Bringing your building into the gallery
Your gallery's walk can take place in your own church. Missionary panels hang on your hallway walls, and kiosks stand in your foyer and fellowship hall. A volunteer captures the building once, and the AI does the placing.
Each one is included or available as an add-on, depending on your plan. You can start with Our building and add a scan later.
Before you capture anything
- Choose the spaces. Hallways with long plain walls are for panels. Open floor in the foyer or fellowship hall is for kiosks. Five to fifteen spaces is plenty.
- Prepare them. Turn on all the lights and set the blinds the same way in every room. Move carts, stacked chairs and temporary signs out of the way.
- Leave people out. Capture when the building is empty, so no one appears in the gallery without being asked.
- Do it in one session, so the light looks the same from space to space.
Our building: a 360° walk
Visitors walk through your halls the way they walk the virtual hall. Each step glides forward from one 360° photo to the next, so how you space and line up the spots decides how natural the walk feels.
What you need
- A consumer 360° camera, roughly $350 to $550 in 2026, on a light stand or monopod with a small base.
- The camera's phone app, used as a remote.
Plan the route
- Sketch the floor plan on paper and mark a spot every 10 to 15 feet (3 to 5 m) along each hallway, one in the middle of each open room, and one at each doorway.
- Each spot should be able to see the next one. That's how visitors walk between them.
- Keep the spots down a hallway in a straight line, along its middle. Walking forward then feels like walking down the hall. Put one spot where hallways meet, so visitors can turn there.
- Number the spots in the order you'll shoot them.
Shoot
- Set the camera at 5 feet (1.5 m), the same height at every spot.
- Turn on HDR, which helps with bright windows. Use a timer of at least 2 seconds, or the remote.
- Step out of view: leave the room, or stand behind a door or pillar.
- Shoot every spot in route order, in one session.
- Export full 360° photos: JPGs twice as wide as they are tall. Keep the file names in shooting order.
Upload them all at once in Admin, under Venue, then Our building. The AI levels each photo, prepares it to load quickly, names the spots and suggests which spots link to which, in both directions, so visitors can walk back the way they came. It also marks wall areas where panels fit. You confirm or change each suggestion.
A 3D scan (beta)
What you need
- A recent iPhone or Android phone.
- The free Scaniverse app, which builds the scan on the phone and exports it as a splat file (SPZ). Any app that exports a Gaussian-splat PLY file also works.
- Up to three scans, one per space: a hallway, the foyer, the fellowship hall.
Scan
- Prepare the space as above. Glass, mirrors and direct sun confuse scans, so close the blinds on sunny windows.
- Hold the phone at chest height and walk slowly, about half your normal pace.
- Sweep the phone gently side to side as you go. Tilt it up to the ceiling and down to the floor now and then.
- In open rooms, walk a loop around the edge and finish where you started. Two to four minutes per space is about right.
- Process it in the app's splat mode, then export SPZ (or PLY). Upload it in Admin, under Venue, then 3D scan.
No app? Record a slow, steady 2 to 4 minute walkthrough video of the space in 4K at 30 frames a second, and upload the video instead. The scan is built in the cloud, which uses AI credits.
Scans are in beta. If one doesn't come out well, the walk uses Our building or the virtual hall until you upload a better one.
Want it done for you?
Upload your 360° photos or scan, and we'll place the panels, link the scenes and fine-tune the result for a one-time fee. We work from what your church captures; we don't travel to take the pictures.
What the gallery accepts
| Type | Formats | Size | Limits by add-on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 360° photos | JPG, 2:1 shape (equirectangular) | At least 5,760 × 2,880; up to 50 MB each | 50 spots, 1 GB |
| 3D scan | SPZ or Gaussian-splat PLY; or an MP4/MOV walkthrough | Up to 300 MB a scan; video up to 4 minutes | 3 scans, 1 GB |
Your missionaries can send photos, video and 360° views from the field too. Share the missionary guide with them.