Panoramas

Walk through a mapped space as a navigable 360° panoramic tour.

Overview

A 360° Virtual Tour turns a mapped space into a walk-through experience. Instead of looking at a mesh or a point cloud, you stand at a capture point, look around in full 360°, and step to the next point, the same way you would explore a street-level map.

Tours come from 360° imagery that is already in your capture, so there is no extra capture step. There is an extra upload step: a tour is opt-in. Ask for it when you create the map by setting source.metadata.assets to ["pano"], described in Optional assets.

Two inputs carry the panoramic imagery a tour needs:

• 360 video captures (Insta360, Antigravity A1, equirectangular MP4).

• .e57 and MatterPak scans with embedded panoramas.

LiDAR captures from the MultiSet App and Unity SDK have no panoramic imagery, so no tour is available for them at any setting.

assets is read once, when the map is created, and cannot be added afterwards. A map uploaded without pano has no panoramas, and the Pano APIs return 404 for it. Getting a tour then means creating a new map and uploading the scan again.

Panoramas are one of a map's output assets, alongside the mesh, the point cloud, and the Gaussian Splat. A 360 video capture can produce all four.

A map's Map details response includes hasPano, which tells you whether that map has a tour available.

How it works

A tour is a graph of nodes. Each node is one 360° capture point and holds:

• the panorama image for that spot,

• its position and orientation in the map's coordinate frame,

• links to its neighbouring nodes, with the distance to each in metres.

Because the nodes carry real positions, the tour is spatially aware. A viewer can jump to the node nearest a given location, or bias its choice toward whichever direction the user is facing, rather than only stepping along a fixed path.

View a tour in the Developer Portal

Open the map from the Maps list, then click View Pano in the Map Details toolbar:

Map Details toolbar. Open View Pano.

Inside the viewer, each ring on the floor is a neighbouring node you can click to move to. The minimap shows the full tour path and where you currently stand, and Go to lists nearby nodes with their distances.

Drag to look around, scroll to zoom, and click a ring or any point on the floor to move.

Compare a space across map versions

When a map has been re-scanned as a Map Version, the tour can show the same viewpoint in each version, so you can compare a space before and after a change while standing in one spot.

Compare mode: one viewpoint shown in two versions of the same space. Each match reports how far it sits from the anchor, in distance and angle.

One continuous tour across a MapSet

The maps in a MapSet can be presented as a single continuous tour. Where two maps meet, the tour bridges between them, so a visitor can walk from one map into the next without noticing a boundary.

A tour spanning a MapSet. The minimap shows the joined maps, and navigation flows from one map into the next.

Build your own viewer

Everything the Developer Portal viewer does is available over REST, so you can embed a tour in your own application: list the maps that have tours, load a complete tour in one call, or fetch just the neighbourhood around the user as they move.

See 360° Virtual Tour (Pano) API for the endpoints, the node shape, and request examples.