How long does it take to create a virtual tour?

That depends on the floor area, how accessible the spaces are, how many areas you want covered and which approvals are needed. A dependable answer comes out of a short review of the building; a blanket figure without knowing the site would not hold.

What do I need to prepare myself?

Decisions, mostly: which areas may be captured, who should be able to open the finished tour, and which zones, screens or documents stay out of it. Beyond that, access to the building and a time window for the capture.

Who does the capture?

You do, with equipment you already own. There is nothing to buy for it - a smartphone covers interiors, a drone covers facades and roofs, an action cam covers large areas.

How do I update the tour later?

When a single work area changes, a smartphone recording of that area is enough. It is merged into the existing 3D model, so the whole building does not have to be captured again.

What does it cost to create one?

The capture needs only equipment you already have. Use of siteviewer is licensed as one plan for your whole organisation, chosen by the number of people who work with it; the number of sites is not limited. The demo runs 30 days free of charge.

How to create a virtual tour of a building

Step 1: Agree the purpose and the areas

The first question is not technical. It is what the tour is for. Coordinating work inside an existing plant asks for something different from presenting a site to customers, and different again from marketing a vacant floor.

The answer decides which areas are captured and which are not. Sensitive zones, desks with personal data on them, screens and documents are ruled out here — at the start, not in a hurry before publication. The same step settles who should be able to open the finished tour.

Step 2: The capture

You capture the site yourself, with equipment the company already owns: a walk through the building with a smartphone, a drone for facades and roofs, an action cam for large indoor and outdoor areas. There is nothing to purchase for this.

What does need planning is the timing, the route and access. In a working building the quiet period usually decides the date: a hall without people and vehicles moving through it can be captured more completely, and leaves less to check afterwards.

Step 3: Reconstruction and quality control

The recordings become a spatial reconstruction. It is then checked for coverage — gaps appear where areas were obscured, walked through too quickly or badly lit.

The same step checks the content that was ruled out in step 1. People, number plates, screens and documents are reviewed before anything is published.

Step 4: Publication and access

The finished tour runs in a web browser and is reached through a link. Viewers install nothing.

The access model follows the audience and the need for protection: open, unlisted, or restricted to a defined group of people. A tour used to market a floor is shared differently from one used for internal maintenance. A published tour is a frozen, versioned state — it does not change while someone keeps working on the site.

Step 5: Updating

A tour shows the building as it was on the day of capture. When a single work area changes later — a rebuilt production cell, a reassigned storage bay — a smartphone recording of that area is enough, and it is merged into the existing 3D model.

That holds for individual areas. Whole halls and complete recaptures go through the process again from step 1.

What drives the effort

Floor area and the number of areas to be covered
Accessibility: cramped plant rooms cost more time than open hall floors
Lighting, and large featureless or reflective surfaces
A working building, which narrows both the capture window and the route
The extent of approvals and the review of sensitive content

The capture itself needs only equipment you already have. Everything beyond that is set out under pricing.

Limits

A virtual tour is not an automatically survey-grade CAD or BIM model. Distances, areas and volumes can be taken inside the tour; guaranteed dimensions still require suitable survey, scan or CAD data.

Only what was captured is shown: locked rooms, obscured zones and surfaces behind installations stay out. A tour does not replace mandatory safety briefings, nor any task that requires someone to be physically present.

How to create a virtual tour