This article describes a submitted project at a regional level (Canary Islands) that will be developed over 3 years, to contribute to environmental education through virtual tours made with 360º photos.

A virtual tour offers high-quality 360° photographs of the entire environment to be shown. With the appropriate hardware and software and once the photographs have been assembled, the interface allows the user to move freely and intuitively around the scene, to explore or to stop at a specific point and observe any detail. These types of tours also include interactive elements that provide the user with additional information. Overall, virtual tours offer an immersive and comprehensive experience for exploring any environment.

Tours will be created that cover different areas such as areas affected by environmental degradation, uncontrolled urbanization or climate change. VR 360º tours will also be created that show sustainable initiatives with the environment. Thus, it is planned to create at least 9 360º virtual tours with visual elements, videos, sounds, interactive graphics and informative texts covering three categories:
1st) Environmental technological infrastructures, to show their contribution to sustainability.
2nd) Botanical gardens to show the importance of preserving Tenerife's unique biodiversity, in the face of the threat posed by human activity and climate change.
3rd) Natural routes, which will include areas such as fossil beaches and which will serve to explore and highlight Tenerife's vulnerable natural spaces.

The hardware to be used will be 3 Instad 360º cameras, 3 Meta Quest glasses, 1 Apple Vision Pro glasses. The software for image editing will be Cloudpano and 3D VistaTour PRO.

With these 3D 360 VR environments, the aim is to show in a graphic and intuitive way the weaknesses that the Canary Islands environment faces. The tours will be published and made available on a free, open and responsive WEB platform.

To analyse the impact of this action, three parameters will be measured with groups of students from the University of La Laguna: user experience, usability and accessibility of the WEB platform, as well as its contribution to improving environmental awareness.

The User Experience Questionnaire in Immersive Virtual Environments, QUXiVE, will be used as a measurement tool. It is a standardized questionnaire that includes 10 components/subscales: presence, engagement, immersion, flow, skill, emotion, usability, technology adoption, judgment and, finally, consequence of the experience. Validated usability and accessibility tests will be used to measure the usability and accessibility of the WEB platform. Finally, the contribution to improving environmental awareness will also be measured through pre-post user surveys.

Keywords: Virtual Tours, 360º photos, Virtual Reality, Environmental Education, User Experience.