324 stations, 1,441 arrows, 696 connections: what seventeen delivered tours contain
Seventeen delivered tours hold 324 stations, 1,614 overlays, 1,441 navigation arrows and 696 distinct connections. Just over half the arrows — 51.7% — are duplicates leading somewhere you can already reach from the same panorama. The average station offers 2.15 destinations, and that barely moves between a four-station flat and a seventy-two-station apart-hotel: the range across all seventeen is 1.50 to 2.43. Every figure below was counted out of the delivered files. None is an estimate.
We counted our own archive because we were about to publish a price for analytics and could not honestly quote one without knowing what we were metering. The count took a script and an afternoon. What came out of it is the only dataset of its kind we have found anywhere in this industry, so it is published here whole rather than in the pieces that flatter us.
Seventeen tours, twelve projects, four sectors, two countries and one studio. The smallest are four photographs each — a bakery branch and three flats; the largest is seventy-two of a sixteen-apartment building. Every one of them is live and open in a browser with no form in front of it — start at the published work if you want to check a row.
The whole archive, tour by tour
| Tour | Stations | Overlays | Nav arrows | Connections | Per station |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fenix Apart-Hotel, Sarandë | 72 | 437 | 429 | 155 | 2.15 |
| Hotel Moskva, Budva | 64 | 218 | 211 | 126 | 1.97 |
| Canadian Institute of Technology, Tirana | 48 | 271 | 186 | 107 | 2.23 |
| Hotel Nertili, Sarandë | 40 | 231 | 229 | 97 | 2.42 |
| Social Camp Jale, Jalë | 29 | 127 | 124 | 62 | 2.14 |
| Hostel Kapsul, Vlorë | 14 | 56 | 56 | 34 | 2.43 |
| Restorant Menca, Vlorë | 7 | 50 | 23 | 17 | 2.43 |
| Delibros, Komuna e Parisit | 7 | 40 | 25 | 14 | 2.00 |
| Turist Shop, Lungomare | 6 | 13 | 13 | 12 | 2.00 |
| Emigres No. 31, tower 3 | 6 | 22 | 20 | 10 | 1.67 |
| Emigres No. 15, tower 3 | 5 | 22 | 16 | 8 | 1.60 |
| Emigres No. 29, tower 2 | 5 | 29 | 24 | 12 | 2.40 |
| Emigres No. 36, tower 2 | 5 | 27 | 24 | 12 | 2.40 |
| Delibros, Rruga e Kavajës | 4 | 13 | 13 | 8 | 2.00 |
| Emigres No. 35, tower 3 | 4 | 21 | 16 | 8 | 2.00 |
| Emigres No. 14, tower 2 | 4 | 15 | 12 | 6 | 1.50 |
| Emigres No. 38, tower 3 | 4 | 22 | 20 | 8 | 2.00 |
| All seventeen | 324 | 1,614 | 1,441 | 696 | 2.15 |
Overlays are every clickable object in the tour. Nav arrows are the ones that move you. Connections are the distinct destinations those arrows lead to, counted once per panorama however many arrows point at them. The seven Emigres rows are seven separate tours, not one job.
Three numbers are all called hotspots, and we always say which
The word hotspot does more work in this industry than it can carry. On the same seventeen tours it can truthfully mean 1,614, 1,441 or 696 depending on what is being counted, and the difference between the first and the last is more than double. That is not a rounding argument. It is the difference between two invoices.
- Station
- One 360° photograph — one position the camera stood in. It is the unit the tour itself is priced by; every other line on the rate card is an optional extra on top of it.
- Overlay
- Any clickable object placed on a panorama: an arrow, an information popup, a photograph that opens over the image, a sound, a link out. 1,614 of them across the archive.
- Navigation arrow
- The subset of overlays that move you somewhere. 1,441 across the archive. Arrows are never charged for — walking the tour is the tour, not an extra.
- Distinct connection
- One panorama, one destination, counted once. Two arrows in the same room leading to the same place are one connection. 696 across the archive.
- Information popup
- An overlay that opens something instead of moving you — a photograph, a note, a price. 146 across the archive, and 108 of those sit in just two tours.
The three totals reconcile exactly: 1,441 navigation arrows plus 146 information popups plus 27 everything-else — one sound, one link out of the tour and twenty-five overlays that are labels and do nothing when clicked — make 1,614. The reconciliation is written out properly on arrows, connections and popups, which is worth reading first if any of this is new.
Half the arrows are duplicates, and that is deliberate
1,441 arrows collapse to 696 connections. 745 arrows, 51.7% of them, are second and third ways to somewhere you could already get to from where you are standing. That is not sloppy building. A visitor arriving in a room facing the wrong way should still see a way out, so a doorway often carries an arrow at each end of the room.
- Fenix Apart-Hotel collapses hardest: 429 arrows to 155 connections, 63.9%. Sixteen apartments hang off four near-identical halls, and every hall panorama has to offer a door to each apartment on it plus both directions of the stairs.
- Hotel Nertili is the next of the large tours at 57.6% — 229 arrows to 97 connections — for the same reason in a different shape: a seafront hotel with an outdoor approach that can be walked in either direction.
- Turist Shop barely collapses at all: 13 arrows, 12 connections, 7.7%. In a six-station shop there is nowhere you cannot already see.
- Six of the seven Emigres apartment tours collapse at exactly 50%. In a flat every destination carries two arrows, because a bedroom door is visible from both ends of a hall.
- Across all seventeen tours, not one navigation arrow points at a panorama that does not exist. Zero orphans. That is the check we would most want a competitor to run on their own archive before quoting against ours.
The density that does not move
The finding we did not expect: connection density is almost independent of size. The archive spans an eighteen-fold range in station count, from four to seventy-two, and the average number of destinations offered by a panorama stays inside a band from 1.50 to 2.43. Fenix, the largest tour we have built, sits at 2.15 — which is the archive average to two decimal places.
- Highest, 2.43: Hostel Kapsul at fourteen stations and Restorant Menca at seven. Both are single rooms or single corridors where nearly everything is adjacent to nearly everything.
- Lowest, 1.50 to 1.67: three of the Emigres apartments. A flat is a star, not a mesh — every room opens off one hall and off nothing else.
- Lowest of the large tours, 1.97: Hotel Moskva at sixty-four stations. A hotel over four levels is a chain of corridors and stairwells, and a corridor connects forwards and backwards and to the doors on it, and to nothing else.
- The median station in twelve of the seventeen tours offers exactly two destinations. Two tours run to a median of three; three apartment tours to a median of one.
The practical consequence for a buyer is that a tour of your building will look structurally like a tour of ours at the same size, and you can estimate its shape before we arrive. What you cannot estimate from area is the station count itself — that is a separate argument, made with the same data, in what your building will take.
What we have not published here, and why
No prices per job. We publish our rate card in full and we do not publish what any named building came to. You are welcome to do the arithmetic; we are not going to do it for you against somebody else's premises.
No time-per-property table. We can tell you that a forty-station hotel shipped in four working days and a forty-eight-station university building took two weeks, because both are published on how we work. We have not kept days-on-site consistently enough across all seventeen to publish a column of them, and inventing one would defeat the point of this post.
No client accounts. Every number here is ours, counted by us, out of files we built. Nothing in this post is cited to an outside source because there is no outside source for it — which is also why it is here.
Questions people ask
- What is the difference between a hotspot and a connection?
- A hotspot is any clickable object on a 360° panorama. A navigation hotspot is an arrow that moves you to another panorama. A connection is a distinct destination: if one panorama carries two arrows that both lead to the kitchen, that is two hotspots and one connection. Across seventeen delivered Vronos tours there are 1,614 hotspots in total, of which 1,441 are navigation arrows, and those arrows lead to 696 distinct connections.
- How many hotspots does a virtual tour need?
- Measured across seventeen delivered tours, the average panorama offers 2.15 distinct destinations, with a range from 1.50 to 2.43 depending on the shape of the building. Flats sit at the bottom because every room opens off one hall; small single-room premises sit at the top because everything is adjacent to everything. Total arrow counts run higher than that, because a well-built tour repeats an arrow at both ends of a room so a visitor facing either way can see a way out.
- Are navigation hotspots charged for?
- No. Unlimited navigation hotspots are included in every Vronos price — the arrows that let people walk the tour are the tour, not an extra. The only thing metered per hotspot is optional analytics, at €0.50 per distinct connection, plus a one-off €50 if you have no analytics property to report into.
- Where do these numbers come from?
- They were extracted from the delivered tour files themselves by a script in the Vronos repository, not estimated and not supplied by anybody else. Stations are counted as panoramas, overlays as the clickable objects placed on them, and connections by collapsing every arrow in a panorama that resolves to the same destination. All seventeen tours are public and linked from the Vronos projects page, so any row can be checked by opening it.
