If you’ve ever tried to share a 3D Virtual Tour during a Microsoft Teams or Zoom meeting and found that it suddenly becomes slow, jumpy, laggy or difficult for other people to follow, there’s a good chance the Virtual Tour itself isn’t the problem.
It’s often down to how your screen is being shared.
Platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom have to balance image quality, frame rate and bandwidth during screen sharing. By default, screen sharing is often optimised for relatively static content such as documents, presentations and spreadsheets rather than something with constant movement like an interactive 3D Virtual Tour.
Fortunately, a couple of simple changes can make a big difference.
When you navigate around a Virtual Tour, the image on your screen is constantly changing.
If your video conferencing software treats this in the same way as a static PowerPoint presentation, the people watching your screen may see:
Your own Virtual Tour may still look perfectly smooth. It is the screen-sharing feed being sent to everyone else that can become the bottleneck.
Here’s how to improve it.
If you are using the browser version of Teams, we recommend sharing only the browser tab containing your Virtual Tour.
When Chrome or Edge asks what you would like to share, you will normally see options for:
Chrome/Edge Tab | Window | Entire Screen
Choose the individual browser tab containing your Virtual Tour.
Sharing an entire screen or application window means Teams has considerably more information to capture and process.
For a Virtual Tour presentation, sharing only the relevant tab gives the browser and Teams a much simpler job and can result in noticeably smoother movement.
In the example below, we’re sharing only the Leeds United Memorial Virtual Tour tab rather than the complete screen.
If your browser gives you the option to Share tab audio, you can also enable this if your Virtual Tour contains audio or video content that you want your audience to hear.
For important presentations, demonstrations or client meetings, we’d generally recommend using the Microsoft Teams desktop application rather than Teams inside your browser.
The desktop version includes an extremely useful option specifically designed for content containing movement.
Once you start screen sharing, open the sharing/presenter controls and select:
This tells Microsoft Teams that the content you’re presenting contains motion and that smoother playback should be prioritised.
This is particularly useful when presenting:
3D Virtual Tours, Matterport Spaces, interactive Digital Twins, video, animated content or other visually rich online experiences.
If your Tour looks smooth on your own computer but appears jerky to somebody watching the meeting, this is one of the first settings we’d check.
Zoom has a very similar feature.
When sharing your screen in Zoom, open the sharing options and enable:
You may also see this described as Optimise for video clip depending on the version of Zoom you’re using.
Although you’re not necessarily sharing a traditional video, a Virtual Tour involves continuous movement across the screen, so this setting can make navigation appear considerably smoother to meeting participants.
If your Virtual Tour includes sound or embedded video, also enable Share sound.
If you are running Zoom through your browser, use the same principle as Microsoft Teams:
Avoid sharing your entire desktop unless there is a particular reason you need to.
The less unnecessary screen content Zoom has to capture and transmit, the better chance you have of achieving smooth Tour navigation.
Screen-sharing settings aren’t the only thing that can affect performance.
If you’re still having problems, try these checks:
If you’re having problems presenting one of our Virtual Tours through Teams or Zoom, get in touch with the Apollo3D team and we’ll be happy to help troubleshoot it.