Here is another recent example of an excellent implementation of a 360 product view that we think truly stands out.

Produced by Lowe Alpine to showcase their high-tech backpacks, these 360 degree photos deliver one of the best online product presentations we've seen so far. See one of the sample 360 views here or just click on the image:

The backpack pages feature nicely blended high-quality 360 product photography with neatly organized hot-spots, all tastefully crafted into website's look and feel (notice how all of our standard toolbar graphics have been overriden with custom imagery).

We are glad that the guys at Lowe Alpine picked our WebRotate 360 Product Viewer and put it into a good use!

In this quick tutorial we would like to share with you how our WebRotate 360 photo studio shot about a hundred flashlights for one of our 360 photography clients. This is a great example of how this technology can be applied to achieve great results quickly and within budget when working on 360 photography projects consisting mostly of small uniform products like the flashlights.

The equipment we decided to use for this project was our Ortery Photosimile 50 and the smallest Ortery turntable, PhotoCapture 360 that would give us consistent lighting and with sufficient automation to get the large number of items photographed in 360 degrees quickly and efficiently.

What we also had to figure out was how to best present the flashlights as just dropping them on the 360 turntable was not expected to produce good results – we wanted to achieve a straight horizontal orientation of each object as if it was floating in the air while rotating in 360 degrees. Our solution was this small DIY mini platform with two tiny stands made out of metallic paperclips that we then plugged into the piece of cardboard foam which was also wrapped into the sheet of white paper. The platform was measured and marked to identify its lines of symmetry such that we could always quickly align it with the center of the PhotoCapture 360 turntable.

The cardboard stand was made just once and was reused for all items by moving the paperclip stands along the center line on the wrapped paper to support each product firmly. Some of the larger products would instead require a piece of white rubber in the front to hold the light in the desired horizontal position.

We then also added two dark grey cards in the left and right corners on the back of the Photosimile 50 to avoid too much glare on the flashlights when they were turning at about 45 degrees.

To give the products more spark on the front views, two low power daylight lights (single bulb) were added on top of the lightbox as you can see below.

We have recently moved all posts from our old photogear360 blog here, so here's some related material you may find useful:

• 360 Product Photography of Long Narrow Objects
• 360 product photography upside down
• 360 product photography of Glock pistols
• Using suspension in 360 product photography (example 1)
• Using suspension in 360 product photography (example 2)
• White background in your 360 product photography projects
• DIY guide to building a manual 360 product photography turntable
• 360 product photography of large objects
• Mastering 360 product photography

Check out our brand new extension for OpenCart! As with our new WordPress module we released the other week, this extension features all of our latest enhancements and fixes that we have introduced so far in our core product WebRotate 360 Product Viewer. Like the awesome full-screen capability that you can see in this demo below. And yes, for those of you who wanted hot-spots in full-screen, this is now also possible.

To make a long story short, please see this OpenCart 360 View Demo and if you would like to give it a try, just follow these simple steps:

Step 1. Download

Download our OpenCart module using this link:

Download Extension »

[UPDATE: get the latest version directly from OpenCart.com]

Step 2. Copy files

Unzip webrotate360_opencart_integration.zip on your local computer and copy all folders from the webrotate360 folder to the root of your OpenCart installation. This will not replace any existing OpenCart files unless you already had a previous version of WebRotate 360 module installed.

IMPORTANT: If you are using vQmod, just copy vqmod_webrotate360.xml located in the root of the package to your vqmod/xml folder and jump to step 6 below (skip steps 2, 3 and 4).

Step 3. Find header.php

If using vQmod, please skip this step and jump to step 6 below. Otherwise, please find the following file in your OpenCart installation:

<Your OpenCart folder>\catalog\controller\common\header.php

Step 4. Update header part I

Make a backup copy of header.php then open the original file for edit and enter the following three lines right after the first line that reads "<?php" at the very top:

global $__wr360Path; $__wr360Path = 'catalog';if(defined('DIR_APPLICATION')) $__wr360Path = preg_replace('/.*\/([^\/].*)\//is', '$1', DIR_APPLICATION);include $__wr360Path.'/controller/module/wr360/wr360header.php';

Step 5. Update header Part II

Enter the following line right after this statement "$this->render();" at the end of header.php and save the file:

$this->output = addWR360Headers($this, $this->output, $this->db);

Step 6. Activate module and configure

Go to your OpenCart Admin and select Extensions > Modules and click [Install] next to the WebRotate 360 module. Then select module's [Edit] to enable the module and set the rest of parameters by following the text notes under each field.

To see our test 360 view (included with the module), just enter the following url under Config File URL in the table next to your test product (remember to enable it in the table): /360assets/sampleshoe/config.xml. Or use a full url including your domain name, eg http://yoursite.com/360assets/sampleshoe/config.xml:

Step 7. Finish

Click Save to activate your changes.

PS: if you haven't created 360 product views with WebRotate 360 Product Viewer before, you would first need to download our software and follow this simple video tutorial to create your 360 views first and then just upload them to your OpenCart installation via FTP.