A very good friend of mine emailed me a couple of years ago while I was shooting virtual tours in North Carolina with a link to the website of a new company that offered a way to create 360º Tours.  The company was Matterport.  I checked out the website and told him I was really impressed.  He told me I should buy their equipment and start shooting virtual tours.  He told me over and over again how cool it was.  But, as I always do, I checked it out and learned  as much as I could before making a decision.  I scheduled an appointment with a Matterport salesman and had a nice conversation about what they had to offer.

As it turns out, the camera is very expensive.  At the time of my inquiry, the top of the line setup was $4,500.00.  As I progressed with my conversation with the sales rep at Matterport, I quickly realized that there was no way I could host the video on my own servers.  As it turns out, you have to host the post-produced video on their servers for everything to work.  As a web developer since 1996, and someone who owns their own servers, this was a really big turnoff to me.