WebRotate 360 Post (Copy)
The Archive
Notebooks full of CDs from the 1990s and early 2000s sat on shelves in a closet at my home for years. These CDs were part of my archive of 360° product demos I made for Apple for almost 12 years. From 1996 to 2007 my company, Flipside Studios (then called John Greenleigh Studios) was the exclusive provider of Apple’s website 360°s for every hardware product they released. The first iPod, the first iMac, and who can forget the eMate 300? Well…everyone.
I had always thought about digging out these old 360°s to put on my website for fun and to show an important part of Apple’s history – and my own. Unfortunately, Apple has not supported the platform they were meant to function on - Quicktime VR (aka QTVR) - for years, and I hadn’t wanted to deal with all of the steps and hassle of updating them for current systems and browsers.
QuickTime and Quicktime VR
Recently, as I was revising the Flipside Studios website, I decided it was time to include a gallery of my Apple QTVRs. This meant finally getting down to taking the original jpeg files and making new versions of the 360°s in HTML5. Unlike before, however, I now had a tool that would make the process much easier and stress free, and that was my go-to stitching and viewing software, WebRotate 360!
How our QTVRs were made
Apple’s QTVR product 360°s were photographed on custom-designed automated turntables. As the turntable rotated and stopped every 10 degrees, images were captured until a full 360° rotation was made. Almost all of the Apple 360°s were of the “multi-row” variety, meaning that photos were captured both horizontally and vertically (x-axis & y-axis) using a motion control rig that raised the camera to precise and repeatable positions above the product. These QTVRs usually contained 360 product views and allowed the customer to virtually examine a product all around and also over the top.
Left: A diagram from an early Apple Developer document showing the multi-row object movie process. Right: Shooting a Mac and display with our custom designed turntable and motion control camera rig in 2001.
For some products – like ipods – we additionally photographed the underside to allow viewers to see below the product as well as above. The trick to capturing the bottom was to shoot the whole sequence twice – flipping the product upside down for the 2nd run. When the upside down images were rotated 180° in post production, the effect was that of moving underneath it.
A muli-row QTVR object movie allows for horizontal and vertical movements.
Once the images were captured, they were edited in Photoshop to remove the backgrounds, retouch minor cosmetic blemishes, and composite a screen image into every frame that showed a screen. The result was a folder of retouched, sequentially numbered jpegs.
Apple’s QTVR Authoring Studio software was used to stitch the retouched jpegs into web-ready QTVR files.
Frames of a MacBook after importing into Apple’s QTVR Authoring Studio.
The finished QTVRs were delivered to Apple at two different resolutions: 360px x 360px and 480px x 480px. Why such small image sizes? Because anything larger would have taken forever to download on the slow dial-up modems that connected us to the internet before broadband came along in the early 2000s.
Final files with the product code name “Gimme” as delivered to Apple. The “.obj” files were the interactive web-ready files.
The final QTVRs were featured on the product page of all newly released hardware, and also on a page called “QTVR Hardware Gallery”.
Left: A product page with a link to the QTVR 360°s. Right: Apple’s QTVR Hardware Gallery
Apple eventually discontinued supporting the QTVR object movie plug-in in 2006, and later did the same with panoramas, forcing panorama photographers to move to Flash and then to HTML5 for presentation on the web.
Remaking the 360°s
To remake the QTVRs in HTML5 for viewing on current systems, I simply imported the original hi res retouched jpegs into WebRotate’s Spot Editor, adjusted the control and interface settings as usual, and output the files to a folder. This time around - thanks to broadband – the image window could be larger than the originals, and could include high resolution zooming as well as full screen mode. The folders were uploaded and are now hosted with WebRotate’s new PixRiot server platform which simplified the uploading and has made a real difference in the download speeds as well.
A screen capture of the WebRotate 360 SpotEditor.