Here’s another example of creative ingenuity by folks at TinkerForge, Germany who applied their own DIY building “bricks” that they sell online and a cool idea, and turned it into a fully functional robotic 360 product photography turntable.

As you can see on their blog, the whole constructions is made of just a handful of DIY parts, including a stepper motor, of course, a rotary ball bearing (250kg rated!), two cutting boards and a couple of cool “bricks” manufactured by TinkerForge: Industrial Quad Relay Bricklet and Stepper Brick. All in all, this is a substantial saving compared to commercially produced professional tables.

Except for the challenge with the ball bearing attachment that ended up needing some clearance to work in conjunction with the hub and the motor, we call it a success! Hopefully some of our readers will get inspired by this design and will use TinkerForge’s cool “bricks” to create similar 360 product photography platforms.

You may also be interested in these DIY solutions that we have been collecting on this blog:

• DIY 360 Product Photography Turntable with Magnetic Trigger
• Another DIY 360 Photography Turntable
• Computorized DIY Turntable For 360 Product Photography
• Build your own DIY 360 Photography Turntable for under $40 

Joomla came a long way since the Mambo days and we are proud to say that we have followed its evolution each step of the way. Without a doubt it became one of the most popular CMS platforms and the 3.x release catapulted Joomla even further.

This is why we didn't think twice and ported our battle-hardened feature-rich shortcode engine to Joomla to support the most flexibility our integration modules had to offer. So without further adieu, please welcome WebRotate 360 Product Viewer for Joomla!

LIVE DEMO

Download from Joomla! Extensions Directory

To start with the plugin, please visit our Joomla extension page on Joomla! Extensions Directory and click any of the Download buttons to download the plugin to your computer first. Then login to your Joomla Admin panel, select Extensions Manager in the top menu, click the Browse button on the Install tab and pick your downloaded zip to start the plugin installation.

The last step is to enable the plugin in Plugin Manager and specify any defaults for your 360 product views on the plugin settings page that should look like this:

Just hover with your mouse over the text lables next to each field on the settings page as shown above to see what each of them stands for.

The rest of the integration is done via simple shortcodes that are summarized in detail on our Joomla demo page. In short, you can use two of the available shortcodes to either embed your 360 product spins directly inside any of your Joomla content or launch your webrotate 360 spins inside the lightbox popup which also supports gallery mode.

All available shortcodes are also supported inside K2 content extensions and even VirtueMart product desriptions! More shortcode types will be available soon.

Please also note that there is one sample 360 product view located under the webrotate360 plugin folder under 360_assets. To try this sample in your test shortcodes, use the following config path as per the shortcode examples on the demo page:

/plugins/content/webrotate360/360_assets/sampleshoe/config.xml

Just one month after our initial update of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer for WordPress to support the "latest and greatest", we did a major overhaul and just released version 2.5 of the plugin.

This release was done primarily to introduce plugin defaults in WordPress admin to save you time adding shortcodes, easily change viewer and popup skins, set Master Config XML for all your 360 product views at once, and similar.

Summary of the latest changes and additions:

• ADDED: new plugin settings page with various defaults.
• ADDED: drop-down with 360 product viewer skins.
• ADDED: drop-down with prettyPhoto / popup skins.
• ADDED: defaults for viewer dimensions, basewidth, Master Config, etc.
• ADDED: new shortcode parameter to allow disabling browser optimization when using PNG images with opacity (imageopacity="true").
• ADDED: latest version of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.5 scripts and graphics (free version).
• FIXED: prettyPhoto margin calculations was reworked to show correctly on small device screens.
• FIXED: shortcode width and height are now correctly parsed whether "px" was supplied or not.
• NOTE: if using PRO, you may need to re-apply your license.lic as it's removed by WordPress upon upgrade. Simply copy it under the root of the webrotate plugin folder or specify its new location on your server using the new plugin settings page (this way it will not happen next time you upgrade the plugin). You may also need to request the commercial version of imagerotator.js or use the one from any of your published SpotEditor PRO projects located under published/imagerotator/html/js and copy it to wp-content/plugins/webrotate-360-product-viewer/imagerotator/html/js.

New and updated WordPress demo page is available here

DOWNLOAD

You know one of the challenges with the 360 product photography of large objects such as cars, big machines, etc. is that you can’t really put them on a turntable (unless you have a lot of $$$, of course), and then moving with your camera around an object just sucks. Same with building huge fixed circular rails..

So it just occurred to us a couple of weeks ago.. why can’t we start using drones for this? Presumably, you can just fly a drone around a large item at a certain trajectory and capture rotational 360 images this way. Of course, it may not be as straightforward as one might think, but this should be doable.

Here’s for example a quick video we just stumbled upon showing a custom 3 axis gimbal attached to a drone designed for larger cameras. You can see how it works closer to the end of the video which we think is pretty smooth for what we’re doing here.

PS: DJI’s latest quadcopter seems to be built just for the task!

http://makezine.com/2014/11/19/dji-inspire-drone-demo/