Where the room comes from

Search for how to build a virtual escape room and you will find good, detailed guides from the people who make the tools. ThingLink has a scenario builder with an escape room template. Genially has templates you can fill in without knowing anything. 3DVista has scoring, hotspots and timers built into Virtual Tour Pro. The mechanics are a solved problem.

Then every one of those guides reaches the same sentence and walks past it. ThingLink puts it plainly: a 360 photograph, an illustrated scene or a photograph of a real location can all serve as the backdrop, and you can design one in Canva. That is the whole hard part, handed over in a line.

The puzzle is the easy half

A locked door is a hotspot with a condition on it. A four digit code is a field and a comparison. You can write the entire logic of an escape room in an afternoon, and most people do.

What takes the weeks is somewhere to be trapped. It has to look real from every angle, because a 360 scene is looked at from every angle. It has to be somewhere a player believes they cannot simply walk out of. And it has to be something you are allowed to use commercially, which rules out most of what a search turns up.

Why one image is not a room

A single panorama is a backdrop. A player stands in it, turns around once, and has seen everything. There is nowhere to go, so the only thing left to do is answer questions, and at that point you have built a quiz with a picture behind it.

A room becomes a place when there is a second room. Walk down the corridor, through the door, into the chamber, back out. That is when players start mapping the space in their heads, and a mental map is what makes an escape room feel like one.

This is why the packs are packs. The light, the materials and the wear match from panorama to panorama, so a corridor and the room it opens into belong to the same building. Assemble a location from three unrelated stock images and players feel the seam even when they cannot name it.

What the file has to be

• Equirectangular, 2:1. That is the standard a 360 viewer expects, the same projection Google Street View uses.
• Big. 8192 x 4096 means a padlock at the far end of a corridor is still a padlock when somebody zooms into it, and players will zoom into everything.
• Seamless at the join, and sane at the poles. A visible seam behind the player breaks the room the moment they turn round.
• Licensed for what you are doing with it. Check before you build, not after.

Then pick your tool, not the other way round

The backdrop does not care what you build with. The same JPG loads into 3DVista, ThingLink, Pano2VR, Marzipano and Kuula, so choose the tool that fits your budget and your team, not the one that happens to have art. More on that in the same image in five different tour builders.

If your escape room is meant to be scary rather than industrial, the haunted sets are the other half of this catalogue. Mansions, cellars, dungeons and one very long corridor.

See the escape room packs →