Informal learning environments often have a clear ambition to spark interest [1].  People also need multipleexposures to content [2, 3] to learn. The Dome+ model, with its principles of interest, identity, and agency, wasdeveloped to guide the construction of the Big Astronomy Project consisting of a planetarium show plus addi-tional resources, to support audiences in extending engagement beyond the physical space of the planetarium.A main design principle was sparking interest through the immersive environment of the show. The Big Astron-omy Project released a show as a virtual YouTube 360⊠stream due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we testthe utility of the four-phase interest model [4] to characterize interest surrounding the virtual show for use in ourlarger dataset. The four-phase model suggests people progress from earlier phases of situational interest inducedby the environment to later phases of individual interest marked by self-driven engagement. We use this modelto characterize the role the show plays in audience interest and look for the role of interest in a virtual environ-ment.  We used focus groups with audience members on our premiere day of the planetarium show consistingof eight individuals, and included follow-up interviews with five of those individuals to understand how theycontinued their engagement with the Big Astronomy Project.  Everyone indicated that they chose to watch theshow because of an established interest in astronomy. Since self-induced engagement is an aspect of individualinterest, we placed all participants in phases 3 to 4. Our data lacked people who fell into the situational interestphases.  We suggest that virtual shows will attract individuals who have an individual interest.  We plan to usethis research as a tool for the analysis of the larger dataset that includes a more diverse set of individuals.