Start here: how scenescape.io works

Goal

Build a clear mental model of how scenescape.io fits together — so you can pick a confident first build path and explain the visitor experience to anyone in one breath.

When to use it

• You are new to scenescape.io and want the big picture before touching the builder.
• You need to explain the difference between a world, a scene, a hotspot, and a portal.
• You are deciding whether to start from the AI World Builder or a blank manual world.

Step-by-step walkthrough

1. Start with the world. A world is the whole authored experience — it has a name, a description, a set of scenes, a visibility setting, and a public URL you can share.
2. Picture scenes as connected 360-degree rooms or moments. Every scene needs a panorama, and each one can carry its own narration, music, and AI Guide settings.
3. Use hotspots to direct attention. An info hotspot teaches with a short note, a narration hotspot adds a spoken beat, and a portal hotspot carries the visitor to another scene.
4. Reach for the AI Guide when visitors should be able to ask questions, get help interpreting a scene, or be quizzed on what they have seen.
5. Choose visibility deliberately: private for your own review, unlisted for sharing a direct link, and public when you want the world discoverable in Explore.

Best practices

• Give every world one clear visitor goal — what should someone understand or feel by the end?
• Sketch your first three scenes before you generate a single panorama.
• Use hotspots sparingly so visitors still get the joy of exploring the image themselves.
• Always walk through your world as a visitor in Preview before you publish publicly.

Avoid these mistakes

• Treating a world like a slide deck instead of a place a visitor can inspect and move through.
• Generating a pile of scenes before the story or the route through them is clear.
• Adding portals with vague labels that never tell the visitor where they are about to go.

Go deeper

• Every memorable world has three things: a premise, a route, and a reason for the visitor to keep looking.
• The strongest scenes share visual anchors — recurring objects, colors, or framing — that tie the world together.
• Save Explore for worlds polished enough to land with a stranger who has zero context.