Selecting a virtual tour to be added to your website could be tough. If you select the wrong software you may end up with no real result. If your virtual tour cannot function with other aspects of modern web, nobody will use them. This is the result of recent revolution of mobile internet:
This goes beyond just only being displayable. People also should be able to navigate in them so other than functionality, small screens and touch inputs bring more challenges. many of available softwares are unable to switch to a touch input/smaller screen environment. Since their design is still based on desktop UX principles. As a result %80 of current virtual tours do not function acceptable on new devices and lost their effect.
Here are some examples:
If your virtual tour don’t have ability to get indexed, all the content get hidden from the world. Most users look for content on search engines. If your virtual tours content don’t properly submitted to search engines, Users won't find your virtual tour and your virtual tour will be ineffective.
Here are some examples:
Imagin user opened your virtual tour in his tablet in landscape mode. If user just turn the tablet 50% the whole structure of page will change. Now if virtual tour does not get resized and re rendered some of content like links and views will get outside user view. Also all responsive design on web taught us is module contents like virtual tours should resize based on screen real estate and should get customized based on touch.
Next example shows how a virtual tour should act in small screens like mobiles and tablets. open the virtual tour and resize the window. It will re render itself to show itself in biggest size possible:
Auto size version of a virtual tour inside a very small iframe in page just to show the autosize. Notice that even from small view user still can switch to full screen.
every virtual tour has an start point. In old days virtual tours only had one address. But this is not the case anymore. If users are not able to go directly to an specific part of content from just a url they cannot share contents inside the virtual tour. In today's internet, a content that is not addressable is almost useless.
Imagine you are browsing in a gallery virtual tour. If you see a painting inside and want to send it to a friend, you should be able to do that by just sending the url when you are at painting in virtual tour. In order to achieve this virtual tour url should change when user moves inside a virtual tour. This is fundamental when you think how important this could be for your social network users who need to be able to share content inside your virtual tour.
Here are some examples: