Nearly 3 years ago now, we checked out and invested in "spin" technology for capturing 360 degree presentation of minerals.
The concept is simple, you set your mineral centre on a turntable and then control the movement of the turntable with your camera to capture a series of stills as the turntable steps round.
From the series of stills you then create a presentation that runs through the stills in sequence to simulate movement.
The issue for this presentation is the cost of time in producing and storing 36 or more images especially for a single product.
Why not use video? Video generally does not render with the same definition and the presentation produced cannot be controlled by the user, over stop/start.
With the advent of better and High Definition (HD) video capture through digital stills cameras, comes a revision to the software that will speed up the production process by using faster video capture and rendering the 360 degree presentation stills derived from the video clip.
This is the theory, and in addition we have been backing using the same technique for image stacking, on both stills camera and Iphone.
We are eagerly awaiting delivery of the software capable of doing this accurately - wont be long now!
I had a bit of time on my hands this morning so ran up a spin presentation - to remind myself of how this works and looks on e-Rocks!- see TVM608755 below.
Hopefully the video version will make this more practical soon!
