360° Virtual Tour Glossary
Last updated:
360° Virtual Tour Terms: An Immersive Capture Glossary
Virtual tours turn a physical space into a navigable, shareable experience — useful for real estate, venues, facilities, and marketing. The vocabulary here is its own world, blending photography, 3D capture, and web delivery. If you are planning a 360° tour of a property in Pittsburgh or Western PA, these are the terms that decide how it looks, how people move through it, and how you publish it.
360° Panorama
A 360° panorama is a single image that captures a full spherical view from one point, letting a viewer look in every direction. Stitched panoramas are the building blocks of a walkthrough, placed at each stop along the route through a space.
Equirectangular & Cubemap
Equirectangular and cubemap are two ways of flattening a sphere into storable image data. Equirectangular stretches the view into a single wide frame; cubemaps split it into six faces. Both are reassembled by the viewer into the seamless 360° scene you navigate.
Dollhouse View
A dollhouse view is a pulled-back 3D model of the whole property that looks like an open dollhouse, letting viewers grasp the layout at a glance before stepping inside. It is one of the most recognizable features of a Matterport-style tour.
Floor Plan View
A floor plan view is a top-down schematic generated from the tour that lets viewers jump straight to a room. Alongside navigation, tour-derived floor plans give agents and facility teams a quick, measured reference for the space.
Mattertag / Hotspot
A Mattertag, or hotspot, is an interactive marker placed inside the tour that reveals a note, photo, video, or link when clicked — used to label equipment, highlight finishes, or connect to product and booking pages. Hotspots turn a passive walkthrough into an information layer.
Guided Tour & Walkthrough
A guided tour is a preset path that automatically moves viewers through the space in a chosen order, versus free navigation where they roam on their own. Guided tours are ideal for storytelling and first-time visitors.
HDR Capture
HDR capture is high-dynamic-range imaging that blends multiple exposures so bright windows and shadowed corners are both properly lit. HDR is what keeps a tour looking crisp and professional rather than blown-out or murky.
Measurement Mode
Measurement mode is a tool that lets viewers measure distances directly inside the tour — door widths, wall runs, ceiling heights. It adds practical utility for planning, fit-outs, and remote assessment without a site visit.
Embed & Iframe
An embed, or iframe, is the snippet of code that drops a live tour into a website, listing, or email so viewers explore it in place without leaving the page. A clean embed is what gets a tour in front of the audience that matters.
Digital Twin
When a tour is paired with accurate 3D and measurement data, it becomes a lightweight digital twin — a navigable, dimensioned record of the space that owners and facility teams can revisit long after capture day.
Virtual storefront terms
Virtual Storefront
A virtual storefront is an interactive 3D model of a physical store or showroom that lets visitors explore the space online, view products, and often shop directly from the tour.
Product Tagging
Product tagging means attaching interactive information — name, price, description, purchase link — to items shown in a virtual storefront.
E-commerce Integration
E-commerce integration means connecting a virtual storefront to an online store or checkout so visitors can add items to a cart and buy without leaving the experience.
Immersive Commerce
Immersive commerce means selling products through interactive, spatial online experiences rather than flat product pages.
Why These Terms Matter
Knowing this vocabulary helps you brief a tour that does its job: the right capture quality, the interactive features that fit your goal, and a delivery format your audience can actually open. Whether the tour is for selling a property, showcasing a venue, or documenting a facility, tell us the goal and we will match the capture and features to it.
