Dedicated to International Day of Knowledge.

Helping the new intake find their way around is a first-order task for any university's staff. This example shows how it is handled in Germany, using signs with the letters of each building.

Bring panoramic photography into it and you can achieve far more interactivity. That matters especially in our post-coronavirus age, when students are physically inside their own university less often than ever. And in domestic practice there is frequently not even the kind of visual wayfinding signage you see in Germany.

So: this is about building a virtual tour to orient first-year students. You could equally call it an abbreviated guide to creating a virtual tour on True Virtual Tours from scratch.

The step-by-step guide consists of the following points:

1. Check the quality (that is, retouch your finished, stitched panoramic photographs)
2. Upload and label them
3. Fix the direction the viewer faces when the panorama opens
4. Add info points
5. Create a plan / diagram / 3D view
6. Create a new "virtual tour"
   
7. Describe it (add the tour's text information) & [optionally] add a video version of the tour
8. Add the plan / diagram / 3D view to your tour
9. Add transitions between the tour's panoramas

And your virtual tour is ready.

Now, each point in order:

1. Check the quality​

What this means is that the better your panorama satisfies the quality criteria set out in Roman Grinev's article, the higher its rating on this site. It will consequently rise higher in the listing - the list of all panoramas on True Virtual Tours - and as a result be clicked more often. The end result is that you earn coins for the number of views.

Which is why this step should not be underestimated.

In my own worked example I removed the shadow of the camera and tripod from the panorama:

For the simplest and quickest retouching of unwanted shadows or people, I personally tend to use FastStone Image Viewer.

2. Upload and label

This is the simplest step. It is all self-explanatory:

3. Fix the direction the viewer faces when the panorama opens

4. Add info points

Go through each individual panorama and add INFO POINTS - the single most important element of navigation. A spherical image on its own carries relatively little information. Only once there is a description of what lies behind a given element of the shot do viewers gain a point of reference, in the context of the tour.

Photo and video material is the most common and the easiest thing to add to a tour, so a detailed digression on the ways of adding info points is in order here. A photo or video can be inserted either by uploading it directly to True Virtual Tours or via a link to a file-sharing service. Coins are deducted in both cases. Uploading directly, however, works out cheaper.

See for yourself:

This encourages more active use of the site, which in turn leads to higher traffic and longer retention of the user audience. That improves how easily the site is found in search engines and lifts its position in the results.

Ultimately you are the one who benefits, because your work will appear in the top rows of Google and Yandex - and that raises your chances of finding a potential client. Those are the main reasons for encouraging direct uploads.

Below are both methods of inserting graphical information into an info point:

A. By link
Take an image and upload it to an external file-sharing service. Most such services give you links for embedding the image on a forum, on a site, straight into the browser's address bar and so on.
For this example we will take the HTML-formatted link:

From there everything comes down to simply pasting that code into the info point's text field
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The version with a YouTube video looks much the same, except that instead of HTML mode the link is pasted into the corresponding field of the info point

B. By direct upload
Here everything is immediately self-explanatory; comments would be superfluous.

The size of the image window that opens inside the panorama always depends on the options right at the top

Remember!

Coins are deducted for external links in every case - regardless of whether it was a hyperlink, a link to a video on YouTube, or a direct link to a .JPG file:

A separate article on the properties of info points is planned. It will cover the three types of info point symbol (icon, polygon, text) and how each is used.

5. Create a plan / diagram / 3D view

It genuinely does not matter where you find your overview image of the area. You might shoot a spherical panorama from a drone, or clip a 3D view out of Google Earth, or take a simple drawn map of the district. What matters is that the viewer can orient themselves quickly between the stops on your virtual tour. Choose on that basis.

6. Create a new "virtual tour" & add the panoramas

7. Describe the tour and [optionally] add a short video version

Once all the spherical panoramas have been added, you can open the tour's properties and fill out the text information about it:

8. Add the plan / diagram / 3D view to your new tour

We add a flat map image - for this example I took a 3D view of the university grounds from Google Maps

The result of the upload:

9. Add transitions between the tour's panoramas (both onto the 3D view and from one individual panorama to another)

I will leave a crib sheet for the properties of the "transition symbol" here at the end

And with that our virtual tour is broadly finished.

An additional note on moving a panorama's position within a tour

You cannot drag a panorama along this strip with the mouse - only with the left/right buttons

One more thing: the buttons only become visible for the panorama currently open for editing. If you want to move a different one, click into that other panorama on the strip first

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There are in fact a great many additional capabilities available when creating and editing tours. They cannot all be covered within one article, so we will stop here for this time.

All the best!