In our 360 product photography projects we usually produce 20-36 images per product and this is what we recommend to most of our clients. 20 images in particular offer a good balance between smoothness of the animation, download/wait times, and the amount of required photography and post-production efforts.

The next question to consider is viewer dimensions when placed on your web pages and its zoom depth. For example, if your viewer is configured to be 500 x 375px on the product pages and you want to support x 2 zoom, the images should be at least twice the size of the viewer to present in good quality when zoomed in, or about 1000 x 750px (NOTE: for sharpest product presentation we recommend producing 360 images that are just a bit larger than what they would appear when zoomed in full). This will result in JPG images being ~80-100 KB per image for an average product image with no background and with a decent JPG quality, which is a ~2 MB download for 20 images. For the average broadband cable speeds at about 3 Mbit/sec (read more), this is ~4-5 sec wait time for a complete view to load. This wait should work well for the majority of e-commerce applications.

Note that WebRotate 360 viewer downloads and shows the first pre-loader image immediately so your web page visitor has something to look at while the rest of the images are downloaded and processed.

Same applies to the full-screen mode where to keep the original sharpness of the images you will need to produce images that are noticeably larger than your original viewing box on the product pages. WebRotate's 360 product viewer has two settings that control image presentation in full screen mode (maxZoomFullScreen and fullScreenStretch).

When saving images, always use the Save for Web option if available so you can optimize your 360 degree product photography specifically for Web presentation. Don't over-optimize as even high quality JPG compression (~80%) will result in relatively small files that should work for most 360 product presentations.

IMPORTANT: Due to the zooming algorithm used by the Flash player/browser, it's important to keep image width to height ratio same or similar to the ratio of the viewer. This will ensure that you have sharpest presentation of the images inside the viewer. For example, if your viewer is 480 x 320px, the images can have either the same size or smaller (recommended for best quality if no zoom/full-screen is required) or stretched proportionally, i.e. 576 x 384, 720 x 480, 960 x 640, etc.

Download the FREE edition of our product: WebRotate 360 Product Viewer

Last year around this time we published a quick poll on our blog with a simple idea - learn more about our website visitors. There are many folks out there wishing to create 360 product views and understanding where they are coming from is our top priority - it really helps us to tailor our offering towards the actual needs and demands. The poll is still running and before we bring it down (will happen shortly), we thought it would be interesting to publish the results for our readers here..

You are interested in 360-degree product views because you are...

• Owner of an online store - 37.5%
• Hired Web Developer - 25%
• Marketing agency representative - 16.67%
• Manufacturer of your own products - 12.5% 
• Other answer - 8.33%

This is pretty interesting and although it could be very specific to our current business, it does shed some light on who is actively involved in evaluating 360 product photography and similar rich media options. It shouldn't come as a surprise that e-commerce owners are at the top of the list - at the end they are decision makers and should care most about their online businesses.

Most likely the majority of these votes though are coming from relatively small companies as larger firms tend to outsource rich media tasks to marketing agencies which are running at ~17% on our poll. Other votes included photographers and couple of folks contemplating starting their own 360 product photography businesses - we love a healthy competition.

Please vote too! - our poll is still running in the right column of this blog page just below the Twitter feed.

Well, it has been a busy year for us here at WebRotate 360. Looking back at what was achieved in 2010 vs 2009, it's an improvement all around. I personally am extremely happy that we finally got a grip on the image quality and post-production optimization that allowed us to compete even with high-quality still photography studios. On the other hand, we upgraded equipment and developed 360 photography setups/rigs for many complex products such as guitars, helmets, clothing, scuba diving equipment, and many others.

Though maybe the most interesting development in the past year was our custom rich media development service that finally got some wings. Mostly by way of bringing on board a new partner (an old friend of ours), a seasoned software developer who was able to contribute consistently on different projects throughout the year. Our custom product presentations with the elements of 3D product rotations, animated graphics, interactive product viewing tools are now used by many respected brands in different countries. In fact, in 2010 we broke the boundaries, and now have clients in UK, Australia, Denmark, Czech Republic, Canada, Germany and Netherlands, while our US customer base grew 6 fold.

The interest in this area is growing and goes inline with the projected 2010 numbers from Adobe that we originally reviewed and published here. I think Europe is still way ahead but the gap is closing. Surprisingly though we've seen our major competitors here in the US going out of business or significantly reducing their operations. One prominent example is MediaSpin 360, folks whom we admired for keeping constant pressure both technologically and in terms of their marketing efforts. 3DRev have also announced their closing and sale of assets, which was upsetting as they were here when we just started and in some way gave us the needed inspiration.

We also had problems, which mostly revolved around the issues of not having enough time for moving our online presence/marketing forward. In particular, our website is now outdated. It no longer reflects our current quality, services, capabilities, client profiles and testimonials. This is going to be fixed very soon though. Ah, this blog could have done better also - so mush helpful information was ready for publishing and it never happened. We will work on this also.

What to expect in 2011? The trend with the interactive rich media in E-commerce is pretty consistent and will not go away any time soon. We would like to push it further and expend our efforts beyond the 360 product photography and our rich media development services.. Please bear with us while we update our website and our offerings - it's exciting times.

Happy New Year!

How involved is 360 product photography? Folks often think that capturing say 20-40 images of a product rotating around its center and integrating it all into a 360 product viewer is not that big of a deal. And they would be right!

It's true, you can just put a product on a turntable, adjust camera and lights, click start, wait for the Ortery table to go a full circle, click another button or two to generate a generic viewer, and done - ready for publishing! True, we could have been doing it this way also.. Though our goal from the very beginning was to make it a perfection, make it such that each image is consistent, light is even, product branding is clear, alignment is spot on, background is pure, reflections are smooth, etc, etc, etc. It was tough and hundreds of small iterative improvements were required before we could start feeling comfortable with our quality.

Just couple of days ago via a blog post HERE we found a company in UK that produced and published a 360 degree product view of exactly the same product as the one we have been working on here a couple of months ago (one of many in both cases). So we thought it would be interesting to compare the two in the context of this post. Click on these images to see 360 views of the same scuba buoyancy compensator (BCD).

June 8th, 12 - these images have been removed as part of our new website deployment. You can find our latest examples here

It's understandable that folks who produced the first 360 view had limited resources/time and probably couldn't hire a professional studio given the number of SKU's they sell on their properties. Though this is a good illustration of what the difference can be when it comes to 360 product photography. We're pretty sure we spent much more efforts on our product view even with the experience we gained in the recent years.

Here's what makes our product view standout:

• Light: we have plenty of power in our continuous lighting setups. This allows bringing nice highlights and good contrast that is essential for still photography and is not always straightforward to achieve for video or rotational photography. Often to maintain consistent lighting across multiple 360 degree product photos of a single product (especially if it's reflective or has too much contrast going on, i.e black and white parts) we re-position the lights on every single shot.
• Positioning: putting the compensator on a turntable to let it sit there "as is" was something we did consider but this was rejected as it would be impossible to keep the shape of the product intact. Also the rotation would almost certainly be off balance. A special rig was built to allow hanging the product from above. On top of that, we spent enough time making the product look good: cleaning, attaching straps, belts, hoses, etc with double-sided tape, wires, fishing lines.
• Background: we always remove background from our images (and everything else that is not beneficial for a product view). Hand-drawn clipping path on a couple of dozen 360 degree product photos per product is not the most exciting part of our work, but we always do this.
• Post-production: in addition to background removal, there's color balancing, exposure, levels, contrast, etc, etc.
• Viewer: that's where time is less of an issue as we have our own viewer technology and software tools that makes it fun actually. Indeed, it gets pretty exciting around here every time a new 360 degree product view is released - so much efforts transform into a nice looking presentation that excites not just us but our clients and their website visitors as well!

PS: Our current website examples and 360 product view tour have not been updated for a while now and the quality of these examples is not 100% representative of our latest offerings.