Walk through any room, floor or project in a looping video

01A camera that plans its own shots

You don't set up any shots. The room decides them: its size, where the furniture sits, and which corner gives the best view at eye level. That corner is the one farthest from the main group of furniture. From there, the group sits in the frame, not in front of the lens.

Every room video makes the same four moves:

• Orbit. A slow turn around the room from above, under a title card with the room's name and size.
• Eye level. A glide down into the chosen corner, then a short look around from there.
• Plan. A rise to straight overhead, with the main pieces labelled.
• Back to the start. The last frame matches the first, so the clip loops without a jump.

Each move is a chapter. The share-page player marks the chapters on its seek bar, and the downloaded MP4 carries them too. A room video runs 16.5 seconds and comes to about 12 MB.The moves have fixed lengths, so every room video is the same length.

02The plan in the corner goes where the clip goes

Halfway through a walkthrough, at eye level, it is hard to tell which corner you're standing in. So each frame carries a small plan of the room or the floor. A dot marks where the camera stands, and a wedge shows what it sees.

The plan is drawn into the frames themselves, not over the video by the player. A plan drawn by the player would exist only on the share page. Drawn into the frames, it is in the downloaded file, in a chat preview, and anywhere else the MP4 is played.

It stays out of the way when it has nothing to add. It is hidden under the opening title, so the video's poster image is clean. It steps aside during the overhead shot, when the whole picture is already the plan. The wedge has a fixed length, a little over a third of the room's diagonal. A cone that reached the far walls was lost in the eye-level shot, where the wide lens takes in most of the room.The plan is on by default. Turn off "Include mini-map" before you record to leave it out.

1 2 3 4 5

1. The shot. Drawn by the same 3D view you see on the page, at 1920 × 1080 and 30 frames a second.
2. The mini-map. The floor's plan as a plain line drawing, in the corner away from the caption, at most a quarter of the frame's height.
3. The room in shot is tinted, so on a floor tour you can see which room you're in.
4. The camera. A dot where it stands and a wedge for what it sees. Both move with every frame.
5. The caption names the room and its size.

03Floors and projects, one room after another

A floor tour opens on the whole floor, then visits each room in turn. Each visit is a look from above, a descent to eye level, a short look around, and back out. Each room is a chapter, and the plan in the corner tints the room in shot. A project tour plays each floor's tour in turn. Each floor opens on a title card with its name, room count and area.

The floor view keeps every wall standing, and the camera comes down into each room from outside it. Left alone, it flies straight through the corner walls on the way down. So as the camera descends, the walls within a few metres of it are cut down to just below its eye line. They stand back up over its last 0.3 m into the room. A door or window in a lowered wall is cut at the same height. The camera stops half a metre in from the corner, clear of both walls.

Before · coming down

Before · inside the wall

After · coming down

After · nearly in

A tour has a length limit, and when a floor doesn't fit, rooms are left out before the visits are rushed.

• A floor tour runs 60 seconds at most. Every room gets the full visit, about 8 seconds, when they all fit: that's about six rooms. Past that, each room gets a shorter look from above. If even that runs long, the smallest rooms are left out.
• A project tour runs 90 seconds at most. Each floor gets at least 18 seconds, and the rest of the time is shared out by room count. A floor that needs less than its share passes the rest on. Floors with no rooms are skipped.

In our demo project, Meridian HQ, the tour of Level 4's four rooms runs 44 seconds. The project tour covers its two furnished floors in 79 seconds.

04Nothing between the camera and the room

The eye-level shot stands in the corner farthest from the furniture. In a real room, that corner often holds a floor lamp or a plant, and the piece then fills the foreground for the whole look-around. Two rooms in our own demo project had this problem.

While a video records, anything that blocks the camera fades out:

• a piece within about a metre of the camera, gone completely at half a metre;
• a piece that crosses the first 2 metres of the line of sight;
• in a room video, a door or window close to the camera, by the same rule.

Nothing past halfway to what the camera is looking at ever fades, so the subject of the shot stays. The fade follows the camera smoothly, so a piece never pops in or out. The lamp fades as the camera comes down and returns as it rises. Only the video changes; the room stays as you left it.

Before

Now

The other option was to stop choosing corners with a tall piece in them. With the fade in place, the camera can keep the corner that frames the room best.

05Recorded in your browser

The browser tab you already have open makes the video, from the same 3D view you see on the page. It encodes the MP4, uploads it, and saves it with the room, floor or project.

Each frame is drawn on the clip's own clock, not recorded off the screen. The recorder draws frame one, then the frame one-thirtieth of a second later, and so on, and encodes each one. A slow computer makes the same smooth video, only more slowly. A fast one can finish well before the clip would have played. If you switch to another tab, recording pauses until you come back.On one development machine, the 79-second Meridian HQ tour took about 11 seconds to record.

To record your own:

• A room. Open it and choose Share, then Export video….
• A floor. Choose Video on the floor page.
• A project. Choose Export, then Walkthrough video.

Anyone who can edit a room or a floor can record its video; project tours come from the team that owns the project, not from collaborators it invited. The option appears in browsers that can encode 1080p H.264 video. Your newest video then plays on the share link, for everyone working with you on the project.