View, Review, Repeat: Towards Design Guidelines for 360° Virtual Experiences

360° panoramic virtual experiences have become a widely adopted medium for enabling remote exploration of cultural heritage sites and tourist destinations. Compared to fully immersive virtual reality systems, these experiences provide accessible, cost-effective web-based environments that allow users to navigate panoramic scenes enriched with interactive and multimedia elements. Despite their growing use in museums, tourism, and heritage dissemination, the design characteristics of contemporary 360° virtual experiences remain insufficiently examined from a holistic perspective. This study investigates how such experiences are structured and designed in practice. We conducted a structured review of 29 publicly available 360° virtual experiences from cultural heritage and tourism contexts, examining technical implementation, navigation mechanics, information presentation, and content formats. In addition, a focus group with 6 experts in digital experience design and cultural heritage applications qualitatively evaluated a subset of 20 content-rich experiences, assessing aesthetic quality, usability, informational clarity, and structural coherence. Our findings reveal recurring design patterns as well as common limitations, including reliance on sequential navigation, inconsistent integration of interpretive content, and limited support for layered information exploration. By synthesizing quantitative structural analysis with qualitative expert insights, this work proposes a preliminary set of empirically grounded, expert-informed design hypotheses, paving the way towards supporting the development of more engaging 360° virtual experiences for cultural heritage and tourism applications.