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4/12

A New Feature

Last year, we added a feature to Quire that allows users to include 360-degree rotating images in their books. In the context of an art collection catalogue, figures like these add visual excitement and give scholars the most possible views for study. The feature takes full advantage of digital publishing’s affordances and we are no longer limited to showing only front, back, and side view images for sculptural objects.

A vase on a plain, gray background. The vase is made of swirls of opaque glass in shades ranging from dark purple or black to lighter purple and white.
Click to rotate Example of a rotating object from one of our online collection catalogues, Ancient Glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Flask, unknown artist/maker, 1st century A.D. Glass. 7.5 × 4.1 cm (2 15/16 × 1 5/8 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California, 2003.278.

Prior to working on this feature, I didn’t know how these rotating figures were made. I assumed they were 3D scans of some sort. As it turns out, however, while some 360-degree images may indeed be scans (which you can rotate on any axis), the ones we use (which rotate on only one axis) are sequences of static images.

A grid of 25 images of a glass vase, each one is labeled with a number that increases by 5 each time, and shows the vase sequentially from slightly different angles. The bottom row is cut off implying a continuation of the sequence.
Quire’s rotating images are made up of sequences of static JPG images. In this case, one image for every five degrees of rotation.

Instead of taking only a handful of images of the object, our photographers take 360 images, one for each degree of rotation. To view them as a rotating object, a script runs to show and hide those images one at a time, in very quick succession, as a reader click and drags across the screen. The resulting animation creates the illusion of a three-dimensional object.

If we consider this new feature not as one that specifically displays 360-degree object views, but rather as one that can more generically scroll quickly through groups of any images, what other kinds of image sequences might we imagine.

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