Make Your Virtual Tours More Interactive With “Open-door” Effect

Virtual tours are from nature interactive because they are (in most cases) created with 360° photos which enable the user to explore every detail of the space with a click.

But is it enough? Some users would love to be able to interact with the space much more. And here an “open-door effect” and other interactive methods come into play.

So, what is the “open-door” effect? How does it work? What does it look like? And most importantly … why is it useful? 

What is an “open-door” effect in a virtual tour?

Well, it is a method of how a virtual tour creator can create a more interactive user interface and give more control to the user.

From the name itself, you can probably understand what the effect does, but in a nutshell, it is an effect that gives the user the ability to open and close any type of door or other element in a virtual tour.

For example, you want to create a virtual tour experience, that showcases a specific room let’s say a hotel suite. And you want the user to focus on the specific point of the space and only after exploring this space, do you want the user to go to the next room. The “open-door” effect is great for that because at the start you can let the doors to the other room close. After the users wants to go to the next room, they can easily open the door to the next room.

Or you want to showcase some specific element in the space with a click. So, you let the user find the hotspot button and by clicking open the element (for example a cabinet).

And much more. These were just 2 possible ideas on how we can use an “open-door” effect. The possibilities are endless.

How does an “open-door” effect work in virtual tours?

The concept behind an “open-door” effect in virtual tours is pretty simple.

When creating 360° images, you will create one image when the element (in our example the door) is open and one image when the element is closed. 

The last step is just to create a hotspot button that will work as a switch. When the user clicks or hover on the button the second image will be visible. When I say visible, I mean the second image will be in a higher layer similar to how layers work in Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo. We can achieved this by setting the CSS z-index property higher for the second image. 

What does it look like?

Do not worry, I’ll share here with you a few examples of what an “open-effect” can look like.

In first example you can see a hotel room we create a virtual tour for with an “open-door” effect for opening these sliding doors. We used the polygon type button which enable the user to open the door by just hovering on the door. When the users wants to go to the second room, they can just click on the door or the button in the center of the door.

This hotel room is from one of our clients Almanac X Alcron Prague. And if you want you can see other virtual tours we create for our clients, you can explore our project portfolio with case studies

You can see the second example of open-door effect in the same virtual tour. But with opening and closing the mini fridge. Here we used a classic button, which opens and closes the closet with a mini fridge by hovering on the button with the wine glass icon.

Well, that is a great question. As you can imagine, creating an “open-door” effect can be a little bit time-consuming. 

So, in terms of business, virtual tour creators will probably charge more if the client wants the “open-door” effects. The price of course is determined by the creator, so you as a client need to ask how much it is.

But in some cases, can be really useful and sometimes can be even cheaper to use this effect. Imagine that you want to showcase a small room, but you do not need a full 360° image for that, so you just use the “open-door” effect and show the user what it looks like when it is open.

Or your business wants to give the user more options what they can explore. In other words… provide more value to the customers (users/visitors/clients/employees/ …). And let them spend more time on the virtual tour. This for example can be beneficial if the virtual tour is stored on your website and your business care about website traffic and user experience. 

In conclusion

Virtual tours are interactive with or without an “open-door” effect. However, adding an interactive element such as “open-door” or others to the virtual tour can be beneficial if your business would love to provide more information to the user and make a better user experience.

It all depends on the goal of the virtual tour and the abilities of the virtual tour creator.

If your company would love to have “open-door” effects in your virtual tours, let us know here and we will be glad to help.