v3.6 Release Candidate is now available for download! It includes a long list of improvements, new features and fixes that you can review here. These changes and updates were mostly driven by the work we have done on our new website in the last 6 months.

It could have been the final v3.6 release, but we still have to update the user guide and the info tooltips inside SpotEditor and it takes somes time.. Otherwise, it's a solid release that we recommend to all our users.

There're two major additions that most users will notice:

1. Vector SVG images are now used across all of viewer resources (no more raster graphics!). This ensures that your viewer skins and hotspots look sharp on any device. We also completely restyled two existing skins (thin and round) to look modern and usable with a greater variety of website designs out there. Also, all of the skins finally have the row navigation buttons for your multi-row 3D product views.

2. There's a new "shortcode" integration mode and publishing template which removes the viewer script snippets from your pages completely. This can drammatically simplify your website integration with various CMS platforms, especially when there're multiple 360 product views on the same page. Documentation is still in the works but you can simply select Shortcode template on the Publish form in SpotEditor and see it in action.

If you are a developer, this release adds a good number of API improvements, giving you more options for major viewer customizations. All new APIs are listed in the JavaScript template that you can select on publish in SpotEditor (and then explore the source html for additional bits and pieces as needed). Not to mentioned the long awaited support for jQuery 3.0!

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Previously released features and fixes in v3.6:

• WebRotate 360 Product Viewer 3.6 Build 1046
• WebRotate 360 Product Viewer 3.6 Build 604
• WebRotate 360 Product Viewer 3.6 Build 542
• WebRotate 360 Product Viewer 3.6 Build 127
• Full version history

PRO & Enterprise customers can request the commercial version of v3.6 RC via support. If you received v3.6 beta download URL from us before, it still works! And if you already have a previous build of v3.6 beta installed, you can simply download the new update via Check Updates on the About form in SpotEditor.

If you need any help applying this update to any of WebRotate 360's plugins (i.e, WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, Magento, OpenCart, BigCommerce), just let us know and we would be happy to assist.

Happy to announce the launch of our new company website. It's built by us from scratch in-house based on years of hard work, helping our clients with their website needs. It's CMS driven, which will help us keep it always up to date with latest news, examples, releases and more.

Maybe even more importantly, it's fine-tuned to work nicely on modern mobile phones and high pixel density displays. It's super responsive and the demo 3D product views are optimized for mobile viewing so you can see the difference! More examples will be released soon and we will gradually move this blog onto the new platform as well.

The new website also represents the change in our vision after almost 7 years of delivering the most advanced 360 product viewer, related tools, software and services. Finally, we narrowed down our message to a few clear terms and examples that most of our users can relate to.

Also, starting June 2016, we will be donating 5% of all product sales to selected charities that work in wildlife conservation and animal welfare which is one of the global issues all of us at WebRotate 360 are concerned with.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Here's an interesting demo we did a few days ago of one of the cool features in v3.6 that allows combining multi-row 3d product views with image labels. These labels can be assigned to hotspot actions to produce pretty impressive product tours that can guide users from one product feature to another. Possibilities are endless, considering that you can have these hotspots and / or label actions in any form or fashion (lightboxes, custom popups, you own page content, apps, etc).

All of this is already available in the latest v3.6 beta that you can download here (it's stable and has been used in production by many companies for the last 6 months).

Final v3.6 release is right around the corner (and our new website undergoes the final preparations for going live!).

PS: the excellent 3D product photography was produced for JVC by our friends at Flipside Studios in Berkeley, CA.

This short video below by C.M. Williams provides a sneak-peak into the creative process of photographing museum’s artifacts that probably are too precious (or too heavy!) to be mounted on a moving platform. The massive rig appears to be custom made and apparently was assembled on the spot around the statue.

This is an interesting and unusual setup where a camera and a background rotate around an object in unison vs a spinning turntable that we see elsewhere.