If you’ve ever tried to picture a room at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from a floor plan, you’ll know the challenge. It’s a big place. MCEC describes it as 70,000 square metres of space, from the Plenary theatre to a pillarless exhibition hall to courtyard meeting rooms.
MCEC’s virtual tours cover more than 37 separate 3D experiences. They’re captured using Matterport, and then comes the part that takes the real work: our custom navigation, so 37-plus tours behave like one venue instead of 37 links in an email. When you’ve got that many spaces, helping people get to the right one matters just as much as the tours themselves.
Why does a big venue need more than one 3D tour?
It isn’t a stylistic choice. A single Matterport model has practical limits on how much floor area and how many scan points it can hold before it stops processing reliably and starts loading slowly for the people you want using it. A venue the size of MCEC sits well past that line.
There’s a second limit that catches people out. A tour shows a space exactly as it was set up on the day it was captured. So a room that works as a theatre one week and a banquet the next can’t be both in the one tour — each configuration needs its own capture.
Which means a venue like this was always going to be a set of tours rather than one. The interesting question isn’t whether to split it up. It’s how you put it back together for the person looking.
How do people find the right space among 37+ tours?
Nobody planning a conference wants to click through 30 rooms to find the one they came for. So the experience is built around getting people where they need to go, quickly.
MCEC’s own guide to its virtual tours walks viewers through the options:
- A navigation menu to jump straight to the space or room they want to see.
- Floor plan view to switch between levels without getting lost.
- Dollhouse view for a bird’s-eye look at how the spaces fit together.
- Share links that drop a colleague into the exact view you were looking at.
Custom navigation is part of what we do. There’s no point having 37 tours if someone opens one, can’t work out where they are, and closes the tab. The tours have to be worth using, not just worth having.
There’s real craft in the capture itself, in how a venue this size gets scanned properly, and the custom navigation is built on top of that work for each client specifically. What suits a convention centre isn’t what suits a display home or an airport terminal.
Who uses MCEC’s virtual tours: planners or visitors?
Both, and this is the detail I like most about how MCEC uses it. The same 3D Tour has two different uses, because planners and visitors are asking different questions.
Event planners find the tours on MCEC’s Take a virtual tour page, alongside floor plans and capacity guides. They’re sizing up rooms, picturing layouts and deciding whether the venue suits their event, without needing to be in Melbourne to do it.
Visitors find them on the Explore our venue online page. MCEC frames this around practical questions: where’s my conference room, how close is the entrance, where’s the nearest cafe? It’s about arriving already knowing your way around.
Same building, same capture, two uses. That’s a good way to think about any venue tour: who’s going to open it, and what do they need to find?
What can Mattertags add to a venue tour?
Mattertags are the clickable points inside a tour that hold extra information: descriptions, images, videos and links. MCEC’s team added theirs themselves, on our platform, which is how it should work — nobody knows a venue’s spaces better than the people who run them. They colour-coded them so viewers can spot what’s relevant at a glance:
- Orange for technology features
- Red for accessibility features
- Pink for specific room and space features
- Black for general venue features
It’s a simple idea that does a lot of work. Someone checking AV can follow the orange. Someone checking access can follow the red. And if you’d rather just look around, the tags can be switched off.
They’ve gone with colours that match their own brand, which shows how flexible our custom navigation really is for each customer. There are thousands of icons to choose from, and every one of them can be set to any colour you can imagine, pick the HEX code and it’s yours. No settling for whatever the default happens to be.
What goes on behind a capture this size?
Plenty, and most of it happens before the camera comes out. MCEC is a working venue with events on constantly, so the capture dates were planned around what was already booked, space by space. That’s normal for venues this busy and it’s most of the job: getting clean access to a room at a time when it’s set up the way it should be seen.
MCEC’s own teams did a lot of work to make it happen. Coordinating access across a live venue, getting spaces ready and having the right people available at the right moments is no small effort, and the quality of the result reflects theirs as much as ours.
Rooms that can be set up more than one way add another layer of complexity. A space that works as a theatre one week and a gala dinner the next can’t be shown properly in one capture, so those spaces need more planning than a fixed room does. It makes a job more complex, not harder — it’s the kind of thing we’ve worked through plenty of times.
What should your venue decide before capture day?
MCEC is a big example, but the same questions apply to a venue with six function rooms. A few quick calls early save a lot of back-and-forth later:
- Who will open it? Planners, attendees, staff, or all three? Each may need a different starting point.
- What do they need to find? A specific room, the accessible entrance, the AV setup, the nearest cafe.
- How should they move between spaces? One tour, or several connected ones with a menu to jump between them.
- What information belongs inside the tour? Capacities, accessibility notes, links to floor plans or booking pages.
Thinking about something similar for your venue?
If you look after a venue with lots of rooms, or more than one venue, We’d love to hear how you want people to find their way around. Tell us how many spaces you’ve got and who’ll be looking at them, and we’ll talk through how to connect them.
Get in touch with SmartView Media. Or have a look at MCEC’s virtual tours for yourself.
Quick answers
How many virtual tours does MCEC have?
MCEC has more than 37 virtual experiences across its 70,000 sqm venue.
Where can I find MCEC’s virtual tours?
Event planners can use the Take a virtual tour page. Visitors can use Explore our venue online.
What technology is behind MCEC’s virtual tours?
The tours were captured using Matterport, then connected through custom navigation built by SmartView Media, which links 37+ separate tours into one venue-wide experience.
