We will be running a one-day promotion event on WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3 PRO this Thursday, July 26th, offering a whopping 20% DISCOUNT! It is our first global one-day promotion and likely the last one in the next 12 months. This will be the last chance to jump on our full-featured PRO license with the hefty discount and before we make changes to our pricing.

Why full-featured PRO now?

Version 3 was a milestone release for us as we finally got to the point where we could support a solid zoom option and full hot-spot support without Flash. This opens up a lot of opportunities as to where we can move this technology further.

And as we move it further, we want to make it available to more folks out there and our fixed PRO pricing didn't work well for everybody.

Starting with the next release (3.1), we will be adding a new license level - PRO level I, which will costs noticeably less than our current $299 and will still include all functionality we have so far in v3. But it will miss some of the latest features that we are working on right now that we believe not everybody needs. This features include extended API, allowing your web developer to control the viewer externally, the ability to have multiple viewers on the same page and also the "full-screen" or rather full-browser window mode that will allow expanding the view to fit a browser window. PRO level II, which will be an equivalent of our current PRO license, will include all new enhancements but will be offered at a higher price than what it's today.

So in short, by buying our full-featured PRO license now or rather on July 26th with the cool 20% discount, you're getting a free upgrade to PRO level II license and all cool features it will offer with the upcoming 3.1 release and going forward for at least one year.

So don't hesitate! "Like" us on Facebook or subscribe to our Newsletter (on the right) or Twitter to receive the discount code that we will distribute to our followers and subscribers shortly.

UPDATE: Select Buy Now and Enter DSK20PRO to get $60 off on WebRotate 360 Viewer PRO on Thursday, July 26th your local time.

If you already have our PRO or Enterprise license, this v3 upgrade and the upcoming full featured v3.1 upgrade is free.

We have just learned that our new product viewer v3 now powers multinational launch of Nouvelle Renault Clio on various localized Renault websites worldwide. The quality of Clio's 360 degree product spin is awesome - very clean and customized with great style. What makes it even more interesting is the cool animation that starts upon page load and which is entertaining on its own, practically eliminating any noticeable wait for the 360 images. Click on the image to see it in action or check it out here. 

It's really exciting to see companies such as Renault using our technology in their major product launches. Just a few weeks ago we reported another major car maker this time in India, Mahindra, launching 360 views of their new sleek XUV500, which is also a great demonstration of how a good designer can manipulate with our raw product and make it look really neat and in the same time achieve their marketing needs.

Another thought that comes to mind, while looking at these 360 degree spins is that our technology has a lot to offer to all things 3D. From 3D printing to booming 3D CAD models for various applications, our product viewer makes it possible to quickly create solid interactive annotated 3D presentations that can be shared over the net in a snap. And unlike 360 photography, where we're really limited in the ways we can approach a photo-shot, 3D product modeling / rendering gives virtually unlimited camera flexibility that can create really impressive presentations. For example, here's an interesting 3D view of a fibre optic gyro by CDL Inertial Engineering - link.

Notice how we can now see the product rotating almost spherically while this is still one row of images inside our 360 degree spin viewer - this feels really fluid comparing to some of the 3D product views where it takes some practice to navigate a product spherically in full 3D with a mouse.

We are proud to announce that we have now officially released WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3. This was a long journey and we are really thankful to our users who contributed their ideas, thoughts, issue reports, most of which have been incorporated into this major release.

With this release, the viewer is fully operational in JavaScript / HTML 5 mode including hot-spots, zooming, panning and much more, and it all works nicely either on your iPad or iPhone or a desktop browser without Flash. We don't require HTML 5 either as the core functionality is pure JavaScript and will work pretty much in any major browser. This release is truly ground breaking for us here in our own 360 product photography studio. We are now able to offer the most advanced out-of-the-box web solution for interactive product presentations with a pretty unique mobile support and our product photography service - all in one package.

We encourage all commercial photography studios and digital agencies to try this out and start incorporating 360 product photography and interactive product photography in their suite of photography services also.

Below is the list of major changes in v3:

• [+] JavaScript / HTML5 mode (JS) is completely reworked (90% rewritten) and is now used as a default.
• [+] SpotEditor is completely reworked (80% rewritten). Now supports viewer theming, zooming, and more.
• [+] Added full hot-spot support in JS mode.
• [+] Added full zooming support in JS mode.
• [+] Added new hot-spot type via custom HTML content (JS only).
• [+] Added new "deep zoom" feature using second image set loaded for zooming only (JS and Flash).
• [+] Added support for custom hot-spot indicator images (JS only).
• [+] Added new "thin" toolbar theme and new hot-spot indicators, including animated ones (JS only).
• [+] Added new fixed hot-spot positioning mechanism via screen sections and margins (JS only).
• [+] Reworked iPhone and iPad implementation for smooth hot-spot presentation and zooming (JS only).
• [+] Added new features to enable rotation direction control, including forced single rotation direction (JS only).
• [+] Added new progress indicator animation with optional progress numbers (JS only).
• [+] Updated all samples to highlight latest 360 viewer capabilities (JS only).
• [!] Fixed numerous issues reported from beta testing and production testing of our previous releases.

It's interesting that many of our clients have been quite happy with the beta v3 for almost 6 months now (the beta program was started early in the development this time). Just as we have reported a week ago, one of our v3 beta clients just finalized their 360 viewer deployment of 4000 designer sunglasses and eyeglasses on all of their websites - now available in 30 countries. This is including their dedicated mobile websites and a centralized storage of their 360 degree product photos. This tells us that focusing on sun-setting Flash capability and pushing forward with more interactive capabilities was the right decision. And we look forward to more success stories like this and will make sure that an adequate support is available from WebRotate 360 - such deployment always requires it!

What's next? We have a long burning list of priorities that is largely influenced by our users. Just in about few weeks there should be a follow up 3.1 beta release that will show some of the latest improvements requested by our clients in v3, the ones that didn't make it into this release. Some of the biggest concerns in the field with v3 right now is the lack of the full-screen support and some complexity involved with having multiple viewers on the same page.

There will also be some cool enhancements in the hot-spot interactivity and more resources will be shifted to the Mac compatibility in our 360 view software. But we have much bigger plans and announcements in store that are still in the early stages of development.

In about two or three weeks, we are planing to run our first global (and likely the last in the next 12 months) one-day promotion event on the PRO viewer v3, offering a whopping 20% discount. This will be the last chance to jump on our full-featured PRO license before we make changes to our pricing. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or subscribe to our Newsletter on the right to learn more. Please note that if you already have our PRO or Enterprise license, this upgrade is free!

Other resources:

• Take our latest 360 product photography tour that now runs on v3
• Visit our dedicated website with our latest v3 samples
• Download our quick v3 user guide
• Download WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3
• Visit our 360 photography equipment store (our website launch promotion is 50% off on the WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3 with certain equipment purchase).

There have been some new security developments in Google Chrome recently. The latest browser releases can't load local files using asynchronous requests when testing published webrotate templates locally on your computer (i.e when they are not loaded from the Internet or your local webserver). We rely on these asynchronous requests (AJAX) in our 3D product viewer to load viewer configuration (xml) files.

Note that all works fine if the viewer is loaded from the Internet or your local webserver (e.g localhost / 127.0.0.1).

Good news is that Chrome has a special key that Google gives web developers and testers to bypass this security check and it's very simple to apply to your Chrome also.

If you are on Windows, go to your desktop and find Chrome shortcut. Make a copy of the shortcut for your webrotate tests and right-mouse click on it to bring up the shortcut properties. You will see that there's a Target field on the shortcut properties form, so just add the following to the end of the target path right after the closing quote (add a whitespace as well): 

--allow-file-access-from-files

Mine for example looks like this: "C:\Users\...\chrome.exe" --allow-file-access-from-files

It's more involved on Mac and we haven't tried it there yet but you can see how it can be done in this post.

Sept 2014 - Note that when you launch your local previews in Chrome from inside WebRotate 360 SpotEditor (v3.5 and up, Windows version), we pass this key to Chrome automatically so you don't need to go through the manual steps. Just make sure that Chrome is not running before you hit Publish in SpotEditor and unless the running Chrome instance was also launched by SpotEditor.

May 2015 - Opera has transitioned to Chromium recently, so you can now use exactly the same steps with the shortcut & key to make your local tests work in Opera too.

Sept 22, 2017 - the latest version of Safari 11 adds extra restrictions for the local previews of WebRotate 360 product views. To be able to preview your published work locally in Safari 11 and up, navigate to Safari's Develop menu and check "Disable Local File Restrictions" as shows in this screenshot.