The Mission

Immersly creates interactive 360° tours so guests and customers can explore a space online before deciding to visit or book. Our initial focus is hotels, holiday rentals and local businesses in Maastricht and the surrounding region. Alongside the tour service, we are developing Immersly Studio: an AI-assisted workflow that analyses panoramic photographs and proposes navigation links, room labels and descriptions. The creator checks and adjusts these suggestions before publication. Our goal is to reduce repetitive production work while keeping control over accuracy and the final experience. The project is led by Timo Kraus, a first-year Business Engineering student at Maastricht University. Immersly has three showcase tours and is ready to take on customers; no sales have been made yet. Through the Brightlands Startup Challenge, we want to validate customer demand, measure the production workflow and build relationships with pilot partners and mentors.

The Challenge

A polished 360° tour requires more than panoramic photographs. In Timo’s experience producing three tours, manually placing and connecting navigation hotspots was the biggest time-consuming step. Labels, descriptions and quality checks add further work. For a small tour provider, this limits production capacity and makes repeatable delivery harder. Hotels and holiday rentals also need a way to show how their rooms and facilities connect, beyond separate photographs. Immersly will test which customers value this experience and whether an AI-assisted workflow can reduce production effort without introducing misleading navigation or content. Cost savings, booking impact and willingness to pay still need to be measured.

The solution

Immersly combines a 360° tour service with Immersly Studio, an AI-assisted production tool under development. Panoramic photographs are analysed to propose connections between viewpoints, room labels and descriptions. The creator reviews and corrects the suggestions, adjusts hotspots and checks the tour before publishing it in a browser-based viewer. The AI supports production; it does not replace human approval or verify every factual detail. Existing showcase tours demonstrate the visitor experience. The Studio workflow is being developed and tested separately, so the showcases are not presented as proof of fully automated production. Our next validation steps are to work with pilot customers, compare manual and AI-assisted production time including corrections, and assess whether users can explore the spaces accurately. The intended benefit is a more repeatable production process that can make professional tours more accessible to smaller businesses.