Eighty-one popups and two tracked floor plans: the university building
The Canadian Institute of Technology in Tirana is 48 stations and 271 overlays: 186 navigation arrows, 81 information popups and four others, with 107 distinct connections and two floor plans that track your position as you move. It took two weeks from capture to handover, against four working days for a forty-station hotel. The eight extra stations are not why. The popups and the plans are the build; the forty-eight photographs are the easy part.
One building, two floors, forty-seven named places. A reception and yard at the entrance, then the library, the auditorium, the CITHub, five numbered laboratories, a robotics lab, classrooms A1 through E2, and the offices — admissions, finance and HR, academic staff, the registrar and the rector's floor. The station list and the spec are on the project page.
What is actually in the 271
| Counted | Value |
|---|---|
| Stations | 48 |
| Overlays in total | 271 |
| Navigation arrows | 186 |
| Information popups | 81 |
| Popups that open a photograph | 80 |
| Overlays that are something else | 4 |
| Distinct connections | 107 |
| Connections per station | 2.23 |
| Floor plans with position tracking | 2 |
| Named places | 47 |
The four others are one sound, one link out of the tour, and two labels that do nothing when clicked.
This is the only tour in our archive where the information layer is a substantial share of the whole: 81 of 271 overlays, 30% of everything placed on a panorama. Across all seventeen delivered tours there are 146 information popups, so this one building holds more than half of them. Eighty of its eighty-one open a photograph full size over the panorama — the published extra we call a descriptive photograph, priced at €10 each, shot on the same visit on a conventional camera.
What a tracked floor plan actually does
Eleven of our twelve published projects record no floor plan. This is the exception, and it carries two — one per floor — with live position tracking. The distinction is worth being precise about, because the words get used loosely.
- A plan in the tour
- A drawing you can open. Useful, static, and no more informative than a PDF emailed separately.
- A tracked plan
- A marker on that drawing moves as you move through the tour, so at every moment you know which room you are standing in and what is on either side of it. This is what a large building needs and what a four-room flat does not.
- What it costs to add
- Positioning each panorama on a plan you already own is a published extra at €5 per panorama. If there is no usable plan, we draw one at €0.60 per square metre, minimum €45, and €0.40 for each square metre after the first 150.
In a building with corridors that look alike — and a two-floor academic building has several, which is why this tour has named places called Labs' Junction, Classes Junction, Floor Junction and Hall Turn — the tracked plan is the difference between a walkthrough and a wayfinding tool. A prospective student trying to work out how far the robotics lab is from the auditorium gets an answer from the plan that forty-eight panoramas cannot give them.
Where the two weeks went
Our published turnaround is three to five working days for most tours, and it holds. A forty-station seafront hotel with 231 overlays and no popup layer shipped in four days. This one took two weeks with eight more stations. The whole of that difference is build, not capture.
- Eighty descriptive photographs. Each one is a separate exposure taken on the day, processed, then attached to a specific point on a specific panorama so it opens over the right thing. Eighty of those is eighty small placement decisions, none of which can be batched.
- Two plans positioned against forty-eight panoramas. Every station has to be pinned to its true location on the correct floor, or the marker lies to the visitor — which is worse than having no plan at all.
- Forty-seven named places. In a building where five laboratories are numbered and five classrooms are lettered, the labels are the interface. Getting Lab 4 and Class D2 right is not photography, it is proofreading somebody else's building.
The correction we publish about this tour
This tour contains video. It is not a 360° video, and for a while our own draft copy said it was. Four video placements point at three flat clips — the institute's own promotional reel, playing on the televisions inside the building, exactly where the televisions are. That is a nice detail and it is not a deliverable. A real 360° video is twice as wide as it is tall; these are ordinary widescreen clips.
The project page therefore records 360° video: None, because that is true. We caught this by counting rather than by remembering, which is the entire argument for counting — the method and the other traps it caught are written up in why we counted the hotspots instead of estimating them.
What we would do differently
- The two dead overlays come out. Two objects in this tour do nothing when clicked. On a rebuild they are either wired to something or removed; an overlay that looks interactive and is not teaches a visitor to stop clicking.
- The popups would be written to a brief, not to a room. Eighty descriptive photographs is a lot of small decisions taken one at a time. On a building this size we would agree what each popup is for — a fact, a photograph, a link — before the first one is placed.
- The labs deserved a larger share of the eighty-one. The value in an institutional tour is concentrated in a handful of rooms. A prospective engineering student wants the robotics lab in detail and does not need the registrar's office at all, and we would agree that concentration before the build rather than letting it fall out of the order the building was walked in.
What is in each of the eighty-one popups, and who wrote them, is not published here — we have not got that written down in a form we would stand behind, and this is a post about counted facts. Everything above was extracted from the delivered tour files. If you are buying for an institution, the university marketing brief is the version of this written in procurement language.
Questions people ask
- What is an information popup in a virtual tour?
- An overlay placed on a panorama that opens something instead of moving you: a photograph at full size, a note, a price, a link. In the Canadian Institute of Technology tour there are 81 of them, 80 of which open a photograph taken on the same visit. Across seventeen delivered Vronos tours there are 146 in total, so this single building holds more than half of them.
- What does a floor plan with position tracking do?
- It shows a marker on the building's plan that moves as the visitor moves through the tour, so at any moment they know which room they are in. Positioning panoramas on a plan you already own is priced at €5 per panorama; if there is no usable plan we draw one at €0.60 per square metre, with a €45 minimum and €0.40 per square metre after the first 150.
- Why did a 48-station tour take two weeks when a 40-station one took four days?
- Because build time follows the information layer, not the station count. The two-week job carried 81 information popups, 80 attached photographs and two tracked floor plans across 48 stations. The four-day job carried 231 overlays that were all navigation and no popups at all. Eight extra photographs cost hours; an interpretation layer costs days.
- How many stations does a university building need?
- The one in our published work took 48 across two floors, covering a library, an auditorium, a CITHub, five numbered laboratories, a robotics lab, five classrooms, five office areas and every corridor junction between them. Institutional buildings tend to need more circulation stations than their floor area suggests, because corridors in academic buildings look alike and a visitor who cannot tell them apart cannot navigate.
