If you are still on the fence whether to implement 360 product views into your eCommerce strategy, consider this study by Tibert Verhagen, Charlotte Vonkeman, and Willemijn van Dolen that was published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, Vol 19, No 7. 

The study looked into three product presentation options to find out how they affect buyer's ability to evaluate products online and their impact on buyer's purchase decision:

• Still images
• 360 product views
• Virtual mirror

Almost four hundred undergraduate students participated in this study in Netherlands in 2016 where they rated various forms of perceived product tangibility and their purchase intentions using product pages that had all three options on Ray-Ban.com.

While we encourage you to browse through the entire paper, the conclusion they arrive to makes perfect sense: virtual mirror is a winner followed by 360 product photography. Interestingly, the difference between the virtual mirror and 360 product photography seems very close to the gap between 360 and still product photos.

As a take away from this study consider this: buyers who interact with 360 product images are 14% more likely to purchase a product than when there are still photos alone.

Not surprisingly, adding a "virtual mirror" gives an extra 15% boost. And that's not all as we have to also consider that the improved buyer experience ("perceived diagnosticity") can reduce product returns and improve the overall shopping satisfaction.

As per the study, the perceived diagnosticity is 17% better when 360 product views are present on the pages.

Another interesting research by folks at University of Hong Kong and Stanford (published in the Journal of Consumer Research) looked into the affect of having multiple additional images of the same product on buyer's ability to compare and decide while shopping online. Surprisingly, participants who saw extra photos were "both less confident about their decision and liked and valued the product less than those who saw only one photo for each product".

This suggests that you may benefit even more by having a single 360 product view and skip the rest of the gallery images altogether.

We often get these questions regarding the 360 product view of the Reebok shoe that you probably already saw on our home page. A lot of these questions are specific to the actual photography so this post we hope will answer some these questions and serve as a good reference for future inquires and updates.

We have been approached by Reebok a while back to see how we could shoot their new line of sneakers. They sent us an example and so we quickly assembled a proof of concept using some of the rigging we had left from a recent SCUBAPRO photoshoot (a bunch of buoyancy compensators that required an elaborate rig with hooks, finishing lines and some manual spinning action..).

This time we automated the setup by attaching our basic Ortery turntable upside down in hopes that we would improve upon this quick mock-up design later on and be able to shoot hundreds of similar items every now and then. This mock-up design is what you can see in the pictures below.

The rig had two Mathews C-stands, a boom pole with a steel plate in the middle (by the same company) and a sheet of plywood that already had holes in it for the steel plate from the previous project. So the table was simply attached to the rig upside down with a sturdy wire. One great thing about the Ortery 360 product photography turntables is that you can re-use the center nut for various applications and so we used a bolt and some tough wire to add the missing pieces. The wire was made quite long to let the boom light to pass through so the shoe was evenly lit.

One of the Reebok requirements was to keep the reflection of the shoe on the final 360 product images which was accomplished by having a sheet of translucent plastic under the rig. And while this is not really visible in the reference shots of the setup or in the final 360 product spin, the shoe doesn't touch the translucent sheet. We also made sure there's plenty of light in this area during photography to really highlight the sole of the shoe which had some nice design, color and branding.

Post production was a whole new story and this time we had to solicit some outside help - there are companies that offer specialized product retouching services and their assistance can be invaluable.

PS: since then we have seen this type of angled 360 degree shoe photography in various places online and realized that our approach with the wire could be improved. For example, it would have been better to shift the center of rotation closer to the middle of the sole and may be use some solid translucent plexiglass tube to help with the post work (i.e patching the wire was intense..). Another thing we should have tried is this approach with suspension which at that time we thought wouldn't allow for a rotation without a noticeable wobble.

If you have done something like this that you would like to share on this blog or our Facebook page, please get in touch!

We have recently moved all posts from our old photogear360 blog here, so here's some related material you may find useful:

• 360 product photography of long narrow objects
• 360 product photography upside down
• 360 product photography of Glock pistols
• Using suspension in 360 product photography (example 1)
• Using suspension in 360 product photography (example 2)
• White background in your 360 product photography projects
• DIY guide to building a manual 360 product photography turntable
• 360 product photography of large objects
• Mastering 360 product photography
• 360 product photography of flashlights

Today we're excited to share some imagery and workflow notes from Studio360.lv. This Latvian company specializes in the production of interactive 360 degree views of vehicle exterior and interior which is gaining a lot of popularity recently. We accidentally stumbled upon some of their excellent work online about a year ago (check it out!). The presentation on the black background was quite impressive so we solicited some commentary from the friendly team at Studio360 for the readers of this blog. The result is this quick documentary by Studio360 on the production of a 360 view of a single car:

At Studio360.lv we provide high-quality 360 car photography services in our specialized studio to give the car dealers a unique selling tool which is our interactive 360 degree views and videos of both vehicle exterior and interior. Each shoot is customized for our client needs and can be produced on any background or using a promo banner.

Update [April, 2023] The team has recently upgraded their infinity cove for white background 360-degree automotive photography. See some of the recent photos from their studio at the bottom of the post.

Here's how our usual car project is executed:

It starts with a car arriving to our studio for unloading and cleaning.

In a short moment the car is ready on stage via our specialized 360 degree spinning platform designed to rotate vehicles in either direction.

With our unique black background setup, we may turn the headlights on for better effect. BTW: we like shooting Sony cameras using the fastest memory cards we can get and this particular project was done using Sony A7R and 24-70 2.8 ZEISS.

Our exterior 360 car views are comprised of 85 images each and with the setup you see it's all done in 3 minutes tops.

We then move on to the interior views. The car is covered with white drape material so that we can get a good defused light inside the car with clean evenly lit windows . You can see the end result of the interior work in this example:

And here's a video of the same shoot so you can see the entire process in action:

In addition to the interactive views, we have pro equipment for shooting car interior videos for a variety of our client needs (from simple YouTube videos to TV commercials). You can find more examples of our work on our website at http://www.studio360.lv

PS: a couple of images from our upgraded studio circa 2023 whith the new white cove:

Here's a quick guide on how to integrate your 360 product spins in Wix. The process is pretty straightforward but note that Wix doesn't allow uploading folders with 360 product images to their hosting so a separate web hosting account is required. For example, you may use an existing website hosting you may already have outside of Wix, setup an extra hosting account, or consider our optimized PixRiot service. We would be happy to upload your tests to our servers free of charge if you need to run any tests (just let us know).

So let's review a few simple steps using this example spin URL we host on our servers:

1) Enter Edit mode in your Wix dashboard and select a page where you plan to add a product spin. Click Add button (a circle with a plus sign) in the menu on the left to expand available widgets and then press More in the menu to bring the advanced options.

2) Select Embed a Site (under the Embeds section) and then resize and align the widget box on your page according to your site layout.

3) In the widget settings, select Enter Website Address and enter this example URL:

https://cdn.webrotate360.com/examples/3.6/sampleshoe-iframe/sampleshoe-iframe.html

4) Confirm your URL selection and you should now see this example 360 product view loaded inside the widget box:

To create your own 360 product views, use WebRotate 360 SpotEditor to import your existing images (360 product photography or rendered in a 3d design software) and publish a finalized interactive viewer package on your computer.

Make sure to select the "Mobile full page" template on the Publish form in SpotEditor so that your template is fully responsive and can contract and expand with your Wix widget on any device.

Once published, upload the contents of the 'published' folder that the software creates in your project directory to a web hosting of your choice (you may simply share it with us and we will host it for you free of charge for all your testing needs - contact us). Note the URL of the .html file in the uploaded folder and use this URL inside the HTML Code widget under Website Address as we show in Step 3 above.