Before you begin creating your first scene or hotspot, here is a basic overview of what kinds of scenes you can create in the Circuit CMS, how you should format their guide cards, as well as a few tips and tricks to help you create content that will engage and excite your prospects. Following our recommended guide card structure, for example, will make sure that your scenes are accessible and immersive on all kinds of devices.

Scenes are essentially the building blocks or “tour stops” of your tours. There are three types of scenes: 360° Scenes, Gallery Scenes, and Matterport Embed Scenes.

Within the CMS, you can create project folders and groups to organize your scenes in the way that you want. We recommend creating a project based on a location, and a group based on a building that a number of your scenes may share. For example: in the "Explorer Campus" project would be the "Welcome Centre" group, and in that group would be the "Reception" scene.

360° Scenes are a type of scene that is created using a panorama and built up with hotspots. They are designed to be immersive, interactive, and informative.

Gallery Scenes are a type of scene that showcases a series of images and embedded videos, which are very useful for creating virtual photobooks and can be used for lead generation. They can contain up to 20 items consisting of images or videos with descriptions.

Matterport Embed Scenes are a type of scene that is an interactive 3D model of a room or building. This scene type allows you to embed your Matterport content into your tour.

Your guide card content may look slightly different depending on the scene and tour, but we recommend a specific layout for optimal performance and appearance.

There are three options for creating a guide card that you can preselect in the guide card builder in your scene.

Be mindful of how much information you include in your guide card. As a best practice, Circuit recommends keeping guide card content to 200 to 300 characters. Users are much more likely to click off a scene or move to the next scene without reading everything you have written when the text is too long. Dividing up one guide card into multiple hotspots solves the character issue and prevents information overload.

Hotspots are interactive annotations that you can add to your 360° scenes, often used to highlight key information in a scene. Hotspots can feature an image or video, text descriptions, and links to external pages. They can also help users to better experience 360° scenes, and spend more time on page.

The exact same way that you would build one for a scene!

One thing to note about creating a hotspot guide card that is different than a scene is the ability to add a Location, which is a clickable button that allows users to jump to another scene in the tour. This jump is only possible if both scenes are in the same tour. If you would like to add this feature to your hotspots, please reach out to a Customer Success team member for assistance.

On desktop, images appear at the top of the guide card. On mobile, images that appear at the top of the guide card must be tapped in order to expand and view them. If an image has been added to a guide card below the title or paragraph text, it will not show up at all: this is why it is very important to properly build your scenes and hotspots.

Send us a message and we will be happy to assist you.