Within the multidisciplinary research project ‘BLOK’ we have been researching the meaningfulness, liveability and opportunities of self-development for children and teenagers in vertical housing environments. This paper discusses the value of a virtual (360°) environment in the presentation of participatory research data within this research project, and its potentials for the collection of new participatory data and as a (research by) design tool. After an introduction, the first part of the paper focuses on the reasons why we created the 360° environment and the goals we aim to achieve with it, the second part shortly explains the more technical aspects of how the environment was built, in the third part we further define different uses of the tool and finally we reflect on the difficulties and potentials we see in the (future) use of the environment.