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The image of a hospitality establishment can be greatly improved with technology.
Love comes through the eyes, according to popular wisdom, and in gastronomy, it is undoubtedly a golden rule: if we do not fall in love at first sight, we lose many points. They already say it out there: there are no second chances to make a good first impression.
We now live not only in a time when the visual is consumed more than ever in history, but the consumption of virtual reality is growing in an incredible way. Brands such as Samsung or Sony have created gadgets just to display content of this type.
Your restaurant must make a difference with 360º content: that way you leave them absorbed and take them to places or places where your potential customers can go without stepping on your restaurant and of course, to show your dishes in all their splendor.
We give you some ideas to create the content for your website, from different sources.
Take panoramic photos on Facebook
The easiest way is to use a third-party service to achieve this. In the case of Facebook, it is very good because recently it is allowed to make 360º images from the official app, without the need for special equipment.
Well, it is not entirely true.
For a fully and natively 360º photo on Facebook you will need a special camera, which is inexpensive, the Samsung Gear 360 does not exceed € 130. Just take it and upload it, Facebook will automatically detect it.
If you don’t have that camera, you can use any smartphone, and the best are the iPhone 4s onwards, the Samsung S5 onwards and the iPad 2 onwards. Just activate the panoramic mode and make your photo larger than 100º and Facebook will automatically transform it into a 360º one.
The photography can be added to your web page in a simple way.
Creating 360º Videos
With the same camera that I mentioned above, you can make 360º videos and upload them to YouTube or Facebook. Besides that camera, there are many better ones.
The problem with 360º videos is not the technical aspect. At least it’s not the most important, for now.
The characteristic and problem of 360º videos is that yes or yes, they must imply dynamism. The key to a good 360º video is giving your viewer full control. Check out the following video:
The viewer decides which of the two chefs to see, has a broad vision of the restaurant, and at the same time, does not lose detail of what the chef is saying. You must give the viewer a reason to watch a video that is dynamic and rotate the view.
Try to offer a panoramic view, wide and with different scenarios to your viewers, it is the key behind a 360º video. After all, you want them to see everything about your team and your business.
Create 360º photos
No, it is different from the first point. Here I will talk about 360º photos of your dishes to upload to your website.
What we are looking for is a 360º photograph that rotates around your plate. As some stores do with their products, such as cameras, shoes or computers.
It consists of photographing an object, in this case, a plate of yours, from different angles, and then assembling them so that they look like an object that rotates on itself from a single angle. The result should be like this.
You can go to a photographer specialized in this type, but if you like technology, you are patient and you like to learn, there are many ways to do it yourself, and your team, with an ordinary camera.
In Engadget there is a complete tutorial to make a home study in which you will not invest a lot of money. If you don’t want to do it yourself, because fortunately, you have a lot of work and you don’t have time, there are businesses dedicated to it.
Currently the company Dacuda is creating a camera that will do all this work from an app on our iPhone, in fact they have already published a video, but we are still waiting for the project to be public. That will save us a lot of work and allow practically anyone to take photos of this type.
360º content is an unrivaled opportunity for the highly underused restaurant industry: use it as a hallmark and to strengthen your brand. It is not expensive nor does it cost a lot of work.