Creating a virtual tour is an excellent way to showcase your business to potential customers. Not only does it give them a glimpse into your location, but it also allows them to explore the space in a more immersive way. Today, let’s explore how adding a floor plan to your virtual tour helps create a more meaningful experience with your virtual tour.

Floor Plan For Your Virtual Tour: Next Level Upgrade! #PunIntended

How Floor Plans Add Value to Your Virtual Tour

Adding floor plans can help patrons understand where they are in the space and how it connects to other building areas. This can provide a much more immersive virtual experience and help them make better decisions about whether or not they would like to visit your business.

Below is one of the virtual tours for the City of Parramatta utilising a floor plan to help people understand the layout of the community centre/venue.

Double-click in the virtual tour of Burnside Gardens to make it go full-screen, or click here

What is a 360 Virtual Tour?

360 virtual tours allow potential clients to view and interact with an immersive environment, such as a showroom, school, facility or organisation. Virtual tours make effective sales and marketing tools. They can also be embedded onto your website, shared on socials, EDM’s info/kiosk booths and many other places for customers to explore.

What is a Floor Plan?

A floor plan is a graphical representation of a building or room. It shows the dimensions and layout of the space, as well as any obstacles (such as walls) that obstruct its use. Floor plans are also helpful in understanding how people move through space and design features such as stairs and corridors.

Floor plans can be used in various settings, such as businesses, homes and schools. They can help understand an area or business’s function and layout, as well as help to develop more efficient designs.

Styles of Floor Plans

There are different styles of floor plans that can be integrated into a virtual tour. They all have their strengths and advantages, which include:

• Black and White Floor Plans: simple, easy to see and understand. It is ideal for virtual tours that focus on the layout.
• Colour Floor Plan: adds an extra layer of information with colour-coded areas and integrated branding.
• 3D Floorplans: This gives a more immersive experience to the virtual tour, which can also include branding.

Benefits Of Adding a Floor Plan To Your Virtual Tour

There are many benefits to adding a floor plan to your virtual tour. Some seem obvious with regard to navigation, but some of the more inherent advantages may surprise you.

It Helps To Understand The Layout Better

When looking at a floor plan, it can be helpful to understand the layout to better understand the space. The different sections of the plan can tell you about the use of space, where important features are located, and how people will access specific areas. Additionally, by adding a floor plan, you can get an idea of how large or small a room or area is or how areas interconnect.

Aids In Navigation

When looking at a large-scale virtual tour, it can be challenging to know where you are in relation to other areas of the building/buildings. Adding a floor plan can help address this issue by providing a diagram of the space. The floor plan can show you where important features are located and how they relate to one another. Additionally, it can show you where exits and entrances are located. This information can be beneficial for patrons who have difficulty navigating spaces or who are using a wheelchair.

It Helps With Getting Orientated

People sometimes find it difficult to orient themselves in 3D/360 environments. Adding a floor plan can help people understand their location within the space and how it relates to other areas. In addition, this diagram can also help people find their way around the space quickly and easily.

Virtual Tours Are More Engaging With A Floor Plan

When people visit a place, they usually look for an overall impression of the space. This can be gleaned from the exterior of the building or from pictures on social media. However, when people are touring a space that is not their own, they may be more engaged if they can see a floor plan of the space. A virtual tour with a floor plan provides context for what people are looking at and helps them understand how the space is organised.

A virtual tour with a floor plan also allows people to navigate through the space more quickly and easily. In addition, they can see where each room is located and how it connects to other areas of the house or office. This information can help visitors make better decisions about where to go next on their tour and what to look for while they are there.

The below virtual for the City Of Parramatta Epping Leisure and Learning Centre used a modified version of their floorplan with their branding and colours.

Double-click in the virtual tour to make it go full-screen, or click here

More Satisfied Customers / Clients / Patrons

There is no question that having a floor plan that satisfies patrons is key to keeping them coming back. A well-thought-out floor plan will make it easy for guests to find their way around and navigate to the areas of the business that they are interested in. This not only saves time but also ensures that customers are able to find the right location/areas they are looking for with ease.

For people coming to your location for the first time, it can be hard to know where the right entrance is. For large facilities, there could be multiple entrances and knowing how to enter is crucial. This can help decrease stress/anxiety in potential clients by making the experience as easy as possible.

Help The Environment

An often-overlooked advantage of adding a floor plan to a virtual tour is that it helps the environment in the most unexpected ways.

Print Out Fewer Flyers/Pamphlets

While we are heading to a paperless world, the fact is that maps/flyers to help navigate are very practical. By integrating the floorplan of your business/facilities into a virtual tour, you will not have to print out as many flyers because it is on people’s phones, tablets or desktop computers.

As a result, your paper usage will decrease considerably for this aspect of your business. As a result, the amount of ink/toner, paper and additional costs such as having staff or outsourcing to create these printed materials will decrease.

Lower Your Carbon Footprint And Your Customers As Well

If you have ever been to a large multi-site facility, you must often walk long distances or drive around. A good example is a college or school with different facilities on opposite ends of the campus. Having a floor plan available in the virtual tour helps people find their location more easily and burns fewer fossil fuels by minimising the amount they have to drive. This is especially important if they get lost.

Fun Fact: We have worked in some large locations with multiple buildings expanding multiple city blocks that did not have a floor plan or location map. While the staff were on hand for the shoot, they were not as familiar with their own location as they thought. We lost time trying to find the right location/place (about 5-10 minutes each time). As a result, we spent an additional 30-60 minutes on extra driving time, meaning we spent more time burning additional fossil fuels than needed.

We Create Floor Plans For Virtual Tours And Other Projects

Did you know that at Simply 360, we create floor plans for our clients to help enhance their virtual tours? These can be as simple as a black and white floor plan or a full branded colour floor plan. They can even be designed to be used outside of the virtual tour to be put on your website or email to clients.

Aside from creating floor plans for virtual tours, we also create floor plans for businesses that want a floor plan for their build to showcase to potential clients. They can be designed to fit your exact needs.

Conclusion – Floor Plans Bring That Next-Level Feel

As you can see, adding a floor plan to your virtual tour is an important step in creating a successful experience for your patrons. They have a wide variety of multi-use applications in and outside the virtual tour.

Are you an organisation, educational facility, government/council or multi-site facility looking to create a virtual tour? Contact us on  02 9674 9090, schedule a consultation, or fill out the form on this page to start a conversation for your virtual tour. Happy to discuss how we can create a high-end virtual experience for your organisation, facility or multi-site location and design it to your needs.

Do you think we left anything out regarding how a floor plan adds considerable value to virtual tours? Have you seen/been to any virtual tours for businesses, educational facilities or organisations which included a floor plan? Did you find it helpful? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment down below :)

Dimitri Cassimatis( Founder )

Dimitri is the founder of Simply 360, which specialises in creating immersive, interactive and engaging 360 / VR virtual tours, AR integration and marketing consultancy. He has worked in the digital marketing industry for over 15 years and has a passion for creating virtual tours with a key focus in strategic implementation.