360° objects

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This feature is available for Enterprise subscription accounts and up.

360° objects are a method in Micrio of viewing physical objects photographed from all angles as a single, rotatable object in Micrio.

It retains all Micrio features of extreme resolutions, and added storytelling.

This is great to present physical objects in greatest detail: from museum collections and auction house objects, to luxury products and consumer goods; each object will be presented in the highest quality, enriched with clickable hotspots to present its details best to the viewer.

We have put a large effort into making the uploading, enriching, publishing and viewing of these objects as simple as smooth as possible.

Like Image Albums, 360° objects are published with a greatly optimized single viewing preview package, which brings a smooth viewing experience, and the user will not have any flickering when rotating the image quickly while not all individual image tiles are loaded yet.

Creating the photographic content

You can produce 360° by for instance using an automatic 360° turnable base or table. Visit this page for a tutorial with more information on how to do this.

Using 360° photography turnables allow you to place your physical object, and linked to your camera, take a photograph every few degrees.

Again, there is no resolution limit to what Micrio can handle, so it's advisable to use the highest logical output resolution for your object; If it contains a lot of small details, use a high resolution, or if it's for quick viewing, medium / lower resolutions will suffice.

The resulting image sequence can be directly uploaded to Micrio, which will splice them together to a single viewing experience.

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Generally, taking a photo every 5° produces a good viewing experience. This means a 360° rotation will produce 72 images.

Uploading images into the album

First of all, it's important that your photos are numbered correctly, as Micrio will order the files based on filename for the processing of the object.

There are two ways to add 360° objects to the dashboard:

• Through the dashboard itself

  From the Explorer, choose "New..." -> "360° object". From there, select all images from the object. Then they will be uploaded and processed through your dashboard.

  This method is best for low to medium resolution objects, and uploaded as either JPG or WEBP format.

  WARNING

  If you work with many, or very large source files (ie. original TIF files), this method is non-optimal and possible will not finish correctly, since a lot of GBs will be uploaded through your browser. In that case, use the next method

• Through the Micrio Image Processing App

  To process all images for Micrio locally on your computer, avoiding long upload and processing times, use our Image Processing App, available for Windows and Mac.

  After downloading and installing it, you can log in to Micrio, and select the group and target folder to upload your 360° object.

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  Make sure you select a group that has 360° objects enabled. If not, you will not see the option to process the image as 360° object in the app.

  Then, you can select your image sequence, and each image will be processed on your computer and the results will be directly uploaded to Micrio.

  In an example for an image with 72 frames, using high-resolution TIF source files, totalling ~25GB, the total processing and uploading time using this app is around 5 minutes, in comparison to more than an hour using the above method!

Edititing and publishing a 360° object

Once succesfully processed, the 360° object will appear in your dashboard folder as a regular 2d image. Meaning you can move, delete, publish and depublish it the same way as you would any other image.

Opening the image editor will also be mostly the same, except for a few extra settings panels in the editor:

• 360° Camera settings

  

  There is a special 360° object settings panel in the Image Settings panel, which allows you to input your original camera settings, such as distance, field of view, and vertical angle in relation to the photographed object.

  This allows you to make sure that any markers you will place on this object will rotate correctly based on the original configuration.

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  Using this is only required if you plan on adding markers or tours to your 360 object

• 360° Marker settings

  

  In the 360° marker placement settings, Gain placement precision over each marker to specify from which angles they will be visible, and where they are displayed in the object's pseudo 3D environment. This is a powerful way of overcoming inconsistencies in the object, such as a protruding bit that overlaps a marker, when it should not be visible, when in any other case it would.