For those folks who are using our 360 product viewer for ‪‎OpenCart‬, as promised we have now included vQmod support into the viewer installation package. No more manual mangling with the core OpenCart files!

Readme instructions as well as the documentation notes on our OpenCart extension page (linked below) have been updated as well to reflect the new option.

Read more and download here:

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension%2Fextension%2Finfo&extension_id=11377

Did you know that you don’t always need a 360 photography turntable to photograph an object or a product in 360 degrees? This time we came across a recent article on core77.com about a different 360 photography technique used by photographer Eric Pare of Montreal, Canada. Eric experiments with the hybrid-light photo painting and motion-stop photography mixed with “bullet-light” technique to capture 360 photos in an awesomely unique way.

He has tough requirements in that he shoots 360 views of dancing people while capturing their movements from various angles to create an immerse artistic presentation of the dance in 360 degrees. So Pare’s solution is a custom rig made of 24 DSLR cameras that he arranged on a circular frame surrounding the dancers. Take a look at the video below:

While it works well for capturing action animations, Eric’s technique is not very suitable for 360 product photography as it’s a fixed setup both in terms of camera position, lighting, background, the number of 360-degree frames, etc., not to mention it can be quite expensive to build. Though we think this concept has a lot of potential when applied to 360 photography of large objects such as cars, furniture, large industrial machinery and similar products where the cost of building a custom rotating platform (if possible at all!) would be prohibiting.

Keep this technique in mind when approaching you next 360 photography assignments and if you get a chance to build something of this scale and complexity, let’s get in touch and share your experience on our blog!

Hi folks, here is another v3.5 viewer update from WebRotate 360. We also included a download link below to our latest stable limited beta script (build 123). As usual, just copy the imagerotator folder that you will find in the zip download below over the one you have in your 360 viewer integration.

To apply this update to your existing SpotEditor installation just copy the contents of the SpotEditorUpdate folder that you can also find in the zip over the same files in your SpotEditor installation folder located under Program Files (x86)\WebRotate 360\SpotEditor on Windows. If you are on Mac, right click on the SpotEditor icon, then Show Package Contents and navigate to Contents->Resources and then copy the files from SpotEditorUpdate over the same files under Resources.

March 07, 2014 - You can now download full Beta release for Windows and Mac OS X on our main download page under DOWNLOAD LATEST BETA 3.5

Updated list of features and fixes coming in 3.5:

• Full-screen option in JavaScript mode. As you probably know, we're discontinuing Flash support going forward with the 3.5 release and the only feature we were lacking in pure JS mode was the full-screen capability. Well, this became possible thanks to the recent enhancements in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and also to some extent in IE and Opera (the last two ones will show a full-browser view vs full-screen that we usually expect from Adobe Flash). This demo below uses a separate high-res image set in the full-screen mode (the same images that are used for the deep zoom), but you can also use your main set of images for the full-screen. This will remove the initial loading while in the full-screen mode and you can even pass a different xml configuration as a viewer parameter so that your full-screen can use completely different images and viewer settings.
• Support for responsive websites - now you configure your 360 views to stretch horizontally and vertically with the layout of your responsive websites that scale with the browser window or a mobile screen.
• Simple APIs that allow controlling most of the viewer functionality from your own script, allowing you to have your own control interfaces, override hot-spots, and more.
• Multiple 360 views on the same page. Many of you have asked about it and now it's done!
• Out-of-the-box v3.5 integration in Magento, BigCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop, WordPress.
• Revised SpotEditor.
• jQuery plugin support. It's now possible to use the 360 viewer as a generic jQuery plugin.
• jQuery 2.x support. jQuery team has released a slimmed down version that drops support for obsolete browsers and some of the functionality that we relied on in the previous releases. v3.5 has been updated to work nicely with the most recent jQuery releases.
• Inertia or gradual slowdown during drag release. There's also a couple of settings in SpotEditor that will allow you to adjust how fast and responsive the inertia should be.
• New hot-spot type to effortlessly create video hot-spots based on youtube videos.
• New hot-spot mode to allow configure the popups to always appear in a predefined (configured) position regardless of where the hot-spot indicator (those small circles) is positioned on a rotating product, helping you create a greater variety of professional looking 360 product spins.
• New hot-spot behavior that you can use to force the hot-spot activation on mouse click instead of hover / touch mode we had relied on before.
• New rotation mode that works on mouse hover vs mouse dragging with the left button pressed.
• Two more standard 360 viewer skins and one mobile skin with less controls and larger graphics.
• This release addresses the issue with Firefox white image flashing during rotation which was caused by this Firefox bug and was most prominent in the latest FF 17 releases. Similar issue in the latest Opera has been also addressed.
• The hot-spot issue on Android stock browser and Android Chrome where hot-spots wouldn't stay up under certain conditions is also fixed.
• Would like to see something else in 3.5, please let us know!

Please note that not all of these features will be available in the free version of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer going forward.

We're also adding a slimmed down paid edition of our 360 photography software that will have some of the features but will not include more advanced options such as API's, multiple on-page 360 product spins, advance hot-spot modes, etc that will be only available in PRO+ and Enteprise. Pricing for PRO+ and Enterprise will be revised as well. Though all clients who have purchased PRO or Enterprise before the official v3.5 release will get the full-featured upgrade, so hurry up and get PRO today - we will be definitely releasing v3.5 shortly.

New SpotEditor 3.5 Video »

Did you know it's possible to add Facebook Likes to your 360 product view using our 360 photography software? In this quick tutorial we'll show you how it can be done in a few simple steps. You would use a similar approach for other social plugins or similar static and interactive elements:

1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ and generate your Like code. Uncheck Send button as you will need to use the iFrame integration not the XFBML for this test.

2. Copy the script code on the iFrame tab as shown below. Note the // in front of www.facebook... and replace the two forward slashes with http://

3. Go to SpotEditor and create a new Fixed hot-spot.

4. On the Text Content tab, check As HTML markup and type in a container for your Like button like this (change height and width as needed as it's just a sample container and can be anything):

<div style="display:block;height:100px;width:100px;"></div>.

5. Insert your iFrame script inside the div between > and <div>

6. Click Preview in browser to see if it looks as intended.

7. Position the hot-spot as you like via X Y coordinates or the grid with margins on the Hotspot tab (see above).

Here's what we got in our quick local test: