The Weight of Everything – on Benaco instead of Kuula or Matterport

For this art gallery show, the Benaco virtual tour looks much better than the Matterport tour, with richer colors, and more dynamic range. Compare those redwing blackbirds to Matterport where they’re basically all black. Doing the photography with the Ricoh Theta Z1 instead of the Matterport Pro camera came in handy, because the images are available on the Z1 so you can download them and try out different 3D tour platforms. I was able to adjust the images in Lightroom before sending them off to other platforms.

Matterport is still the best for real estate, but without having access to the images, or to how images are processed, Matterport is not the best for galleries. The image below opens up the Benaco tour in a separate page.

The Weight of Everything on Benaco

Comparing Benaco to Kuula, Benaco is much easier. All I had to do was upload the photos, and the Benaco software did the rest. In Kuula I had to manually create all the navigation points for each scan. This might be okay for real estate, where rooms are down halls and you can’t see the whole house from one point, but for an art gallery you can see almost the entire thing. If you have 16 scans, you have to have 15 navigation points for each scan. It’s a lot of work!

Benaco requires a fee for having the tour embedded in the page, but it’s not used much in the US, so for now I’m just linking to a separate page. However, I like it best of all the Matterport alternatives. If I could control the look of my images in Matterport, and if they had a better VRBO conversion, I wouldn’t be looking for alternatives.