One ThingLink Project, Many Possibilities: Deep Cloning

Louise Jones September 29, 2026

Your best ThingLink project should not have to stay in one form forever. Whether you want to tailor it for a new audience, refresh it for an upcoming school year, or hand it to a colleague who wants to build on your foundation, making a separate version used to mean more work than it should. That changes now.

Introducing deep cloning in ThingLink. You can now clone an entire project, including every scene in a multi-scene virtual tour, into a single folder in one action. Your original stays exactly as it was. Your new copy is ready to adapt.

What Is Deep Cloning and How Does It Work?

Cloning in ThingLink creates a fully independent copy of your content. You can edit the clone freely without touching the original. With deep cloning, this applies to your entire project at once: all scenes, all linked hotspots, all connections.

For virtual tours, you only need to clone the first scene. ThingLink automatically copies all linked scenes and updates the transit tags so your new tour is fully connected from the start. For scenario-based learning, cloning copies every block and connection in the original, so your branching structure arrives intact. Learner progress, responses, and analytics data from the original are not carried over to the clone, which means you get a clean slate every time.

For full step-by-step instructions, visit the support guides for cloning media content and cloning scenarios.

Make One Project Work for Many Different Audiences

Clone this Escape Room example to see it in your account with all associated ThingLink scenes! Click the 3 dots on the top bar to clone, you must be logged into your ThingLink account.

Imagine you have built a virtual tour of a museum, a campus, or a workplace. The same spaces can tell completely different stories depending on who is exploring them: a visitor orientation, a student activity, an induction for new staff, or a guided experience in another language.

Deep cloning gives you a ready-made starting point for each version. Build the experience once, clone it, and then adapt the content to suit the specific people who will use it. You are not starting from scratch each time; you are building on work you have already done.

This approach is just as valuable for content that evolves over time. Clone your current project before an event or a new school year, update the copy, and your published original remains untouched. If you are also looking to reach audiences in different languages, ThingLink’s translation feature supports over 40 languages and pairs naturally with a cloning workflow.

Want to see the kind of immersive projects that benefit most from this approach? The guide on how to create virtual tours is a great place to start.

Share a Starting Point That Others Can Make Their Own

Some of the most creative uses of immersive content begin when someone else takes your work in a new direction. Deep cloning makes it straightforward to share a project as a starting point that others can copy and personalise without affecting your version.

Here are a few ways creators are using this:

• An educator shares a virtual tour so learners can develop it with their own research and narration.
• A trainer gives colleagues a scenario structure to adapt for their own teams and locations.
• An organisation creates a template experience that regional partners can build on for their local context.

The original provides the foundation. Each creator can make a version that fits their own purpose. You can also combine cloning with collaborative editing so that teams can work on their cloned versions together in shared folders.

For inspiration on the kinds of immersive learning experiences worth cloning and sharing, take a look at how ThingLink creators are building scenario-based learning.

Deep Cloning Works Across All Your ThingLink Content

Deep cloning is not limited to virtual tours. The same capability extends to scenario-based learning projects, interactive images, and 360° experiences. Whatever format your immersive content takes in ThingLink, you can now create independent copies with confidence.

This is particularly useful if you are managing content across a team or organisation. Clone a polished master project, distribute copies to contributors, and let each person adapt it for their context while your original remains the single source of truth. Pair this with ThingLink’s organisation statistics to track how different versions are performing across your team.

Start With What You Have Already Created

If you have a project in ThingLink, deep cloning opens up more ways to use it right now. Make a version for a new audience, try a different creative approach, or share it with someone who can take the idea further.

One project can now be the beginning of many more. And the best part is that you do not need to start over to get there.

Learn how to clone your media content or explore cloning for scenarios in the ThingLink Support Center.