One of the most important goals of a virtual tour is to show users different parts of a complex such as a hospital or an administrative building. If the building is large or has multiple sections, it may be challenging for users to find a specific section in the virtual tour.
Dealing with this challenge has always been one of our most important policies at Panoman Studio, and we have always tried to improve the user experience for viewers and observers of virtual tours by adding functional capabilities to virtual tours in the form of dedicated programming. Capabilities such as displaying the destination title for all guide arrows (using a text box specifying this title under the guide arrow. The important thing here is that due to the automatic generation of these text boxes, this feature is easily provided in large tours even with several hundreds of 360 panoramas), Smart search function that allows users to find the desired sections by typing any title related to that section...
But the new feature that we intend to introduce here is smart routing and automatic navigation, which is a very practical and useful feature to guide users. By using smart routing and automatic navigation, users can choose the shortest route from the selected 360 point to the desired destination (based on the least number of points between the origin and the destination). Another interesting feature of this module is the ability to determine the exact distance between points during photography with a tool such as a laser meter, in which case, the shortest route is suggested and displayed to the user based on the exact distance. The smart algorithm of this feature is exactly the same as traffic navigation applications such as Google Maps, and for the first time, Panoman Studio has placed it globally in virtual tours.
The importance of this capability and the idea of its design arose during the creation of virtual tours of hospitals and medical centers in our team. One of the most important goals of a virtual hospital tour is to provide guidance to clients and help them find the department they want. Clients can find their desired ward or department before entering the hospital or while they are there by using this special feature in the virtual tour. Therefore, considering the existence of different departments in hospitals and in order to better guide users to find the desired department, we added smart routing and automatic route navigation to Panoman Studio's virtual tour platform by spending weeks of coding. By using this key feature, virtual tours become a more efficient tool for visitors to hospitals as well as other large service centers. An example of intelligent routing and automatic navigation is here:
Virtual tour of the Faculty of Medicine of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran
One of the useful applications of this feature can be guiding visitors in large administrative centers, service centers or large shopping malls. For example, a client can view the virtual tour, starting with the 360-degree view of the place he is standing, by scanning the QR code installed at this place, and from there, by choosing his desired destination, he can go step by step towards the destination. This routing is easily possible without the need to ask different people, and its importance is especially evident for foreign visitors (such as foreign patients of hospitals) who cannot speak the local language.