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  • Free Template With Custom Progress And Spinning Rollovers

    Ever since we launched our new website featuring the revised 3D product view of a Reebok shoe with a custom progress indicator and spinning rollovers, we have been receiving questions on how these customizations were accomplished. Today we would like to share some details as well as the working example!

    Click on this image to see it in action:

    SpotEditor project that was used to create this template is available here.

    The actual template file with the customizations is located under the published folder in the linked archieve and it's called SiteCustomizationsDemo.html such that it's not overwritten should you re-publish the project. Note that the project requires WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.6 RC (free version can be downloaded here).

    Let's start with the spinning progress indicator which is based on SVG Circle Progress by Jon Christensen.

    The core of the customization is a new viewer initialization parameter in WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.6 RC called progressCallback. Now you can pass this callback upon the initialization so you can be notified on loading progress. This includes the loading of the 360 product images as well as the hotspot rollover images (if they are configured under Image Content on the Hotspot form in SpotEditor). When you supply the callback, we automatically turn off the built-in progress indicator, and it becomes your responsibility to present the progress information to your visitors.

    So if you are using jQuery, here's how this callback can be setup:

    jQuery('#wr360PlayerId').rotator({
        configFileURL: '360_assets/SiteCustomizations/SiteCustomizations.xml',
        ....
        progressCallback: function(isFullScreen, percentLoaded, isZoomLoading)  {
                // your custom progress logic
        }
    });

    percentLoaded is a numeric parameter, representing the current state of the loader in percent.

    isZoomLoading is a boolean parameter which is only passed to the callback on zoom-in when your 3d product view is configured to use high-resolution images for image zooming. High-res zooming triggers the same progressCallback twice to give you a chance to show (and then hide) some sort of a progress status while the high-res image is being loaded. This means that isZoomLoading is first set to true followed by false in the second call when the high-res image is finally loaded.

    With this in mind, we simply center the SVG circle (as per the codepen example) by absolutely positioning it inside our viewer container via div.customprogress. We then update the offset of the animated stroke in incrementProgress upon every call to progressCallback and according to the value of percentLoaded.

    Next up is the spinning hotspot rollover...

    We started by creating a hotspot in SpotEditor with the Text Content tab set to the following html markup (on the Hotspot form):

    <div class="spinningSpot"><span>Text Hotspot</span></div>

    "Use custom styles" was also checked on the same tab to give us full control over the hotspot presentation. The rest was done in CSS by styling div.spinningSpot and the embedded span element accordingly.

    You can see the CSS styling inline in SiteCustomizationsDemo.html located under the published folder of the supplied SpotEditor project. In short, we have the parent container div.spinningSpot with two absolutely positioned elements: 1) div.spinningSpot:before for the spinning background and 2) div.spinningSpot span for the text. The demo SVG image that we used as a spinning background is also located in the linked zip archieve next to SiteCustomizationsDemo.html.

    To test this template with your own (published) 360 views, copy SiteCustomizationsDemo.html to your published folder and update configFileURL on line 165 to link to your xml config file which you can find under 360_assets/your-project-name. Remember that you would need to publish your project using the latest SpotEditor v3.6 RC (build 1367) to test these customizations with your own 360 or 3D product images.

  • Interactive 3D Product Visualizations at Venues, Conferences and Trade Shows

    It's true, WebRotate 360 Product Viewer is primarily designed for the online world. This has been our objective from the start...

    But the technology was developed to be flexible so you could test your work locally on your computer or take it to your customer and still be able to demo it while being offline. More so, we worked with several software companies to make sure their webrotate 3D product views could be incorporated into native mobile applications without relying on the Internet connection (using native web browser controls both iPhone and Android offer).

    Update [Apr 5, 2022]: You may find an existing "off the shelf" app for your marketig team that can be used with WebRotate 360 software like the one we discuss here.

    Now, in the advent of huge touch screen displays, these efforts proved to be even more valuable as some of our clients started using these displays at various venues by incorporating WebRotate 360 Product Viewer for super interactive digital presentations of their products. These interactive product tours range from simple 360 product photography to highly detailed 3D product visualizations sprinkled with interactive call-outs, animations and other cool effects.

    Today we are showcasing one such example expertly developed by THE ACTIVATION SHOP for Telsmith and BTI. These companies manufacture mining equipment and their machines are so large and complex, it's hard to imagine a better technology than the oversized touch-screen displays you can see in the video and the photos below:

    These interactive kiosks make it easy to create the wow factor you need by taking the wealth of your product information and the sales pitch and compressing it into a sophisticated high-tech digital presentation.

    Mike Hopper, the CEO of THE ACTIVATION SHOP whose team has developed the kiosk presentations was very kind to say this:

    "Our client represents large mining equipment. Not only it's physically difficult to display in a live setting - but it's even more challenging to demonstrate the features inside. Our 3D development skills paired with WebRotate 360's software turned out to be the perfect combination. Allowing us to virtually show the heavy equipment from all sides on 55" giant touch screens."

    PS: we haven't tested any of the large touch-screen panels ourselves so far, so can't recommend a particular brand yet. It seems that there're a lot of choices though from companies such as 3M, Planar, Elo, Ideum, Nec, Samsung, etc.

    Below you can see some of the related links we found while researching the subject. We strongly recommend to test the webrotate viewer on selected platforms before purchasing any expensive equipment to ensure that the multi-touch capability some of these displays offer will work with your 3D product views and hotspot design:

  • WebRotate 360 Product Viewer Integration for OpenCart 2.2.x and 2.3.x

    Announcing the release of v1.6 of our OpenCart integration. This one took some time as OpenCart had some major changes starting with version 2.2.0.0. We also wanted to incorporate all of the latest features that we have been releasing this year as part of v3.6 (version history).

    So now you can enjoy multi-row 3D product views, Google Analytics integration, new styling with svg skins, new hotspot modes and various other improvements and fixes. This also allowed us to take some time to polish up our admin dashboard to look good and consistent with the rest of the OpenCart admin eco-system.

    Folder structure of the module was re-worked to comply with the new OpenCart guidelines, so if you are on OpenCart 2.2.0.0 or 2.3.x and upgrading from the previous version of the webrotate plugin, it's best to remove the old plugin files first and then re-install using the new download links.

    To remove old plugin files, please delete these files and folders fist:

    • admin\controller\module\wr360
    • admin\controller\module\webrotate360.php
    • admin\model\catalog\webrotate360.php
    • admin\view\template\module\webrotate360.tpl
    • admin\language\english\module\webrotate360.php
    • catalog\controller\module\wr360

    You will also have to delete this webrotate vQmod file as it has changed as well:

    • vqmod_webrotate360_header.xml

    Good news is that the database structure hasn't changed, so all your existing 360 product view configurations will remain intact and will still work with the latest version of the core 360 product viewer.

    We now also have a dedicated page for the OpenCart plugin where you can find the latest downloads and instructions as well as the version history:

    WebRotate 360 Product Viewer Integration for OpenCart

    If you have any issues with the installation or upgrade, please let us know.

  • Shopify Integration for WebRotate 360 Product Viewer Released

    Happy to announce that the first version of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer for Shopify has been released.

    This time it's a full blown web application that neatly hooks into your Shopify dashboard while providing all latest features we released so far in v3.6. It's quite flexible too and should work with pretty much any Shopify theme or fine-tuned further by a Shopfiy theme developer as needed. And it's free!

    Note that Shopify doesn't allow uploading folders to their file hosting yet which is required for WebRotate 360 and 3D product views to operate, so a separate hosting account is necessary. You may use any existing FTP account, setup an Amazon S3 account, etc.

    Read more and install the app

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