During a break from manning our table at SCOE 2012, I took a walk around the vendor area and came across a really cool app. It’s called Arqball Spin and it makes the coolest little interactive animations of items that you want to sell on eBay or post on your website or blog. I asked their team to share some info about their app with us and here’s what they had to say:
Arqball Spin is a new app and online service that makes it dead simple to capture, edit, and share a “360-degree” spin of an object. Spins are a terrific addition to your online store because they give visitors the ability to interactively rotate your products a full 360 degrees and inspect them from any angle (they work right from your eBay product listing too!).
To make spins you use the free iOS (or Android) app and a turntable, either a hand-rotated lazy susan or a motorized turntable. Place the object on the turntable, point your smartphone/tablet at the object and hit a red record button in the
app.
In the time it takes your turntable to complete one revolution (plus about 30 seconds of processing time) you will have an interactive spin of your product right on your device.
The app also has a number of useful editing functions: for example, the app allows you to set a white point (or black point) in order to “blow out” the background. The app also allows you to add 3D labels on the object—these labels appear and disappear as the object is spun.
This short video illustrates the process: https://vimeo.com/49201045?
See an example of a labeled spin here:
https://arqspin.com/s/
When you are ready to share your spin with the world you “publish” it from the app to your Arqball Spin account. (You can create your free Arqball Spin account here. Once a spin is published, it can be embedded into blogs (like the spin above), added
to your eBay listing, shared in your Facebook feed, or sent over email or SMS as a link. The service is free for the first 5 spins. If you’d like to share more than 5 spins, there are different tiered service plans that you can enroll in. Read more about Arqball Spin pricing here.
There are other tools for making 360-photography. Systems sold by Ortery and Spin36 cost thousands of dollars and involve wired connecting between your camera, computer, and robot turntables (i.e., a dedicated setup). There are also other systems that are smartphone-based: eg, CupChair and YouSpin. However, neither of these solutions offer the same quality or the rich feature set as Arqball Spin.
You can learn more about Arqball Spin at the following links.
Get started: https://arqspin.com
Pricing: https://arqspin.com/product/pricing-plan/