Why your 3D tour came out blurry (and how to reshoot)

Start here. It tells you which problem you have.

Everything is soft, everywhere. The source frames were blurry. Either you moved too fast, or the room was dark enough that the phone dropped its shutter speed to compensate. Scrub through your original video and pause at random; if the paused frame is smeared, that is the cause.

Sharp in most rooms, mush in one. Usually light. The soft room was darker than the rest, or had a large window that made the phone expose for the outside and crush the interior.

Sharp surfaces, but floating smears or ghost shapes. Reflections. A mirror, a glossy TV, or a glass wall was treated as depth, and the pipeline placed geometry where the reflection appeared to be.

One corner or ceiling is a hole or a blur. Coverage. The camera never pointed there from more than one position, so there was nothing to reconstruct.

Slower than feels natural. A relaxed walking pace is roughly 1.2 metres per second. For reconstruction, aim for half that, and slow further when turning. Panning is worse than walking: a 90-degree turn in one second blurs every frame of the turn. Take three to four seconds for a corner.

A test you can do before the reshoot: record ten seconds at your intended pace, then step through it frame by frame in the Photos app. If any frame looks like it was taken from a moving car, slow down.

Phones keep exposure correct by trading three things: aperture (fixed on a phone), ISO (grain), and shutter speed. In a dim room the shutter opens longer. A longer shutter plus a moving camera equals motion blur, even at a slow walk. The phone also raises ISO, and the noise reduction that follows smooths away exactly the fine texture the solver needs.

The fix is light, not settings. Every lamp on, including the ones you would never use in daylight. Overhead lights on. Blinds at the same height in every room. The low-light shooting guide has the full list, and the shot guide starts with lighting for this reason.

The reconstruction has no concept of a mirror. It sees a scene through the glass and tries to build that scene behind the wall. The result is a second, half-formed room where the mirror was, and smearing on the glass surface itself because its apparent depth changes with every camera position.

On the reshoot: cover large mirrors with a sheet or avoid pointing straight at them, switch TVs off and leave them off, and film glass railings and windows at an oblique angle rather than head on. For a wall of glass with a view, accept that the exterior will be soft; it was not in the room.

Do not change everything at once. Match the cause to one change.

• Everything soft → halve your walking speed and triple your turning time.
• One dark room soft → add light to that room and lock exposure before entering it.
• Ghost shapes → cover mirrors, kill screens, angle away from glass.
• Holes in corners or ceilings → add a slow pass that tilts up and into each corner.

Then re-upload. A failed or unusable reconstruction on VOLUME is never charged, so a second attempt costs you the walk, not the fee.