Patent ID: 8531483

Claim:
A method for providing a virtual tour of a shopping mall via an interactive map, the method comprising: maintaining at least one database; displaying on a display device a first portion of the interactive map generated from a logic process based on the database, wherein the first portion of the interactive map represents a first part of the shopping mall and includes different routes available in the shopping mall, each of the routes includes one or more nodes, one or more branches, and one or more of hotspots, each of the hotspots represents an event in the shopping mall; displaying a sequence of images of a selected route to demonstrate what stores a user would see when going along the selected route in the shopping mall, wherein the image sequence being shown is synchronized with the interactive map in a manner that a jump from one image to another image in the image sequence leads to a corresponding leap motion in the interactive map being displayed; accessing auxiliary data associated with the event when the user selects a hotspot along the selected route, wherein the auxiliary data is not part of the interactive map being displayed but is obtained from an external source; and displaying from the auxiliary data an visual effect about the event so that the user understands more about the event.