Hotspots, Navigation and Interaction in a Virtual Tour

How to design movement and information inside a tour so visitors explore rather than leave, and which interactions actually get used.

A virtual tour's imagery determines whether a visitor is impressed and its navigation determines whether they stay. Tours are abandoned far more often because the visitor could not work out how to get to the next room than because the photography was inadequate, and navigation is the part that receives the least design attention.

The first requirement is that the visitor always knows where they are. A floor plan with the current position marked, visible without opening a menu, resolves most disorientation. Without it, a visitor who has moved three times has no model of the building and no way to decide where to go next, which is the point at which they leave.

The second is that movement between positions should follow how a person would actually walk. Hotspots placed on the floor in the direction of travel, at the threshold a person would pass through, read as movement. Hotspots floating arbitrarily in the middle of a room read as teleportation and make the space feel like a set of disconnected photographs rather than a building.

The transition between positions matters more than it appears. A hard cut disorients; a brief movement in the direction of travel preserves the sense of having moved through space. This is a small implementation detail with a disproportionate effect on whether the tour feels like a place.

Information hotspots are where a tour stops being a viewer and becomes a sales instrument, and they should carry things a visitor actually wants. Room dimensions, what is included, the finish specification, a short video of a facility in use, the price, a link to book or enquire. Hotspots containing marketing copy are ignored; hotspots answering a question are opened.

The quantity should be restrained. A panorama with twelve hotspots is a puzzle, and visitors resolve puzzles by leaving. Three or four per position, placed on the things a visitor would naturally look at, produces more interaction than a comprehensive set, because each one reads as deliberate rather than as clutter.

The viewer experience research supports treating interaction as a design variable rather than a feature list. Yu and Lo (2023), in a systematic review mapping viewer experience in cinematic virtual reality, and Carpio et al. (2023), evaluating the viewer experience of interactive virtual reality movies, both point toward interaction design as a determinant of how the experience is received. More interactivity is not automatically better; interaction that answers a question is.

The default heading for each position is the most commonly neglected setting and one of the most consequential. Many visitors never rotate the view at all, so whatever direction the camera faced on arrival is the entire experience of that room for a share of the audience. Setting it deliberately, so the visitor lands looking at what matters, costs minutes and changes what the tour communicates.

The commercial mechanism is well supported. Amin et al. (2021), examining the impact of visual presentations and online reviews on hotel booking intentions, studied how these elements shape decisions, and Poushneh (2021) found that perceived proximity to a virtual product influenced purchase intention. Laing and Apperley (2020), examining the relevance of virtual reality to communication design, treat the medium as a communication problem, which is the correct frame for deciding what the interaction should do.

The analytics available should shape the next iteration and almost never do. Which positions were visited, in what order, where visitors stopped, which hotspots were opened and which were ignored. That data identifies the rooms that sell, the information visitors actually want and the point in the tour where interest is lost, all of which are directly actionable in a way that a view count is not.

References

Yu, Z., & Lo, C. H. (2023). Mapping the viewer experience in cinematic virtual reality: A systematic review. PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality, 32, 205–229. https://doi.org/10.1162/pres_a_00409

Carpio, R., Baumann, O., & Birt, J. (2023). Evaluating the viewer experience of interactive virtual reality movies. Virtual Reality, 27(4), 3181–3190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-023-00864-2

Amin, D., Mahomed, A. S., Ab Aziz, Y. B., & Hashim, H. B. (2021). Examining the impact of visual presentations and online reviews on hotel booking intentions. Tourism and Hospitality Research, 21(4), 402–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/14673584211021900

Poushneh, A. (2021). How close do we feel to virtual product to make a purchase decision? Impact of perceived proximity to virtual product and temporal purchase intention. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 63, Article 102717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2021.102717

Laing, S., & Apperley, M. (2020). The relevance of virtual reality to communication design. Design Studies, 71, Article 100965. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2020.100965