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VR or a virtual tour? The difference the quotes do not explain
Two quotes both labelled VR, one four times the other. What a walkable build does that a 360 tour cannot, and when the cheap one is the right answer.
A development director sent us two quotes last year and asked why one was four times the other when both said VR on the cover. They were not quoting the same thing. One was a walkable real-time build. The other was eight rendered spheres and a web viewer. Both are legitimate products. Only one of them was described honestly.
This is the most confused corner of the category, and it costs developers money in both directions — paying walkthrough prices for photospheres, or dismissing VR entirely because the demo they saw was a photosphere and felt like nothing.
A virtual tour is a set of photographs you can turn your head inside
A 360 tour is pre-rendered. For each position in the apartment, the renderer produces a sphere — everything visible from that exact point, in every direction. The viewer wraps that sphere around the camera. You can look up, down and behind you, at full render quality, because every pixel was computed in advance.
What you cannot do is move. Walking towards the window is not possible, because there is no information about what the room looks like from two metres closer. Tours solve this by letting you jump between positions, the way street view does. It works, and buyers understand it immediately.
The things a tour cannot do all follow from the same fact: nothing exists except the spheres.
- Nothing moves. Doors stay as they were rendered, blinds stay as they were rendered, lights stay on or off.
- Nothing responds. A buyer cannot change the flooring and see it, because that would be a different render.
- Scale does not read. This is the big one, and we will come back to it.
- The light is fixed. One time of day, one season, whatever was chosen at render time.
A real-time build is a running simulation
A walkthrough built in a game engine is not showing you pictures. It is computing the image sixty to ninety times a second from a model of the apartment, while you move. That is a fundamentally different thing, and it costs more because the whole apartment has to be built to hold up from any angle at any distance, not just from eight fixed points.
What you get back for that is everything in the list above, inverted. Doors open. The sun moves. The buyer switches from oak to stone flooring while standing on it. They walk from the hallway into the bedroom without a jump cut, which is the only way the layout ever becomes intuitive.
Scale is the argument
Here is the thing that decides it for most developers. In a headset running a real-time build at true scale, a 2.6 metre ceiling feels like 2.6 metres. A 3.2 metre bedroom feels narrow, because it is narrow. Buyers walk out knowing how big the apartment is in their body rather than in their head.
A 360 sphere does not do this reliably. The geometry is correct, but you are stationary, and without the parallax of moving your own body through a space, the brain does not commit to a size. This is why buyers who have only seen a tour still ask "but how big is the living room, really" — and why buyers who have walked it in a headset stop asking.
The objection a plan cannot answer is "I cannot picture it". A tour partly answers it. A walkthrough removes it.
Which one you should actually buy
Almost nobody should buy only one. The two land in different places in the funnel and the production overlaps, so the second one is far cheaper than the first.
- Virtual tours on the website, for everyone. They open from a link on any phone with nothing installed, which is where the first look happens. Cheap enough to cover every unit type rather than two flagships.
- A real-time walkthrough in the sales gallery, for the buyers who turn up. This is the one that converts a viewing, and it is also the thing visitors photograph and post.
- Both together, if you are selling across borders. Ship the tours to an overseas shortlist; fly the serious ones to a headset in your office.
Four questions that separate the quotes
If you are comparing suppliers right now, these four answers will tell you which product you are being sold, whatever the cover page says.
- Can the buyer walk anywhere in the apartment, or only stand at fixed points? If the answer involves the word "hotspots", it is a tour.
- Can the buyer change a finish while they are standing there? Pre-rendered spheres cannot, at any price.
- Does the sun move? A real-time build can be asked what the south bedroom looks like at six in November. A tour was rendered once.
- Does it run on the headset itself, or does it need a PC on the stand? Standalone is what you want in a sales gallery, and it is a real engineering constraint, not a detail.
What it does not do
Neither product closes a sale on its own, and a developer who is told otherwise should discount the rest of the pitch too. What both do is remove an objection and extend a viewing. The sales conversation afterwards is still a sales conversation — it just starts from a buyer who already knows what the apartment feels like.
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