Immersive Insights: Virtual Tour Analytics System for Understanding Visitor Behavior

Virtual tours are gaining increasing importance especially in the last year, when emerged the need to make develop new products and strategies due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which people where obliged to stay at home or, however, with strong limitations. To increase visibility and attraction of the users towards many kinds of services, virtual tours are used in different contexts: mainly tourism, but also universities and schools, real estate agencies and commercial activities. Then, virtual tours are communication tools that allow the visitor to navigate in an immersive and interactive way inside a website thanks to the integration of multimedia contents, so to live a real experience. Therefore, it has become mandatory the definition of a standard method for the creation of virtual tours and also a tool for evaluating their effectiveness related to the context in which they operate. In this context, this paper aims at proposing a standard data layer as a baseline to develop serialized virtual tours. Moreover, it presents an analytic tool able to evaluate the performance of a specific virtual tour. The case study taken into exam is the Open Days in a University located in the Marche region, in the center of in Italy. However, the approach can be extended in several context and can be generalised.