Virtual tour

A virtual tour is a computer-mediated presentation of a real place that a viewer can explore remotely, most often built from a set of linked 360-degree photographs or videos between which the user moves. In a 2023 study of online museum tours, Roman Shikhri, Lev Poretski and Joel Lanir of the University of Haifa, citing Bakre and colleagues (2017), describe a virtual tour as "a realistic presentation of a physical location constructed by multiple 360-degree images or videos, usually shot with a 360-degree camera or stitched from a series of photographs", in which users "can interactively navigate through the space, alter the viewing angle, and look around as if they were actually there". The same authors list museums, historical sites, real estate and university campuses among the places presented this way.

The technique grew out of interactive movie map research such as MIT's Aspen Movie Map (1978-1980) and reached personal computers with Apple's QuickTime VR in 1995. Google Street View, which began in 2007, extended the panorama approach to entire cities. Most tours are still viewed through a standard web interface, but panoramas and 3D captures can also be opened in a head-mounted display for virtual reality viewing, as with Google's tours for Google Cardboard viewers and WebXR property walkthroughs on Meta Quest headsets.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Every claim and quotation checked against the cited sources: Shikhri et al. 2023 and Eagan et al. 2025 full texts, the Tussyadiah et al. author manuscript, the NBER paper, Chen 1995, Szeliski-Shum 1997 and Lippman 1980 abstracts, OpenAlex metadata for all journal papers, Naimark's Aspen page, Google, Engadget, TechCrunch, Road to VR, Meta, Matterport, UN News and Steam pages. About review dates.

Definition and terminology

The term is used loosely. Shikhri, Poretski and Lanir, following Cho, Wang and Fesenmaier (2002), treat virtual tourism as presenting users with "a realistic experience of a location or destination through the use of technology", and call the 360-degree virtual tour "one of the primary forms" of it. They also cite Lerario and Maiellaro (2020), who defined virtual tours as "representations of the natural environment in virtually recreated pseudo-3D spaces consisting of an interconnected series of 360-degree images that map and reproduce an actual physical place", and note that in HCI research such methods of capturing an environment are sometimes called "scanned reality". Cho, Wang and Fesenmaier's paper, published in the Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, framed the web-based virtual tour as a tool for tourism marketing.

Some researchers use a broader definition. In a paper at the 2025 ACM CHI conference, Eagan, Young, Bering and Langlotz note that "virtual tourism" is sometimes used interchangeably with "digital tourism" or "technology-supported tourism", and for their own work define it as tourism that uses VR "to virtually transport people to remote places", whether through hand-modeled worlds, 3D reconstructions, or immersive videos and livestreams. This article covers tours of real places. Fictional or user-built online spaces are covered under Virtual world, and the reconstruction and presentation of historic sites is covered in more depth under Virtual heritage.

How it works

Panorama-based tours

The most common form is a network of panoramic images. Shenchang Eric Chen's 1995 SIGGRAPH paper on QuickTime VR set out the basic method: instead of modeling a scene in 3D, the system "uses 360-degree cylindrical panoramic images to compose a virtual environment". Each panorama is "digitally warped on-the-fly to simulate camera panning and zooming", and the images can come from computer rendering, specialized panoramic cameras or overlapping photographs "stitched" together. Moving through the space was done by "hopping" between panorama points, and the system supported hit-testing through "orientation-independent hot spots". Two years later, Richard Szeliski and Heung-Yeung Shum of Microsoft Research presented a stitching method that worked with images from "a hand-held digital camera" rather than requiring a controlled horizontal pan, and that could extract environment maps viewable with standard 3D graphics viewers and hardware. Current tours are usually built from images shot with a 360 Camera or stitched from a series of photographs.

Shikhri, Poretski and Lanir reviewed 40 museum and cultural heritage tours and found that all of them relied on what they call spatial navigation points: clickable icons, each tied to a position where a 360-degree image was taken, that move the user to that spot. They grouped the design choices of tours into three dimensions:

Dimension	Elements (Shikhri, Poretski and Lanir, 2023)
Navigation	Freedom of movement (number and placement of navigation points), movement transition (from an abrupt cut to a smooth animated move), spatial orientation (mini-maps, overview panoramas, top-down views, lists of places) and user controls (mouse, keyboard, on-screen buttons, drag to rotate)
Information presentation	Visual information cues laid over exhibits, and media content such as text, images, video and 3D models
Proactiveness	How far the system moves the user automatically (navigation proactiveness) or opens information by itself (interaction proactiveness)

Video and 3D reconstruction

Tours can also use 360-degree video instead of still images. The Otago-Aarhus team behind the 2025 CHI study recorded a 15-minute kayak trip through Ōkārito Lagoon in New Zealand with an Insta360 One X2 camera and a Zoom H2n ambisonic recorder mounted on the kayak, combined the recordings in the Unity engine and played them back on a Meta Quest 3. The same paper notes that 3D reconstructions of real sites cannot show dynamic features such as weather, people and wildlife, and that they are computationally expensive and prone to errors, particularly outdoors.

In an image-based tour the viewer is usually placed at the center of each 360-degree image and moves only between capture points. Reconstructions made with photogrammetry let a headset user walk around inside a model of the place instead. The PC VR app Realities (realities.io, released on Steam on 5 April 2016 for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift) used photogrammetry to recreate locations such as Death Valley, Cologne Cathedral and Alcatraz. BRINK XR's BRINK Traveler, released for Quest and SteamVR headsets on 9 September 2021, uses photogrammetry to build walkable models of natural sites in the United States and Iceland; ahead of launch Road to VR reported 18 places spanning a dozen locations. Commercial capture platforms such as Matterport produce navigable 3D models of buildings, which the company and its owner CoStar Group describe as digital twins.

History

Early surrogate travel

The Aspen Movie Map was produced at MIT's Architecture Machine Group in 1978-1980; Michael Naimark, who was responsible for its cinematography, calls it the first interactive moviemap. According to Naimark, 16 mm stop-frame cameras on a gyroscopically stabilized mount atop a car were triggered every 10 feet, and playback required several laserdisc players, a computer and a touch screen. Nicholas Negroponte obtained support for the project from DARPA's Cybernetics Technology Office; Andy Lippman was principal investigator, and the production team included Scott Fisher. Lippman's 1980 SIGGRAPH paper described how the user could "control the speed, route, angle of view and mode of presentation of this information and may thus tour the area".

Desktop panoramas

QuickTime VR brought the approach to ordinary computers. Chen's paper contrasted it with conventional VR systems, which needed "laborious modeling and expensive special purpose rendering hardware", and described QuickTime VR as "a virtual reality extension to Apple Computer's QuickTime digital multimedia framework" that also allowed viewing an object from different directions.

Street View and online museum tours

Google Street View began in 2007 with imagery from five cities in the United States. Google added the option to view Street View in VR in 2015, and for the service's 15th anniversary in 2022 said it had captured over 220 billion images and more than 10 million miles across 100 countries and territories. A 2010 paper by Google engineers in IEEE Computer described the system as serving "millions of Google users daily with panoramic imagery captured in hundreds of cities in 20 countries across four continents".

Google applied the same capture technology indoors with the Google Art Project, launched on 1 February 2011 with 17 museums. A camera trolley photographed gallery interiors in 360 degrees, allowing navigation of more than 385 rooms. By 2023 Shikhri, Poretski and Lanir described Google's arts and culture platform as ubiquitous, writing that many existing tours use it and that its design and navigation "are often copied by other VTs".

Consumer VR

Google's Expeditions app, which debuted in 2015, offered guided virtual field trips to places such as the Burj Khalifa, Antarctica and Machu Picchu. In September 2017 Google Earth VR on the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift gained Street View imagery from 85 countries, opened by holding a floating photosphere up to the user's head. In May 2018, when Google said Expeditions had brought more than 3 million students on such trips, it released Tour Creator, a tool for building VR tours from Street View imagery or users' own 360-degree photos, publishing them to its Poly library for viewing in a browser or a Google Cardboard headset. In November 2020, amid a wider retreat from phone-based VR that included the end of support for the Daydream View headset, Google said the Expeditions app would no longer be available after 30 June 2021 and that its 360-degree tours would move to its Arts & Culture platform, noting that "immersive experiences with VR headsets are not always accessible to all learners".

Browser-based tours reached standalone headsets through WebXR. In November 2022 Meta used Matterport to demonstrate Web Launch, a feature that sends a WebXR page from a phone or computer to a Quest headset: a viewer looking at a Matterport walkthrough on mobile can choose "View in VR" and the address opens in the headset's browser.

COVID-19 pandemic

UNESCO and the International Council of Museums reported on 18 May 2020 that nearly 90 percent of the world's museums, more than 85,000 institutions, had closed because of COVID-19, and that only 5 percent of museums in Africa and small island developing states could offer online content. Shikhri, Poretski and Lanir write that the pandemic's lockdowns and restrictions made virtual tours an attractive option for people who wanted to learn about museums and cultural places remotely, and El-Said and Aziz describe tourism stakeholders adopting virtual tours to keep their attractions in the minds of potential visitors while travel was halted.

Applications

Museums and cultural heritage

Museums and cultural heritage sites are the focus of much of the research on virtual tours. For their usability study, Shikhri, Poretski and Lanir chose a Google Arts & Culture tour of the Bode-Museum in Berlin, picked for the platform's ubiquity, and a Matterport tour of the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, describing Matterport as a new leading platform. Both tours moved the user only between fixed navigation points. Heritage tours that go beyond panoramas, such as reconstructions of lost buildings, are treated in the Virtual heritage article.

Tourism marketing

Tourism researchers have studied virtual tours as a way for people to preview destinations. El-Said and Aziz collected data from 401 respondents who had experienced at least one virtual tour of an Egyptian heritage site and found that intention to adopt such tours had a positive effect on the tendency to visit the real site.

Real estate

Meta lists marketing properties among the uses of Matterport's 3D models. When CoStar Group completed its purchase of Matterport on 28 February 2025, the companies said Matterport had digitized more than 14 million spaces across 177 countries. Matterport reported 50.7 billion square feet "digitized and managed" and 1.2 million subscribers for 2024. Evidence on whether tours help sales is mixed (see Research below).

Education

Google Expeditions offered virtual field trips for classrooms, and Google built Tour Creator for students, teachers and storytellers, partly in response to educators who wanted to share experiences from their own communities.

Research

Academic work on virtual tours spans tourism marketing, human-computer interaction and economics. Selected findings from peer-reviewed papers, a preprint and a working paper:

Study	Method	Main finding
Tussyadiah, Wang, Jung and tom Dieck (Tourism Management, 2018)	Two studies: 202 participants in Hong Kong viewing VR street view of Tokyo on Google Cardboard or VR video of Porto on Samsung Gear VR; 724 participants in the UK viewing 360-degree video of the Lake District National Park on Gear VR	A stronger sense of presence increased enjoyment of the VR experience and liking of the destination, and positive attitude change raised intention to visit
Alyahya and McLean (Journal of Travel Research, 2022)	Multi-study experiment comparing VR with a website	VR had a greater positive effect on attitudes toward a destination than a website, and the level of sensory information changed mental imagery, presence, attitudes and visit intention
El-Said and Aziz (Journal of Travel Research, 2022)	Survey of 401 respondents who had used tours of Egyptian heritage sites	Factors from the Technology Acceptance Model and the Protective Action Decision Model predicted intention to adopt tours as temporary alternatives in a crisis; adoption intention raised the tendency to visit the actual site
Shikhri, Poretski and Lanir (arXiv preprint, 2023)	Review of 40 museum tours; remote think-aloud usability study with 14 participants	Found "a significant disparity between users' mental models of virtual tours and the actual system behavior", especially in navigation
Eagan, Young, Bering and Langlotz (CHI, 2025)	Between-subjects study, 80 participants in the analysis, 360-degree kayak tour on Meta Quest 3	Narration increased presence and attachment to the destination; believing the tour was live did not significantly change presence but could increase attachment
de Araújo, Nunes and Teixeira (Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 2025)	Scoping review of 20 publications from seven databases	Questionnaires, interviews, behavioral observation and structural equation modeling were the main evaluation methods; usability, engagement, accessibility and discomfort mitigation were key factors
Yan, Meng and Tan (Information Systems Research, 2025)	Time on market of nearly 43,000 properties on a large Chinese real estate platform, 2018-2019	A VR tour shortened average time on market from 34 to 19 days, but did not affect selling price
Soleymanian and Qian (NBER working paper 33204, 2024, not peer-reviewed)	MLS transactions in Vancouver, Canada, with assessed values and agents' marketing data	Tours raised sale prices by about 1 percent on average, but the effect declined over time, particularly after COVID-19, as tours became standard practice

See also

• VR photography
• Virtual heritage
• 360 Video
• Photogrammetry
• Digital twin
• Telepresence
• Mirror world
• QuickTime VR
• Aspen Movie Map