Here's an interesting 360 product view that we just finished among other 360 product photos for USA ePay here in Los Angeles. Even though it looks pretty simple and straightforward, there were couple of issues that had to be considered:

• The phone is very reflective on the front and the back - we don't want to show our 360 product photography studio surroundings reflected on its surfaces.
• iPhone would look better on a black background as it has this bright chrome-like enclosure on the sides but since we had to show it with the scanner, the black background wouldn't be a good option.
• Our client wanted to show their iPhone app running - this is not something unusual, though this post-production step takes plenty of time.
• The view is made of two parts - the phone itself and the black credit card scanner that light up differently on different angles and so exposure and the lights had to be tested carefully to show good details without blowing off the chrome enclosure or the screen while keeping the rest of the 360 product view well lit and consistent. This is relatively simple when shooting a still composition... not so much with 360 product photography. A reflector card was used pretty much on every shot to remove glare, etc.
• The main subject here is the scanner - so we want to shoot the scene almost from the bottom up to bring viewer's attention to the scanner rather than the phone. This is a bit tricky since the lower camera angles show the reflection of our 360 product photography turntable right on the front panel of the phone, so we had to raise the product up on a very narrow platform to cut out the table reflections.
• The end result is slightly dimmer overall than what we would want to see on our final 360 degree product spin, but given all of the above it's a pretty solid product presentation nevertheless.

June 8th, 12 - this sample has been removed as part of our new website deployment. You can find our latest samples here

PS: this is not the trickiest 360 product photography we have done by any means, though it definitely required some extra care and preparation.

We will be releasing our updated website pretty soon and will try to incorporate some of the most interesting samples there as well. In the meantime check out a couple of our not-so-very-recent 360 product views on our new 360 Degree Product Viewer page.

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.

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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