labs dtour
From GraphQL360 to DTour to Twirrl
lineage · 2018–2022+ · archived
This is the lineage of tools we built to let anyone capture, edit, and distribute 360° experiences without being locked into proprietary stacks.
2018
GraphQL360
API + viewer stack born out of Matterport learnings. Brought self-hosted tour control to indie photographers competing with big platforms.
2019
DTour
Mobile capture apps, auto-linking pipelines, and open-source packaging so entire tours could be exported, white-labelled, or hosted.
2020–2021
Aspect360
Brand refresh + native integrations. Expanded to product spins, automotive capture, and deeper Unity bridges.
2022+
Twirrl
All prior work merged into Twirrl — the pivot that carried the 360° capture lineage into product form.
Screens + prototypes
DTour in motion
Straight from the Obsidian vault: capture flows, editors, and export views we used with agencies and photographers.
Open by design
Every component shipped with an open GraphQL API, so agencies could self-host, white-label, or remix flows without waiting on us.
Capture → Edit → View
Native iOS/Android capture apps, auto-linking services, editor tooling, and viewers for web, native, and VR.
Beyond real estate
Hotels, automotive, retail, and training teams adopted the stack. The same pipelines power today's LLM retrieval + AR projects.
Manifesto
Why we built DTour
DTour exists to keep immersive storytelling accessible. Locking capture pipelines behind paywalls slows adoption. So we shipped the whole thing—capture, editor, viewer, and API—as open, remixable blocks.
- Hosted for teams that want a fast start, downloadable for those who need control.
- Auto-linking + tagging to eliminate hours of manual clean-up.
- Native viewers for web, mobile, and VR so the tours outlive any hardware fad.
Where it landed
Real estate
Tours that boosted portal engagement and gave owners remote visibility.
Hotels
Confidence boosts for travellers comparing rooms across continents.
Automotive
Interior/exterior spins that put buyers in the driver's seat before visiting.
Training & HR
Office tours, onboarding flows, and virtual offsites captured with phones.
Under the hood
APIs + computer vision
DTour wasn't just pretty UI—the GraphQL schema, alignment experiments, and QA tooling are the same bones we use for today's AI work.
GraphQL360 schema
The singleTour query that let anyone fetch tours, locations, and assets without waiting on us to export data.
Room alignment experiments
Computer-vision overlays we used to ensure auto-linked panoramas stayed true before humans ever opened the editor.
Hosted + self-hosted, no lock-in
DTour shipped as both a SaaS and a downloadable stack. Auto-linking, capture apps, editors, viewers, and GraphQL APIs were all open-source under Far Horizons.
- iOS + Android capture apps with 360 camera support
- Auto linking/tagging services with manual editor overrides
- Viewers for web, native, and VR (Oculus, Daydream, SteamVR)
Need the playbook?
I can walk you through the original DTour documentation or port the ideas into your current LLM/vision stack — consulting · back to the lab.