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Using new technology to offer interactive virtual tours

A man using a 360-degree cameraAt Brandon, we continually look at how we can further improve our support to people with a learning disability, autism, or both. We also look for ways of improving our systems to help families, carers, advocates, and social care professionals. This includes how people find out about the types of support we offer and the support vacancies we have available.

We appreciate that it can be difficult and time-consuming to organise visits to discover if an opportunity would suit the person’s needs – whether that’s the individual themselves, or their family, social worker, or advocate.

For example, imagine you are looking for accommodation-based support, but you need wide hallways or you are looking for accommodation without stairs. How useful would it be to be able to vet the environment quickly from the comfort of your home, or your office or car?

What is a virtual tour?

So, we started to explore how we can utilise new technology on our website to offer virtual tours of our support vacancies.

In short, virtual tours are a compilation of 360-degree panoramic images. This means that the images can be viewed from all directions, as if you were turning round on the spot. The viewer can navigate the picture, rotate the image, and zoom in and out.

Increased accessibility

Example of a support vacancy listingVirtual tours have many benefits. They are accessible to more people, including those with limited mobility or health conditions that make physical viewings difficult. They also reduce the inconvenience and time spent on viewings. Virtual tours can also reduce the anxiety some people experience before visiting an unfamiliar place.

Although they aren’t expert photographers, we kitted out our business development team with cameras capable of taking 360 images and they keenly set to work photographing support vacancies.

Working closely with the business development team, our web team started to create a new area on our website to display these support vacancies in a more interactive way.

Find out more

We’re now delighted to announce the live launch and we’re pleased with the results. If you’ve ever explored estate agents’ online property listings, we think you’ll find our support vacancies have a similar feel.

To have a look, please visit the support vacancies section of our website. We’ll be updating listings and adding more vacancies as they arise, so do check back regularly.

Please note: To protect the privacy of people we support, a password is needed for some of the tours. To view an example tour, please head to the Oxfordshire support vacancies page.

If you have any questions or would like further information, please get in touch with our team: ProjectManagersBusinessDevelopment@brandontrust.org