Show Your Place

I wanted to rent out an apartment, and I wanted to have a virtual tour of it, so potential renters could take a virtual walk within the browser within the advertisement. So I started searching for tools that I could use. Unfortunately, I had problems with all of them, like: - They were slow - Not intuitive to use - Expensive - Camera control was weird - The transition animation when going from one photo to another was weird, or not even available - Didn't support some of my 360 photo images, they were rendered weirdly, especially if they were incomplete (for example top and bottom was missing) Being a software developer, I ended up creating my own solution. Some key highlights that make it different from other, similar tools: - The 3D/graphics part doesn't use any 3rd party libraries, it's "native" WebGL. - The internal "sphere" it's using to render the equirectangular image onto, is a mathematically perfect sphere (using ray casting), created in the shaders directly. It doesn't use triangles to make up a rough/edged geometry of a sphere, so it's faster, way less resource-hungry, and even smoother than traditional methods. - The camera control is super smooth and fluid, it feels as natural as it can be For the UI, I used react and styled-components. For the backend I used a basic express node js server, the database is postgres, the passwords are stored with argon2 hashing. Generally I tried to avoid including 3rd party libraries and dependencies, because I wanted a minimalistic, fast, and reliable app. Feel free to try, let me know your thoughts. Peter