Dashboard 23.2 Release Notes

The latest product release and improvements to the Threshold 360 Viewer and Dashboard

New features

Viewer (V3)

• Camera inertia

  • The camera carries momentum from the user's movements. You can now “flick” the camera in the direction you want to look. This reduces the amount of swiping needed to get to what you want to look at. This is particularly useful for small viewers, or viewers on vertical mobile screens.

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• Responsive UI

  • All UI elements have been combined together so that they can interact and respond to each other. This allows for the viewer to have a much wider range of sizes and shapes since the interface can scale dynamically. This makes it much easier to add the viewer to your page without having to worry about minimum sizes.

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• Custom configurations

  • The newest viewer gives you control over how it behaves with customizable configuration options. You can fine-tune your implementation by setting individual settings or you can choose from presets that we have right out of the box. You can see which configuration options are available here.

• Custom native call-to-action images

  • You can now add a custom image to your tours to help lead users to your website. After setting an image and a URL in the dashboard, your image will appear in the top right corner of your tours. When the user clicks on your image, they will be directed to the link that you specify. This link can be customized for each of your locations which means you can link to different pages of your website depending on what location is being viewed.

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Maps

• Viewers have been upgraded to v3
  • All viewers within the maps have been switched over to v3. This means all of the viewer analytics from your maps are already using the latest analytics.
• Deleting a location from the dashboard now removes that location from all maps
  • Previously if you removed a location from your dashboard, it would still exist in all of your maps. This meant that users had to go through each of their maps in order to remove that location. This is now done automatically for you.

Analytics (V3)

• Campaign tagging

  • Viewer instances can be tagged with a campaign id. You can then use this id to filter down your analytics. This is useful for identifying which viewers are generating traffic. For example, you may want to track the performance of your  AdTours specifically, by giving them a campaign id. You could even compare the performance of your ad campaigns by giving them unique campaign ids. You now have access to unlimited campaign tags and can view the documentation on how to use campaign tagging here.

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• Source tracking

  • You can now see where your viewers are being shown and track them on a per-website basis. You can then filter down by domain to see how many views and engagements your tours a generating. For example, if you posted one of your tours on multiple social media platforms, you could compare them to see which platform gets you the most engagement.

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• Enhanced engagement rate

  • Engagement rate is now tracked at a per-session level. Previously we could only take the raw number of views and compare that to the raw number of engagements for a poor approximation of how often people are engaging. Now we can track how many sessions actually engage thanks to session id tracking.

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Dashboard

• Now shows location previews using the v3 viewer
  • We are now using the v3 viewer for all the instances that appear in our dashboard.

Improvements

Viewer

• Improved camera sensitivity
  • Camera movement sensitivity now feels more consistent across all viewer sizes. This provides a much more consistent experience between mobile and desktop. Previously it might have felt like the viewer sensitivity was okay on desktop, but too slow on mobile (vertical orientation) or narrow viewer implementations.
• Smaller download size
  • The v3 viewer has been completely overhauled from the ground up. This has given us the opportunity to optimize the output size of our tools. This means you will spend less time loading, and more time enjoying your content.
• Imagery caching
  • Caching of imagery allows users to come back to their favorite tours with even less loading time. Perhaps you wanted to show your grandmother a Threshold 360 tour that you saw earlier that day, but your data connection isn’t great at her place. Imagery caching should make returning to your favorite tours much easier and quicker.
• Autoplay stays off unless the user enables it again
  • The v2 viewer had an aggressive autoplay function that would continually restart the camera movement if the user stopped interacting with the viewer. We felt this was not the best user experience and changes this behavior in v3. The user can choose to start the autoplay again by hitting the play button on their screen.
• The viewer now uses proper full-screen API implementation
  • We previously used a custom library to enable fullscreen capabilities. The new viewer now uses the standardized full-screen API to give a much more consistent experience across more browsers and devices.
• The viewer can be focused via keyboard to enable navigation
  • It was possible to control the v2 viewer with the keyboard. But you would need to focus the viewer with your mouse first. The new viewer can be focused using only the keyboard to make it easier for users who cannot use a mouse.
• CSS is now isolated from the parent page
  • Some users may have noticed that their viewer implementations could be subject to CSS styles from the parent page. The v3 viewer utilizes an isolated shadow DOM to keep the look and feel of the viewer consistent on any page.

Analytics

• Improved unique user count
  • Total unique users are now separately queried over the span of the currently selected date range in your analytics. This means you get exactly how many unique users have seen your content for a given time frame.
• Metrics are individually loaded
  • All of the metric values on the v3 analytics page are now individual requests to our backend. This means you get to see you data as soon as it comes in without needing to wait for everything to load. This also means if there was ever anything wrong with one of your metrics, it would not affect your ability to view the others.

Dashboard

• Generating an embed code for an individual tour is much easier to find

  • There is now a dedicated menu entry option for embedding individual tours on the location details page. If you click the three dots on a particular tour, you can directly access the individual tour embed code. Previously you would need to click “Edit” to see this code which was not very intuitive.
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Issue Resolutions

Viewer (V3)

• Updates to location info are now immediately reflected in the viewer

  • We used to have an aggressive caching layer for our share page Thresholds. This meant that if a user changed information about their location it would not immediately be reflected in their tours. In some cases, this meant that information did not update for several days. The v3 viewer solves this by pulling fresh data each time it gets loaded.

• First scene distortion bug

  • There is a bug in the v2 viewer that distorts the pano image if you immediately go back to the start of the tour after the first step. This is no longer an issue in the v3 viewer. (Example of the bug depicted below)
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• Isolated viewer state

  • Previously if you tried to add multiple viewers to the same web page, you could get some strange behavior between the two. One observed behavior was when moving the camera in one viewer, it would move the camera in another viewer. The v3 viewer ensures that the state of any viewers on the page is totally isolated from each other.

• Moving the camera within a tour no longer scrolls the page

  • When moving the camera on a mobile device the page would still scroll up and down. This made navigating through tours a bit frustrating because you would need to continually manage your scroll height on the page while looking around. The v3 viewer disables page scrolling while moving the camera around which gives a much better experience.

• Tour thumbnails no longer disappear when you hover over them

  • When hovering a thumbnail for a tour within the viewer, it would disappear. This is no longer the case, and it will be highlighted instead.

Maps

• Customizable call-to-action buttons in the maps have been restored

• Fixed a bug where incorrect locations were being added to the map from the add location prompt
  • Sometimes when you searched for a location on the maps, you would get a result that matches what you searched for, but when you attempted to add it to the map, it would add a completely different location.
• The collapsible list of locations will no longer get stuck open
  • Previously there was a bug while embedding maps on the page where the list of locations would get stuck open and cover the map view. This was particularly an issue for smaller screens where the location list covers up the whole screen.

Analytics

• Clicking locations in the insight section navigates you to that location
  • Previously the insights at the bottom of the page could not be used to navigate to the location from the dashboard.

Dashboard

• Fixed Google branded uploads
  • We fixed the process for connecting your Google account to the dashboard. This means you can continue to have your Threshold 360 content published to Google listings with white labeling from your Google account.
• Fixed an issue where some tour previews did not appear
  • There were rare cases where users were experiencing tours not appearing in their dashboard when drilling down to the individual tour and pano level. This issue has been resolved.
• Fixed a bug where location information could not be updated
  • It was not possible for some users to update their location information through the dashboard due to an API issue. This also effected editing pin information. Both of these have been resolved.
• Facebook account integration
  • Addressed a technical issue that prevented users from connecting their accounts with Facebook. Users can now successfully link their accounts to Facebook, enabling them to enjoy the full benefits of account integration.
• Fixed a bug where categories could not be updated in the dashboard
  • Resolved an issue that hindered users from modifying categories directly from the dashboard. With this fix, users can now easily and effortlessly make changes to categories, improving the overall flexibility and customization options for managing their content.

Backend

• Fixed a bug where custom share pages tours would affect the default tour for a location
  • Sometimes when a share page Threshold was created, it would override the information from the default Threshold. This meant when you tried to view the default threshold, you would only see the tours that were selected for custom Thresholds.