We compared the performance of P360 Virtual tours with other similar competitors with respect to functionality. P360 outperformed all competitors on all tested speed metrics.
There are a range of virtual tour products available on the market, but despite changing times and technologies, the number one criterion for consumers is virtual tour loading speed. This is the focus around which we decided to build our product. P360 Virtual Tours supports loads the highest quality images with as little compression as possible, making it the fastest tour available
How we do it
P360 Virtual Tours is one of the oldest and largest sharing service in the world. We launched the first version in 2011 and have helped over 20 million users. P360 is the most downloaded panorama app on both iOS and Android, having 15 million downloads. To successfully meet this demand, me made speed and quality our top priorities.
We tested this using the most reliable and sure shot way which is looking actual calls being made using Chrome dev tools and Locust (https://locust.io/), one of the reasons for doing this is because a lot of the page speed tools are not truly measuring "tour loading".
Speed Test
The parameters we decided to test our virtual tour tests on were: 1) How quickly the tour loads given the order to execute. 2) How quickly does content load AFTER the first part of the tour is loaded. 3) How much time does it take for content to get uploaded.
Initial Loading time : We calculate the initial load time as the time taken the content to appear on the screen, since the user has entered the url on the browser.
Screen Shot 2020-06-30 at 10.19.38 AM.png
19.2 KB
View full-sizeDownload Next Hotspot Load time:Time taken for the next content to be fully displayed once the user has clicked on the hotspot in a tour.
Upload speed: We measure upload speed as the time taken for the content to be uploaded to the services server and then the amount of time the processed takes content to be displayed back on the clients browser.
Screen Shot 2020-06-30 at 10.19.52 AM.png
32 KB
View full-sizeDownload You will observe that Kuula for a larger size image is much faster but that is because Kuula pre-process's the content before uploading it to their server, where the file resolution is reduced. This measurements doesn't include the time involved in resizing that content
