Guided scroll
A touch mode for visitors arriving from the 2D web: swipe up for the next section, drag sideways to look, with a section bar that maps the site.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
Most people reaching your scene come straight from the ordinary 2D web, where a swipe up means "show me the next thing". In a 3D scene that same swipe normally just tilts the camera a little, which reads as a site that's stuck. Guided scroll answers the gesture instead: a swipe up travels to the next page, a swipe down goes back, and dragging sideways looks around.
Turn it on per scene in Settings ▸ Mobile & Touch ▸ Touch input mode ▸ Guided scroll (swipe to travel). It's opt-in and it needs somewhere to travel: on a single-page scene the mode is inert and nothing about the visit changes.
What visitors get
| Input | What it does |
|---|---|
| Swipe up / down | Travels to the next / previous page, using the same camera flight as the tour and the pages menu. |
| Drag sideways | Looks around: it never navigates, so a visitor can turn to face something without leaving the section. |
| Pinch | Zooms, exactly as it always did. |
| Mouse wheel / trackpad | Travels between sections rather than only dollying, so the mode keeps its promise on a desktop too. One flick moves one section, momentum tails and all. |
| ↑ ↓ PgUp PgDn | Travel from the keyboard, matching the axis the on-screen hint just taught. ← → keep working as well. |
The scene answers the finger
Guided scroll snaps a whole page at a time, which used to mean nothing in 3D moved until the swipe committed: the scene sat frozen and then teleported, which is the same "this site is stuck" feeling the mode exists to cure. Now the camera leans toward the section you're pulling to as you drag, aimed at that page's actual position in the scene, so the pull registers in the 3D and not only on the section bar. It's a small lean (a fraction of how far you're standing back, so it reads the same in a tight room and across a landscape) and it's fully reversible: let go short of the threshold and the camera settles back exactly where it started. Visitors who've asked for reduced motion keep the whole gesture (the bar, the step, the hint) without the world moving under their finger.
Travel doesn't wrap. A scroll metaphor promises an end, so swiping past the last section stays put and stays silent rather than looping quietly back to the first. And while a visitor is zoomed into an object, a vertical swipe belongs to that view: it won't pull the whole site out from under them.
The loading hint changes to match the mode, reading "Swipe ↑↓ for the next section · drag ←→ to look", so nobody has to guess that the gesture exists.
The section bar
Guided scroll shows a bar of dots (one per page, labelled with the page title), which is the visible sign that the swipe does anything at all. It replaces the prev/next pager while it's up, so a scene never shows two page counters. Visitors can tap any dot to jump straight to that section, and mid-drag the bar leans with the pull and lights up the dot they'd land on, so the gesture reads as aimed rather than hopeful.
The bar is a map of your site, so it points the way the site is built, not the way the finger moved. Section bar direction (in the same settings group) defaults to Auto, which measures how your pages are spread out:
- Pages spread across the ground get a horizontal bar along the bottom, a carousel.
- Pages stacked vertically get a vertical bar down the side, floors of a building.
Set it to Horizontal or Vertical to pin it yourself when the measurement doesn't match how you think of the place. Either way the swipe stays vertical: only the map changes.
A dot whose section is actively fetching its models opens into a slowly spinning ring, then collapses back into a dot the moment they land, the same mark grown, not a different glyph, so the bar never changes character. Its label says ", loading" too, since a spinner isn't an accessible name, and reduced-motion visitors keep the ring without the spin.
A section that's simply waiting its turn stays a plain dot. On a site with several neighborhoods, lazy loading holds back the models of pages nobody is near: those aren't slow, they're deliberately unasked-for, and drawing them as loading would leave half the bar spinning forever on a visit that was going perfectly. The three readings are: plain dot (loaded, or not needed yet), spinning ring (on its way now), and the filled dot for the section you're standing in.