Virtual Africa:

A Self-serving Company

Virtual Africa was created out of frustration.

Why can’t I see the inside of a house for sale without making an appointment and scheduling an appointment?
Why can’t I see what the venue has to offer before I spend my hard earned cash on a booking?
Why can’t I share this wonderful view with the world?

We wanted to step inside potential products in real estate and tourism, we wanted to interact with the scenery and we wanted to organize information visually.

So we entered the world of panoramic photography and interactive virtual tours as frustrated users.

Not as photographers, not as developers, but as users – and this has been our defining characteristic ever since.

Almost everything we do at Virtual Africa, is focussed on giving the (internet) user a better, more enjoyable and more informative experience.

It’s all about making the internet a better place to browse – for us.

Yes, its very self-serving, but it works. It allows us to stay focussed on what’s important, instead of getting caught up in technicalities and confusing customers with cool, but non sensical features.

A bit of History

So we started small in 2004, when South Africans were still on dial-up and interactive panoramic images sounded like something from the Star Trek. The world had not seen Google Earth or StreetView and virtual tours where warpy, nauseating slide slows that made you feel like a fish in a bowl.

We sniffed out the best technologies of the day and started selling our mad ideas to people in real estate and tourism.

The South African tourism industry was much more focussed on the international consumer than the Real Estate sector and we soon found that the growth in awareness and uptake was much faster too.

As the technology matured, bandwidth increased and and more and more tourism venues started reporting higher conversion rates because of multi media content – our little business started picking up speed.

By the beginning of 2010 our initial java based cylindrical tours were replaced by full screen, spherical Flash virtual tours with embedded video, sound, customized menus and more.

Our client base includes organizations such as The Mantis Collection, Pestana Hotels and Resorts and Isibindi Africa, venues like Benguerra Lodge, Bukela Lodge and the One & Only Resort.

We’re the official providers of virtual tours and 360º content for the South African Tourism Board as well as esteemed and respected tourism websites such as The Portfolio Collection, SA Places and Go2Africa.

So it seems that we’re not the only ones who where frustrated …..

The future

More and more people use the internet everyday and more and more of those users are coming to expect quality multi-media content.
Our challenge is to expand fast enough to service the need of the tourism industry to provide customers with such content.

It’s a wonderful challenge to have, seeing as it coincides perfectly with our core identity: making the internet less frustrating, cooler and more user-centric.

GigaPixel FanCam

As innovators, we cannot resist looking at and working on ‘the next cool thing in tech’ and it seems that one of those things will be GigaPixel photography.

Our initial experiments were met with such unprecedented and unexpected popularity that we’ve spent most of our time during the first half of 2010 to perfect our techniques and apply them to different circumstances.

The most notable success was our GigaPixel FanCam , a 5 Billion Pixel interactive 360º shot taken during large sporting events and allowing users to zoom and explore the crowd in unbelievable detail.

The response to this particular technology has been overwhelming and exploring its use as a social media integration tool has become one of the most exciting and worthwhile projects we’ve had the privilege to pursue.