Have you seen our latest interactive showcase that we produced for Triton Showers in cooperation with our partner in UK? Check it out on on Triton's home page or using the links below.

This was a cool project that brought several pieces of our 360 product viewer technology together and allowed us to showcase rich-media interactivity in couple of different ways. 15 components have been produced all together, featuring the same set of 360 product photography packaged in different sizes, colors, and using some of our add-on components including gallery module, color picker, and info panels. See it in action by clicking the links below!

June 2016 - Triton now has a new website, but you can still see our new 360 product viewer on the category pages as well as many shower pages like this one.

Roomset viewer with our color-picker module that can be activate from the main 3D showcase:

Going forward all of our custom projects will be based of our commercial 3D product viewer that you can download here and use for free. Stay tuned!

Finally here's our new poll. This time we want to find out what our online visitors are looking for when they arrive on our blog. We have plenty of ideas for 2011 in terms of helpful content, new products and services, and your input in this poll will be invaluable. The poll will remain active throughout the year and will be permanently fixed in the right column of this blog.

What information are you looking for?

• 360 product photography Tips & Tricks 
• Shopping for 360 product photography equipment
• Researching vendors to outsource photography
• Need details about your 360 product viewer
• Want to learn more about WebRotate 360 
• Just browsing!
• Other

See the poll running to the right of this post. Please Vote Today!

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.