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!