If you read our recent article about hosted data, you’ll recall that a major benefit of having Arqspin host your spins is that it gives you access to the full set of optimizations in our spin viewer. We thought it would be helpful to tell you more about what makes our viewer great and why it’s such an integral part of your investment in Arqspin.

When we were developing Arqspin we put a lot of time and effort into the spin viewer in particular, because it’s the tool that visitors to your website will see whenever they interact with your spins. What’s important when it comes to the viewer are three metrics—time to view, time to interact, and time to fully loaded. We developed our viewer with these metrics in mind and minimized the time for each. Here’s how:

1. Multiple Compressed Formats

We store each of our users’ spins as a set of compressed images and as videos. The Arqspin viewer is designed to choose among these formats and download whichever one will give the best performance on the browser and the device being used to view the spin. This reduces the time for all three metrics—time to view, interact, and load.

2. Progressive Loading

With our viewer, web pages with spins progressively load data from our servers in order to display part of the spin as fast as possible instead of waiting for the entire spin to load. This minimizes the time to view, or the amount of time someone is left looking at a blank screen.

If a spin consists of 100 images, once the web browser has downloaded only a small number of these images, the spin will appear and start to rotate. As it’s rotating, the rest of the frames are loading in the background. As these additional images are loaded, the spin’s motion becomes smoother. This makes for a more pleasant user experience for customers that visit your website and land on a page with a spin.

Each spin has a set of images

3. Flash and HTML5

There are versions of the Arqspin viewer in Flash and HTML5. This means the viewer will work on any platform and device. HTML5 has become a dominant standard that is supported on most modern devices. But Flash is still important for some popular platforms like Facebook which only allow customizations using Flash. This capability minimizes time for all metrics because it presents your spin in the optimal format for the device or browser you’re using.

You Get What You Pay For

We occasionally speak with customers who have done their own hosting or have tried other 360 software providers. Often times, it was a less optimal experience than creating and hosting spins with us because they ended up with a system that doesn’t offer spins in video form or that doesn’t progressively load images.

We’re very proud of the Arqspin viewer and we’ve put a lot of thought and engineering effort into making it fast, responsive, and adaptive to a wide range of web browsers. It’s an important part of your investment in working with us. Questions? Comments? Let us know ways you think we can improve.