3D Virtual Tours – Transforming the venue booking journey 

City of Sydney’s 3D Virtual Tours re-imagines how our community books local venues. The City looks after 38 community facilities comprising 81 individual spaces worth $40 million. Every year thousands of enquiries hit a small venues team, and a single in-person inspection can swallow around 60 minutes of back-and-forth and onsite time.

Instead of more staff hours, we turned to LiDAR-powered digital twins. Using emerging spatial capture technology, each venue is rebuilt in 3D so hirers can walk around, flip to a birds-eye “dollhouse” and pull exact measurements on any device, 24×7. The three-venue pilot proved irresistible: in the first two months the tours logged 1,000 + unique visits, drove a 44% jump in Google profile engagement and delivered 100% user confidence to book.

Operational gains are just as sharp. Venue staff now see 44% fewer space-related enquiries and reclaim up to 65 minutes whenever a virtual visit replaces a site walk-through. Because LiDAR capture undercuts the cost of traditional photo or video shoots, the business case stacked up for scale.

As one of the first NSW councils to deploy fully interactive 3D venue tours, we’ve set a new benchmark for digital self-service in local government. Strong early results unlocked funding to roll the solution out to 19+ venues so far, with the same workflow used for our community childcare centres and an upcoming API-driven booking platform that will take users from exploration to confirmation in a single step.

3D Virtual Tours shows how modest investment in emerging tech can lift citizen experience while freeing staff for higher-value community engagement, resulting in a win for residents, businesses and the City alike.