Mered Iconic is a residential tower in Dubai. The job was to produce a 360 tour that would let a prospective buyer stand at the height of their future apartment and look out — before the floor they were buying existed.
Shot at the hours that sell
A view is not one thing. The same window is a different proposition at eight in the morning and at seven in the evening, and buyers respond to the second far more than the first. So the tower was captured twice: a morning set in May 2024, and an evening set flown across five sequential flights from 17:57 to 19:25 — through golden hour and into dusk, as the city lights came up behind the skyline.
Every viewpoint was shot as a bracketed raw set rather than a single frame. Around 1,800 raw frames went into the job in total. That latitude is what lets an interior-facing panorama hold the room and the window in the same image, and what lets a dusk panorama keep the sky without crushing everything beneath it.
Built into a navigable tour
The brackets were merged, stitched, seam-corrected and levelled, then assembled into a tour a buyer moves through in a browser. Levelling matters more than it sounds — a panorama a degree or two off is subtly unsettling to navigate, and it is the most common fault in cheap panoramic work.
Aerial video was shot alongside on the same mobilisation and cut for the sales campaign, so the tour and the film came from one visit rather than two.
Why aerial rather than a mock-up
The alternative is a render of the view, which is a drawing of what someone expects to see. A drone at the actual height, on the actual bearing, photographs what is genuinely there — including the things a render would tidy away. For a buyer committing off-plan, that difference is the whole point.
The same approach is now a standing service: see 360 virtual tours and aerial filming.
