RICOH360 Tours Review

Its me, again! Hi! I decided to take some time this week to continue my search for what program is best for my needs to share my 360° media. Today I’m focusing on the RICOH Tours application! (Please note: They are now known as RICOH360 Tours.)This is one with a high entry fee, so the “free” edition is probably the one most hobbyists would want, as the paid offers features that do nothing to enhance the hobbyist’s experience.

I used the Ricoh Theta SC Hatsune Miku to capture my photos/videos as usual. I am interested in trying out different 360° programs in order to find what fits my needs best; something quick, efficient, and optimized for social media.

Initial Thoughts

The RICOH Tours website is, first and foremost, quite nice looking. A little confusing terminology between the Free Trial and the Free Demo (one of which requires scheduling a meeting and the other which just needs an email address), but otherwise straightforward. Of note is that the RICOH Tour site redirects you to download an application in order to create tours, so you need a mobile device of some sort for this. I opted for the free trial. This is another piece of virtual tour software designed for real estate agents.

When you open the app after signing in and go to create a tour, you are first and foremost prompted to put in a street address. As you can see from this screenshot, it is a required element of creating a tour.

Interestingly, you have the option of seeing analytics for your tour. I plan to update my review in a week or so with that information.

This review will be a little shorter than my other reviews, as the RICOH Tours application is fairly barebones. It allows you to string together some images, but not to edit them. I would imagine that the value comes from the analytics tab as well as the RICOH name. The Tour team seems to be local to me here in the Bay Area, a fun nugget of information.

If you’d like to view my tour, you can do so here. In summary, here are my pros and cons for the RICOH Tours application:

Pros Cons
Quick uploads of images No editing abilities
Analytics tab offers interesting value High cost
Hotspot options are more plentiful than other free editors and Not geared towards hobbyists
Geared towards professionals in real estate App is simple, web browser is, too. The program looks good for the viewer, but from the backend is fairly plain.
Highly geared towards lead generation, so great for real estate! Watermark is large on viewer end

Concluding Thoughts

The RICOH Tours application is a simple and easy way to share your 360 content. It is straightforward and not very frilly, which is a nice change from how slow and convoluted the THETA app was the first time I tried it. I recommend trying it out for the 2 week trial, and will update this paragraph in a week when I have some analytics for my tour! :slight_smile:

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I see the pictures in your Tour have a RICOH Tours logo at the nadir. Did you add that? Can you add a different logo?

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Oh, that’s SO annoying, that doesn’t show in the app. I’m editing my pros/cons table in light of this. It looks like there is no way to change the type of watermark or the location, as it doesn’t show on my end. Maybe in the paid version.

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I found this. Do you have access to the “Management Console” as part of the Free Trial?

Yes, I just went in and did this! This is only available in the desktop version it seems, which is interesting. I made this tour on mobile, so this option wasn’t available to me during the creation of the tour. You can replace the “tripod cover” with an image, but you can’t leave it blank, it seems.

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That does look custom. :slight_smile: So you can clearly customize the nadir / tripod cover using the Free Trial. How long does the Free Trial last?

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Yes, unfortunately a transparent background doesn’t seem to be creating a transparent tripod cover for me. I honestly think it would be less intrusive without the cover, but maybe I am the minority. The trial lasts 14 days!

Thanks for the review, I had never heard of it! The app does’t seem to be available in Italy yet unfortunately.
So is this going to be available for subscription only or with a free tier as well?
It’s basic indeed but I quite like the final interface and the hotspot links look quite good actually.
Thanks!

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Unfortunately, it looks like it is a subscription with a free tier only available as a trial run. I agree that it looks very sleek on the other end! :slight_smile:

I think that @Martin might be associated with RICOH TOURS and may have more info.

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From the article:

The rebrand includes a new name, Ricoh360 Tours, and the release of two new features that allow users to create teams and automatically crop 3D videos to create 2D photos.

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