Introducing a new rotation mode! When it's on and the 360 product viewer is zoomed in, you can pan vertically and drag horizontally at the same time.

This is very convenient as pretty much the entire zoomed-in product can be evaluated quickly and there are no extra buttons to click to switch between the pan and drag modes. The only other option we have to achieve a similar effect is using the mouse wheel (Control tab -> More options -> Rotate on mouse wheel) which is not usable with touch-screen devices.

To enable the new mode, expand Control tab -> More Options where you will see a set of these three new settings under the Zoom section:

  • Allow drag rotation when zoomed
  • Allow panning on X-axis
  • Allow panning on Y-axis

By default the last two are checked as our standard mode of operation is to allow X-Y panning when viewer is zoomed-in. Check "Allow drag rotation when zoomed" and uncheck "Allow panning on X-axis" since we can't drag and pan on X-axis at the same time.

Some of our users would flip input via Control -> Flip input axis to make viewer spin 360 product images when you drag up & down vs our usual left & right drag. In this case you would need to uncheck "Allow panning on Y-axis" instead.

To achieve even a more fluid user experience, enable this relatively new setting called "Zoom on single tap" which you can see at the top of the same tab in the screenshot. Once it's set, a single click or tap triggers zoom-in and user can immediately pan and zoom at the same time as discussed above.

This new mode works wonders for tall and narrow products such as the LED lantern in the example video at the beginning of the post.