Seventy-two stations in a sixteen-apartment building: inside the Fenix tour

Fenix Apart-Hotel in Sarandë is 72 stations, 437 overlays, 429 navigation arrows and 155 distinct connections — the largest tour we have published and the most heavily duplicated in the archive, with 63.9% of its arrows collapsing. The building is the reason: sixteen apartments hang off four near-identical halls, and a hall has to offer a door to every apartment on it and both directions of the stairs. The tour carries no floor plan, no aerial and not one information popup, and the first of those three is the thing we would change.

An apart-hotel sells a specific apartment. A guest booking 403 is booking 403, not a representative photograph of a room that resembles it, and the moment you accept that, the shape of the job is settled: every unit gets shot, or the tour is doing the opposite of its job. Sixteen apartments are in this tour by their own numbers — 202, 204, 205, 301, 302, 305, 306, 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 501, 502, 503 and 504.

That is what seventy-two stations buys. Not a large building — a repeated one, where the count is driven by how many times the same room has to be shot rather than by how much of it there is. The full spec and the station list are on the project page, and the tour itself is open at vr.vronos.com/apart-hotel-fenix with nothing in front of it.

Twenty-two named places, seventy-two stations

Seventy-two stations resolve to twenty-two named places: sixteen apartment numbers, four floor halls, the entrance and the terrace. Every apartment therefore carries several stations under one name, which is the first decision worth stating plainly — the naming follows what a guest is buying, not what a photographer is shooting. Somebody choosing between 403 and 405 wants two lists called 403 and 405, not a menu of thirty-two rooms.

The decision: cover repetition without publishing it

The hard part of a building like this is not photography. It is that sixteen apartments in one block are largely alike, and a tour that makes that obvious sells nothing. Three choices dealt with it.

1. Route by floor, not by unit type. The halls carry the structure. A visitor moves along a floor and into whichever apartment they care about, rather than being walked through sixteen kitchens in a row.
2. Let each apartment stand alone. Every unit has its own stations and its own name, so the tour can be entered at 403 and used as if 403 were the only thing in it — a link can be sent that opens on the unit a guest asked about rather than in the lobby.
3. Shoot the terrace and the entrance properly. In an apart-hotel the shared parts are what differentiate one building from the next, because the apartments themselves are not going to.

Why 429 arrows became 155 connections

Fenix has the heaviest arrow duplication of any tour we have delivered: 274 of its 429 arrows lead somewhere already reachable from the same panorama. In a building of four repeated floors that is what correct looks like. Stand in a hall and you need a door to each apartment on that floor, the stairs up and the stairs down — and because you can arrive in that hall facing either way, most of those are placed twice.

Despite that, the density of the tour is entirely ordinary: 2.15 distinct connections per station, which is the average of the whole seventeen-tour archive to two decimal places. The largest building we have shot is structurally as connected as the smallest. The full comparison is in 324 stations, 1,441 arrows, 696 connections.

What this tour does not have

• No floor plan. Four floors, numbered apartments, and no plan tracking where you are. This is the one thing we would change.
• No information popups. All 437 overlays are navigation, except eight that are labels and do nothing when clicked. The largest tour in our archive carries no information layer at all.
• No aerial. Aerial has been flown on exactly one project in the archive and it is not this one. We do not own a 360° drone and do not imply one.
• No 360° video. Nothing in this tour is video.

What we would do differently

A tracked floor plan, on all four floors. Floor-plan positioning is a published extra at €5 per panorama where a usable plan already exists, and it is the single feature that would most improve this specific tour: in a building where the product is a numbered door on a numbered floor, a marker moving across a plan tells a guest where 403 sits relative to the terrace and the stairs in a way that seventy-two panoramas cannot. Our university tour has two of them and it is the most navigable thing we have built — see eighty-one popups and two tracked floor plans.

Second, an information layer on the apartments. Sixteen near-identical units is exactly the case where a popup carrying what differs — the bed configuration, the view, the floor — does more than another photograph would. It was not bought, and we are not going to pretend it was scoped and rejected.

Every figure here was counted out of the delivered tour files rather than estimated, and the tour is public, so any of it can be checked by opening it. What is not here is what the job cost, which is between us and the client, and what the client thinks of it, which is theirs to say.