java-enabled browser – it works with Internet Explorer & Netscape Navigator from v4 on.

FUNCTIONALITY

There are 2 versions of the applet available. Both versions provides the following functionality:

• Image Rotation - click buttons left or right, or click and drag on the image
• Pause - click stop button to stop the rotation
• Image Selection - from a drop down box within the applet (nb - moving from 1 image to the next does not involve any re-load of the html page)
• Info pop-up - click the info button to open a mini window with operating instructions
• Auto-scroll - after 40 seconds the next image from the drop-down list automatically loads >
• Auto-restart - after 10 seconds a stopped image restarts automatically

The enhanced version of the applet includes this functionality:

• Loading Progress - an indicator to show the remaining waiting time
• Zoom - zoom into and out of the image
• Speed adjustment - rotate the image more quickly or slowly

OPERATION

The applet references 3 information sources:

• the principal Class file (eViewer.class)
• the archive containing Class files and gifs for buttons (eViewer.zip)
• a datafile ( *.txt file)
• The datafile provides the addresses of the image files as well as the image names which show in the drop-down box. Image files are in jpeg format.

The Class-path (ie the location where the Class file is to be found) and the Datafile Directory are both hard-coded into the applet for security reasons [If either the applet or datafiles are located anywhere other than in the specified location the applet doesn’t work].

Display Size - The applet is a fixed size (350 pixels wide x 226 pixels high). Within the height, 200 pixels is the image height and 26 pixels the buttons/drop-down list box.

DOWNLOAD SPEED

The java archive (including all Class files and gifs) is 27 kb (or 50 kb for the enhanced version). The image files average 45 kb each.

Before the first image is visible, a browser must download the java archive and then the first image (a total of about 75 kb). This takes 5-20 seconds depending on connection speed. As soon as the first image has completed loading, and started playing, the remaining images start downloading in the background. By the time the first image has fully rotated and the tour moves on to the next image, it will already be in the cache and so will load instantly. Once an image has loaded it stays in cache, so the user can flick between images with no delay.

Blind Applet Loading - A way to improve download speed for the first viewing of a virtual tour is by ‘blind applet loading’. If the applet code above is placed into an html page which is visited in advance of the page containing the virtual tour [but with dimensions 0 x 0 pixels], the archive is loaded in the background into the browser’s cache. This means that when the page containing the virtual tour is launched, the tour plays almost instantly.

INTEGRATION TO A WEBSITE - SIMPLE FORMAT

We offer a hosting service whereby virtual tours can be hosted on our server. In this case, a client can link to the tour in one of 2 ways:

• Hyperlink - in this case, we place the tour into a blank html page and provide a url to it - client can place a link from their own site to this page.
• Code paste - in this case we place all the files (java, image and txt) on our server and provide the necessary html code to access the tour from its location - client can paste this code into their own site wherever they wish to play the tour.

INTEGRATION TO A WEBSITE - DATABASE FORMAT

We have considerable experience of integrating tours into database-driven websites.

We generally host all the files on our server, however for major clients we offer the option to host on their own server (in this case there is a simple technology licence to sign first which recognises our Intellectual Property).

An own-server solution can mean not having to modify existing database structures, since the existence (or otherwise) of a txt file can be used as the determination of whether a tour template should be loaded. In an own-server solution, we upload all tour files via ftp into the client's server, eliminating the need for any processing on the client's behalf.

For major clients, we are able to operate a procedure which names each datafile according to their own unique record identifier. This allows direct and automatic integration between the client database and the virtual tour of a property without any need for manual intervention once the systems have been established.

We offer a full advice, test and support service to help clients integrate tours.

Please telephone or email us for more help.

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