A campus study compared free exploration with a step by step navigation guide, and timing was not the only thing it measured.
Virtual tours built from 360 degree photos have become a common way for universities to introduce a campus to people who cannot visit. One problem keeps showing up. When every navigation arrow is visible from the start, beginners tend to wander, miss rooms, and stop before they have seen the whole building.
Most virtual tours work like a room with all the doors open at once. Arrows point in every direction, and users move wherever they like. The authors call this non linear or free exploration. It suits experienced users, but the paper notes that novices often fail to reach all the locations.
The team built a second version of the same tour. Here the arrows appear one at a time. The next arrow only shows up after the visitor finds the current room and clicks its information icon, so the guide never turns the tour into a passive slideshow. Arrows also carry colour: white when they lead somewhere new, blue when they lead somewhere already seen.
Completion time differed significantly between the two groups. Students using the linear guide finished faster. In the raw times, several free navigation runs passed 2000 seconds, while the guided group stayed far lower.
Landmark knowledge showed no significant difference. People who followed the guide remembered the rooms just as accurately as people who explored on their own. That is the reassuring half of the result: the guide bought speed without costing spatial memory.
Akbar, M. A., et al. (2024). Performance Analysis of Virtual Tour Navigation Guides for Landmark Recognition. JOINCS (Journal of Informatics, Network, and Computer Science).
