How to Implement 360 Spin Photography, Part 3: Hosted Image Server
Posted by Michael Dreas on Mon, Mar 12, 2012 @ 07:15 AM
In the first blog, we discussed hiring a one-stop-shop to handle all your 360 and 3D spin photography and viewer needs. The second blog discussed handling the viewer part or all of the process in-house. The final discussion here will focus on what we feel is the best solution to giving your customers a great online 360 shopping experience, a third party image server based rich media viewer.
Once your spinsets have been created, either by your studio or an outside source, they will need to be placed into an interactive viewer. Most likely, this will be a HTML5 or Javascript based rich media viewer. These two formats have been 
gaining popularity due to Apple's refusal to allow its mobie devices to run Flash. One thing that must be considered is mobile broadband speeds. Land based broadband has reached extremely fast speeds so large rich media files load with no problem, but most wireless systems are much slower.
An image server is a 3rd party hosted system that is able to adapt the image sizes to the device they are being viewed on. There is no good reason to send a 800x600 pixel image spin to an iPhone. Shotfarm has a great rich media viewer that is able to sense what device it is being viewed on, then serve up the appropriate formatted images. This allows the 360 spin to load quickly and be sized correctly for the devices screen, whether that be 27" display or a tablet. This eliminates "getting lost" in an oversized image and keeps the customers attention. Also, very "deep" zoom is possible as the system servers up the high res image section as the customer clicks on it.
Another advantge to a 3rd party hosted image server is that you will not need to worry about the ever changing tide of browsers and technology updates. Your viewer provider will be keeping a close eye on any changes and adjusting their viewer accordingly. Your 360 and 3D image assests will be online and accessable without your team spending precious time trying to keep up with the updates.
If your team has gone to the trouble of creating great interactive 360 and 3D spins of your products, you don't want to cripple the process by having a ineffective viewer solution. As we've discussed, there are several ways to get spinset image assets from the studio to your website. The 3rd party hosted image server has great advanteges for both large and small companies.