We are proud to announce that we have now officially released WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3. This was a long journey and we are really thankful to our users who contributed their ideas, thoughts, issue reports, most of which have been incorporated into this major release.

With this release, the viewer is fully operational in JavaScript / HTML 5 mode including hot-spots, zooming, panning and much more, and it all works nicely either on your iPad or iPhone or a desktop browser without Flash. We don't require HTML 5 either as the core functionality is pure JavaScript and will work pretty much in any major browser. This release is truly ground breaking for us here in our own 360 product photography studio. We are now able to offer the most advanced out-of-the-box web solution for interactive product presentations with a pretty unique mobile support and our product photography service - all in one package.

We encourage all commercial photography studios and digital agencies to try this out and start incorporating 360 product photography and interactive product photography in their suite of photography services also.

Below is the list of major changes in v3:

• [+] JavaScript / HTML5 mode (JS) is completely reworked (90% rewritten) and is now used as a default.
• [+] SpotEditor is completely reworked (80% rewritten). Now supports viewer theming, zooming, and more.
• [+] Added full hot-spot support in JS mode.
• [+] Added full zooming support in JS mode.
• [+] Added new hot-spot type via custom HTML content (JS only).
• [+] Added new "deep zoom" feature using second image set loaded for zooming only (JS and Flash).
• [+] Added support for custom hot-spot indicator images (JS only).
• [+] Added new "thin" toolbar theme and new hot-spot indicators, including animated ones (JS only).
• [+] Added new fixed hot-spot positioning mechanism via screen sections and margins (JS only).
• [+] Reworked iPhone and iPad implementation for smooth hot-spot presentation and zooming (JS only).
• [+] Added new features to enable rotation direction control, including forced single rotation direction (JS only).
• [+] Added new progress indicator animation with optional progress numbers (JS only).
• [+] Updated all samples to highlight latest 360 viewer capabilities (JS only).
• [!] Fixed numerous issues reported from beta testing and production testing of our previous releases.

It's interesting that many of our clients have been quite happy with the beta v3 for almost 6 months now (the beta program was started early in the development this time). Just as we have reported a week ago, one of our v3 beta clients just finalized their 360 viewer deployment of 4000 designer sunglasses and eyeglasses on all of their websites - now available in 30 countries. This is including their dedicated mobile websites and a centralized storage of their 360 degree product photos. This tells us that focusing on sun-setting Flash capability and pushing forward with more interactive capabilities was the right decision. And we look forward to more success stories like this and will make sure that an adequate support is available from WebRotate 360 - such deployment always requires it!

What's next? We have a long burning list of priorities that is largely influenced by our users. Just in about few weeks there should be a follow up 3.1 beta release that will show some of the latest improvements requested by our clients in v3, the ones that didn't make it into this release. Some of the biggest concerns in the field with v3 right now is the lack of the full-screen support and some complexity involved with having multiple viewers on the same page.

There will also be some cool enhancements in the hot-spot interactivity and more resources will be shifted to the Mac compatibility in our 360 view software. But we have much bigger plans and announcements in store that are still in the early stages of development.

In about two or three weeks, we are planing to run our first global (and likely the last in the next 12 months) one-day promotion event on the PRO viewer v3, offering a whopping 20% discount. This will be the last chance to jump on our full-featured PRO license before we make changes to our pricing. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or subscribe to our Newsletter on the right to learn more. Please note that if you already have our PRO or Enterprise license, this upgrade is free!

Other resources:

• Take our latest 360 product photography tour that now runs on v3
• Visit our dedicated website with our latest v3 samples
• Download our quick v3 user guide
• Download WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3
• Visit our 360 photography equipment store (our website launch promotion is 50% off on the WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3 with certain equipment purchase).

There have been some new security developments in Google Chrome recently. The latest browser releases can't load local files using asynchronous requests when testing published webrotate templates locally on your computer (i.e when they are not loaded from the Internet or your local webserver). We rely on these asynchronous requests (AJAX) in our 3D product viewer to load viewer configuration (xml) files.

Note that all works fine if the viewer is loaded from the Internet or your local webserver (e.g localhost / 127.0.0.1).

Good news is that Chrome has a special key that Google gives web developers and testers to bypass this security check and it's very simple to apply to your Chrome also.

If you are on Windows, go to your desktop and find Chrome shortcut. Make a copy of the shortcut for your webrotate tests and right-mouse click on it to bring up the shortcut properties. You will see that there's a Target field on the shortcut properties form, so just add the following to the end of the target path right after the closing quote (add a whitespace as well): 

--allow-file-access-from-files

Mine for example looks like this: "C:\Users\...\chrome.exe" --allow-file-access-from-files

It's more involved on Mac and we haven't tried it there yet but you can see how it can be done in this post.

Sept 2014 - Note that when you launch your local previews in Chrome from inside WebRotate 360 SpotEditor (v3.5 and up, Windows version), we pass this key to Chrome automatically so you don't need to go through the manual steps. Just make sure that Chrome is not running before you hit Publish in SpotEditor and unless the running Chrome instance was also launched by SpotEditor.

May 2015 - Opera has transitioned to Chromium recently, so you can now use exactly the same steps with the shortcut & key to make your local tests work in Opera too.

Sept 22, 2017 - the latest version of Safari 11 adds extra restrictions for the local previews of WebRotate 360 product views. To be able to preview your published work locally in Safari 11 and up, navigate to Safari's Develop menu and check "Disable Local File Restrictions" as shows in this screenshot.

Wanted to share this one here as every photographer will surely appreciate it! We just finished the other week 360 photography of the latest revolutionary product from Manfrotto - Sympla, which is a super cool, extensible PRO modular video rig.

If that's not enough, we used our latest stable 360 degree product viewer V3 to integrate it all with our new 'thin' theme, slick hot-spots, deep zoom and capabilities only v3 could do. Folks at Manfrotto already have it running on their website and I really like how it all worked out. Just click on the image below to see it in action!

We are really proud to work with the company that gave us so many reliable and innovative products that we use in our own 360 product photography studio every day.

Here's a few screenshots of the new SpotEditor beta that also includes our latest 360 product viewer build (beta v3). You can download it here and then run setup.exe under SpotEditor. Thank you to all our users who contributed their ideas and thoughts, and made this release possible.

As you probably noticed, SpotEditor has been pretty much rewritten from scratch. We have improved all workflows, added support for the latest viewer features and we are now flexible enough to accommodate cool new ideas we have in store for our next releases. Also, it's now almost ready for being fully operational on Mac OS via Mono framework (this will not be available until after we finally release v3).

Download our 360 photo software here and give it a try. As always we need your feeback!