The website is simple and easy to navigate with three main homepage options: Meet the Designers – a brief summary of each designer accompanied by a photo of the room and the design philosophy; View Photos – a series of still images of each room; and Tour the Home, where virtual tours of each are located and the user has the option of viewing the tours in either Java or QuickTime. This latter section is impressive with eleven panoramas (the ninth room is a fitness getaway and has three panos); each room is loaded with hotspots on just about everything within the room – from chaise lounges to lighting fixtures to carpets and candlesticks. Select one of the nine rooms from the menu at the bottom of the page and the cubic panorama opens, accompanied by a description of the decorator’s design philosophy for that room. Clicking on a hotspot offers the user the option of performing an immediate eBay search for that item or saving it in a list.

Once Carrington heard details of the project, he had no reservations that he and his company were the right choice; in fact, it seems it was a perfect match of technology needs and design sensibility. “I felt that it was a perfect match for our overall skill set, and the project was perfectly aligned with where we want to go with our approach to the technology of VR imaging,” says Carrington.

Considering that virtual tours were used for such a high-profile event as this, and Carrington Weems’ success in delivering a clean well-organized website that seamlessly integrates virtual tours with hotspots and eBay searches, we were extremely curious to learn more details about this large production. Carrington Weems responds:

Can you divulge some of the stats for the eBay Showhouse website – number of photos, number of virtual tours, hotspots, technical considerations, etc.

Since this job also entailed shooting still images for print media, there were many images shot altogether. There were ultimately nine areas in the house that we wanted to take people to. One of the areas, the fitness getaway, was set up as three separate divided areas itself so ultimately we shot 11 final images for the virtual tour with one final used in each room, but three used in the fitness getaway.

For the still images we just shot what was there in wide perspective and also details. On average we shot 8-12 final images per room for stills.

The hotspots in the virtual tour were quite a bit more of a challenge. eBay wanted this to be a merchandising opportunity in order to show that eBay is not just a mammoth garage sale, but that you can actually buy some very well conditioned and even new home furnishing items. Therefore the approach was to make many items all through the house hotspotted. The destinations for the hotspots clicks are pointed to predefined searches on eBay.com for similar items that are currently in live auction. So if you are in a room and you like the glass candlestick for example, you can then go to eBay to see a search of glass candlesticks.

Since there would be so many hotspots (almost 200 in QTVR and 200 in JAVA) I had a database system built for this tour that would ultimately allow the viewer to keep track of the hotspots that they wanted to save for later viewing. You can now click a hotspot, see that searched item now, or save it on a running list which you can keep referring back to, and then even send to your own email address for viewing later.

How did Virtually Anywhere obtain the contract to shoot the VR tour and photos? Was the virtual tour concept a difficult sell?

We were contacted from the corporate communications department of eBay. They had seen some of our previous work for other high profile clients and thought that it would be an appropriate match for us to produce this virtual tour. While working on details of the tour and website, they learned that my background was as a commercial photographer so they asked for me to do that aspect of the job as well.

They already had a virtual tour in mind since they had used one with another company in a previous Showhouse last year. This year they were putting a lot more promotion into the Showhouse, and they wanted to step up the design of not only the tour but for the entire website. That need really helped us as we put a lot of effort into a really clean design approach. We don't see a virtual tour as only good photography but a full integration of all associated design, photography, interface and programming.

Once I heard about the details of the project, I had no real reservation at all. I felt that it was a perfect match for our overall skill set, and the project was perfectly aligned with where we want to go with our approach to the technology of VR imaging.

What were some of the more difficult aspects of doing the shoot and producing the website?

Originally they also asked us to host the tour and website. They had told us of some server problems with traffic spikes from the previous year just after some major TV stories ran. We were told of a projected traffic estimate of 30 million unique viewers to the site, mostly all in the first month so that concerned us a bit. Ultimately it was decided to host with Akamai so we did not have to deal with those aspects, but anytime you get numbers like that, there can be other problems, so we have been very careful on creating the content to accommodate that amount of viewers.

Probably the scariest part of the job was the timeline. Once the project started to unfold, I could see that there would be a very short time frame from the shoot days to the launch day. And from experience, this job felt like there would be a lot of changes along the way. I knew the room designers would be tweaking their work until the last minute. This is a very dynamic project which I love since it offers the challenge of solving many unknown problems, but that fluidity can bite you too.

We already had a website design approval before shooting, so we were ready to go once the images were shot and polished. The virtual tour images were shot on a Tuesday, and the launch day was originally set for a Saturday (11 days later) to coincide with an A&E documentary. That would give us 10 days to do all postproduction and program a whole bunch of hotspots (almost 400 total) and also do a lot of testing for the hotspot database system. Their immediate needs were still photos for publication and distribution to the media, which took out a chunk of my time. While that deadline was tight, we felt we could make it. THEN, the firm handling the PR for the event was skilful enough to land a big article in the New York Times about the project. Problem there was that it was to run before the original launch day, so eBay asked us if we could have the full site ready four days earlier. That was a difficult phone call for me! The sales person in you always wants to say "yes" to your client no matter what, but the producer in you says "what, are you insane!?"

We did make that earlier deadline, although we launched without all the hotspots; that programming was updated a couple of days later.

Do you have a breakdown of website visitors to date and the proportion viewing photos vs. virtual tours, as well as within the virtual tours subset the QuickTime vs. Java breakdown.

So far the site has only been live for under a week and we only have very limited statistics that we can see. We can see that the unique visitors count is slightly under 50,000. We cannot see yet how many pages and what pages they are looking at.

As of June 10th I think the ebay.com site will have a full time graphic link of the homepage for a few weeks. This will be the thing that generates the most traffic since they get so many people worldwide viewing their site. We do not yet have any statistics on viewer trends such as QTVR vs. JAVA

Was this a one-man operation; if not, how many were involved on this project and that were their roles?

Virtually Anywhere is a small shop and I personally wear many of the hats around here, but there is no way I could not have done this in this timeframe without some very skilled help. Primarily my main team member that does lead design and programming is a guy named Chris Rhodes. He and I have been creating everything you see from Virtually Anywhere since inception in 1998. He is a highly talented minimalist, new media designer, and I am very happy to work with him on a daily basis. He defines the look and feel of all of Virtually Anywhere's tour modules and websites.

The other important players in this job are a programming group called Vireo located in Brooklyn. Mike and Rachel O'Connor built the database system that we used for managing the hotspots. They also have been a great resource for other technical and server issues.

What equipment did you use for the shoot?

Canon 10D camera
Lexar Pro CF media
Kaidan Quickpan III Pro Configuration
Bogen carbon Fiber tripod
Mac Powerbook 1.25 Gigahertz w/1gig Ram
Mac G4 Dual 512 megahertz Processor
PtMac Stitching software
Cubic Converter
Cubic Connector
Dreamweaver HTML Authoring software
VR Hotwires
Adobe Photoshop CS
Proprietary database Software for managing hotspot html coding

Virtually Anywhere Interactive produces a fully integrated product that creates a turnkey deliverable, built to replicate any specifics that our clients need in communicating their sales message related to their environment. We build all our work to graphically match a client’s existing materials, but with an intuitive interface to make for a streamlined user experience.

We are proud of our growing client list which contains many Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, Dell Computer, American Airlines, several NFL Football teams, numerous national healthcare groups, SBC communications, and now eBay, just to name a few. But we also can and do work with much smaller clients as well.