Are there any browser-native 360 spin viewers?

Question

There are several plugins for viewing interactive 360-spin images of products, such as this: https://www.ajax-zoom.com/index.php?cid=home&tag=spin360

However, my question is whether there are any current or proposed solutions for this that are browser-native, so don't require any plugins? One analogy would be how gifs are now natively supported by most browsers without the need for a plugin.

Many thanks!

Answer 1

First, it is important to differentiate between the common types of 360 spin:

1. Spin from images
2. Spin from 3D model

You are asking about a spin from a set of images (photos). There is no native file format for 360 spins generated from a series of images. The spinning effect is achieved with JavaScript and browsers don't have the capability to display these animations natively.

The closest you can get is what Sirv does, to generate a .spin file, which can be viewed as a standalone URL like this:

https://demo.sirv.com/example.spin

However, it is rendered as an HTML file and in the background it still serves up all the unique images and JavaScript required to create the spinning effect. That file cannot be embedded in a page like native files (e.g. images or videos) with an img or other tag - it still need the .js to be embedded in the page too, like this:

<script src="https://scripts.sirv.com/sirv.js"></script>
<div class="Sirv" data-src="https://demo.sirv.com/example.spin"></div>

If instead you wanted to embed a 3D model, then yes, WebGL is the browser-native solution.