Summary:
Design Technologist and Enscape expert Dan Stine shares the benefits of an Enscape and Chaos Cloud workflow. Learn how to review design solutions and render with Enscape, while presenting and iterating with Chaos Cloud via panorama tours, VR, and interactive 3D streaming in a centralized place.
In my previous post on panoramas at Lake Flato, I walked through how we generate stereo panoramas in Enscape and deliver them to clients—often via Yulio and a Quest headset. In this follow-up, I’ll use the same Lake Flato office remodel project to show how Chaos Cloud now handles the heavy lifting: hosting panorama tours, adding hotspots and floor plans, collecting feedback, and even running immersive VR sessions on a Quest 3—no additional platform or licenses required.
What this article will cover:
- From panoramas to virtual tours in the cloud
- Getting Enscape panoramas into Chaos Cloud
- Building an interactive virtual tour
- Sharing the tour and collecting feedback
- Stepping inside the tour with a Quest 3
- Beyond panoramas: 3D Streaming and AI helpers
- Chaos Cloud as an extension of Enscape
From panoramas to virtual tours in the cloud
If you read my earlier “Creating and Using Panoramas at Lake Flato Architects” article, you’ll remember the basic flow:
- Model in Revit (SketchUp or Rhino)
- Visualize with Enscape
- Render stereo panoramas
- Share via links, QR codes, or a Yulio-based VR workflow on a standalone headset
That pipeline still works, but the ecosystem around Enscape has changed. With Enscape 4.1.1 and newer, panoramas and web standalones you manage in the Upload Management dialog can be sent directly to Chaos Cloud (collaboration tab). Existing Enscape galleries and links can be migrated there as well, preserving the original URLs.
Chaos Cloud is now the central hub: it’s where your projects, files, and virtual tours live; where you invite team members and clients to comment; and where you control sharing and permissions in one place.
For this post, I’ll stick with the same Lake Flato office remodel in San Antonio—modeled in Revit, visualized in Enscape—and focus on what happens after the panoramas are rendered.
For step-by-step details on setting up views and creating panoramas in Enscape, refer to the earlier Lake Flato panoramas post.
Getting Enscape panoramas into Chaos Cloud
On the Enscape side, almost nothing changes in your day-to-day work. You still:
- Create carefully composed views in Revit
- Render stereo panoramas from Enscape (we still default to stereo at Lake Flato for a better sense of depth)
The main difference is where those panoramas land.
With Enscape 4.1.1 and beyond, Upload Management becomes your gateway to Chaos Cloud. Panoramas show up in the Panoramas tab, grouped by project, and you can upload them to Chaos Cloud (collaboration tab) directly from that dialog. All uploaded panoramas are then available under your Chaos Cloud account for use in projects and virtual tours.
In Chaos Cloud, each Enscape project corresponds to a project folder. From there, you can:
- Organize files into subfolders
- Create virtual tours from existing panoramas
- Upload additional assets such as still images or diagrams
- Share anything—from a single file to an entire project—using links or email invitations, with granular control over who can view, comment, or edit.
Think of Chaos Cloud as the “project room” where your Enscape output lives and where all the discussion around it happens.
Building an interactive virtual tour
Once the panoramas for our office remodel are sitting in a Chaos Cloud project, the next step is to turn them into an interactive tour.
1. Create the tour container
Within the project, clicking Create virtual tour creates a dedicated virtual tour object. You then populate it with your Enscape panoramas and any supporting images you want to include, such as a floor plan.
Behind the scenes, Chaos Cloud supports several common panorama formats, including equirectangular and stereo panoramas, so your Enscape output drops in cleanly.
2. Add hotspots for movement
Panorama tours only feel like a “walkthrough” when you can move naturally from one vantage point to another. In Chaos Cloud, that’s the job of hotspots.
Hotspots are interactive icons overlaid on the panorama. Click one, and you jump to another panorama in the tour—like walking through a doorway.
You can:
- Place hotspots manually, positioning them in the direction a person would naturally move
- Tweak their icon shape, size, color, and label to match your visual language
- Use Auto generate to automatically cross-link panoramas that came from the same Enscape project (Enscape 4.1.1 and above), either as “previous/next” or “alltoall” connections.
For the Lake Flato office remodel, we auto-generate a basic network of hotspots and then refine a few manually, prioritizing circulation paths that matter to clients: entry > reception > open office > collaboration areas > courtyard.
To make transitions feel like you’re walking forward, you can create paired hotspots pointing between the same two panoramas and use the automatic orientation option, so the viewer’s direction of travel is preserved as they move.
3. Add a floor plan and minimap
One of the most significant upgrades over our old workflow is orientation.
Within a virtual tour, any flat image can be designated as the floor plan. Once set, Chaos Cloud can display:
- A full-screen floor plan image
- A minimap in the lower right corner, showing where you are and which way you’re facing in plan.
You link each panorama to its position on the floor plan via hotspots. Once those links are in place, the minimap updates as the viewer moves through the tour, which is especially helpful for clients who struggle with spatial orientation in 3D.
For our office, we use a simplified furniture plan without dimensions—just enough to show circulation and key rooms.
Note: Currently, only a single image can be designated as a floor plan, so multistory buildings need a custom side-by-side or stacked/pancake-style floor plan image.
4. Use highlights as narrative anchors
Hotspots handle movement; highlights tell the story.
Highlights are callouts you place within a panorama. Each one can include a title, descriptive text, optional images, and links to external resources; anything from a product cut sheet to a sustainability report.
They also double as navigation: Chaos Cloud can display a list of all highlights in the tour; clicking one jumps the viewer to that point in the relevant panorama.
On the Lake Flato remodel, we use highlights to:
- Explain daylight strategies at workstations
- Call out reused materials and low-carbon finishes
- Link to supplementary images of furniture options
The net effect is a guided story layered on top of an otherwise free-form tour.
Sharing the tour and collecting feedback
Chaos Cloud is built around sharing and comments, so once the tour looks right, distribution is straightforward.
From the project or tour level, you can:
- Copy a public or semi-public link
- Invite specific collaborators by email and set their role to Viewer or Editor
- Control whether “anyone with the link” can view only or also leave comments.
Comments aren’t limited to plain text. In Present mode, reviewers can:
- Drop comments on a specific pixel in an image or panorama
- Attach reference images to comments
- Add visual annotations—rectangles, arrows, freeform sketches—directly on the view
- Resolve and reopen comment threads as issues are addressed.
For our office remodel, that means a client can circle a specific workstation cluster and say, “Can we flip the orientation, so people face the windows?” without a 30-minute screen-sharing session.
According to Chaos, the virtual tour and design review features in Chaos Cloud are currently free to use, making this a low-friction way to experiment with cloud-based reviews alongside your existing deliverables.
Stepping inside the tour with a Quest 3
The earlier Lake Flato panoramas article leaned on Yulio and a Quest 2 to deliver “high-end VR in a carry-on.” The Quest 3 continues that tradition—but now Chaos Cloud can drive the experience directly.
Chaos Cloud supports a dedicated VR mode for panoramas and virtual tours that runs in any WebXR-capable browser. The documentation explicitly calls out standalone headsets as supported devices, alongside PCtethered headsets and even mobile phones in cardboard-style viewers.
In practice with a Quest 3, the flow looks like this:
- Open the Chaos Cloud tour link in the headset’s browser.
- Tap the Enter VR / VR toggle button.
- Use gaze or controller rays to activate hotspots and move from one panorama to the next.
Because it’s all browser-based, the client doesn’t have to install a dedicated app or maintain a separate content library. The same URL works on a laptop, tablet, or Quest 3—just with a different level of immersion.
Compared to the Yulio-based workflow in the previous article, there are a few practical trade-offs:
Chaos Cloud advantages
- Integrated with Enscape uploads and Chaos projects
- Shared comments and markups live in the same place as your stills and other collateral
- No separate subscription is needed to view panorama tours; at the time of writing, virtual tours and design reviews are free
Yulio advantages
- Mature, VR-specialized platform with native Quest apps and its own collaboration features
- Ability to download projects for fully offline viewing, which is handy when presenting in locations with unreliable connectivity
For our internal design reviews and most client meetings at Lake Flato, Chaos Cloud now covers the majority of use cases. We still keep Yulio in the toolbox for very specific situations where offline access is required or when a client is already heavily invested in that ecosystem.
Bonus workflow: If you have a 360 camera, you can drop in panoramas of an existing building and create a Virtual Tour to share with the team during the design phase. Or you could document a newly completed building and use the Virtual Tour for marketing.
Here is a short video I created:
Beyond panoramas: 3D Streaming and AI helpers
Panorama tours aren’t the only way Chaos Cloud extends the Enscape workflow.
3D Streaming (Beta)
When a project would benefit from full freedom of movement, not just fixed viewpoints, Chaos Cloud’s 3D Streaming (currently in beta and open to all customers) lets you upload an Enscape scene and stream an interactive walkthrough directly in the browser.
Stakeholders can navigate the design themselves without installing Enscape locally or owning a high-end GPU. For remote sessions, 3D Streaming is a valuable complement to panorama tours: use the tour for lightweight, link-based reviews, and switch to streaming when you want a more free-form, real-time walkthrough.
AI Enhancer and AI Upscaler
Chaos Cloud also includes two AI-driven tools that pair well with Enscape-based workflows:
- AI Enhancer: applies intelligent cleanup and refinement to rendered images, with particular emphasis on people and vegetation assets—often the elements that benefit most from a subtle boost in realism. (accessed from within Enscape)
- AI Upscaler: increases image resolution (2× or 4×) while preserving visual fidelity, so you can send lowerresolution drafts to the cloud and upscale only the frames you decide to keep, instead of re-rendering at higher resolution. Note: this specific Chaos AI upscaler does not work on panos and does not make the entourage more realistic. (accessed in the Chaos Cloud)
On the Lake Flato office remodel, that might mean:
- Using AI Enhancer to refine hero stills that sit alongside the virtual tour in a client-facing presentation
- Upscaling the final “signoff” views for large-format boards or high-resolution PDFs, without rerunning lengthy local renders
Again, these tools live in the same environment as your tours and comments, which keeps the workflow tidy.
Wrapping up: Chaos Cloud as an extension of Enscape
From our standpoint at Lake Flato, the shift from isolated panoramas and external VR viewers to Chaos Cloud-hosted virtual tours is less about adding steps and more about consolidating them:
- Enscape remains the place where we review design solutions, navigate, and render.
- Chaos Cloud becomes the place where we present, review, and iterate—with panorama tours, comments, VR, and (in beta) fully interactive 3D Streaming all under one roof.
If you’re already generating panoramas in Enscape, the next experiment is simple:
- Update to the latest Enscape (4.1.1 or newer).
- Upload a small set of panoramas for an active project, maybe even the same five views you’d normally send as static links.
- In Chaos Cloud, create a virtual tour, add a floor plan, and auto-generate hotspots.
- Share the link with a client or colleague, and, if you have access to a Quest 3, try viewing the same tour in VR.
You’ll still get the benefits of Enscape’s real-time workflow, but now with a cloud-based layer that makes collaboration, sharing, and immersive review much easier—without juggling extra platforms or licenses.
