When shopping online, how many times you see a picture, and wish you could see the product from all the sides? If you are like me, then this happens quite often as you normally want to inspect a product like you normally do in a shop by looking at it from every angle.

In this instructable, I will show you how easy it is to shoot, create and publish an interactive 360 degree product rotations with almost no budget at all and probably in less than 10 minutes (with some experience).

In a nutshell, you will need to shoot a video of your product spinning, then convert it using shoogleit.com into an interactive video and finally embed it into your auction (EBay, etc).

Please do let me know what you think and please show us your finished shoogles by adding comments below. Many Thanks.

Ps. Shoogle means to shake, sway, or rock back and forth, a rocking motion, shake. Dialect chiefly Scot - Scottish word.

see example below:

http://www.shoogleit.com/308-0_Bathers%20Sculpture

Step 1: What You Need

1. A webcam or a video camera.
2. Some lights - the more the merrier
3. White cardboard
4. Turn table or rotating surface.

The video camera can be any resolution, I have done quite a few with a $15 webcam but we do recommend a high quality camera for best results. In the next steps I will show you how to set the lights and the camera.

You need a white cardboard if you want that Apple white abstract look that everyone seems to be copying.

As for the turn table, this can be anything like a lazy Susan, an old record player, or something that spins. You can find lots on Amazon and Google products. I got my lazy Susan table from Amazon UK for something something like $15 dollars. If you don't have any budget then just use a pin to hold the centre of the cardboard.

Step 2: Shooting the Product Whilst Rotating It.

How to set up your camera before shooting?

Find a suitable location with enough space for your camera, lights and rotating table.

Set your turn table in the middle of it and cover it with the white cardboard, the bigger the cardboard the better (see pictures).

Now place your product/object in the middle of the turn table, give it a few spins to check if the object is in the middle of the turn table.

Point your camera to the middle of the object and place your strongest light so it lights the product from the top, use a second light to soften the shadows of the first light. Play a while with the light positions until you get the best results.

See pictures for our set up.

Once you finished your setup then just shoot a video of the spinning product, usually one rotation per minute is slow enough to get good quality.

If you want that abstract white background then you can play with the aperture, contrast and white balance of your camera until you get a nice homogeneous white background, do not worry too much about it being perfect white as I will show you how to fix it in the next steps.

See the video below for the raw video of my spinning object (I'm moving the table with my hand).

Step 3: Import Your Video to Shoogleit

Shoogleit is a free website were you can add interactivity to videos or sequence of images, see some examples here:

http://www.shoogleit.com

Once you register and log in, it will show you options, please pick the "Start Creating a Shoogle Using Frames from a Video" option.

It will then ask you to upload the video file to the server and then please select it (use). Once you done that, shoogleit will analyse the video and then you can choose the start and end of the video and the separations.

Please select the start as being the start of one rotation and the end as the end of one rotation, then select around 60 separations aka 'separate one rotation into 60 frames'.

Finally, let shoogleit do its magic, see video below for a demo of this step.

Step 4: Beautify Your Frames

Once shoogleit finish separating the frames, it will add them to the film strip below. You can move (drag), delete (del key), resize and crop (left menu) them in this stage. See the video below for a quick demo.

Tip:Resize and Crop the frames small enough so your shoogle will take less time to load but it will retain its quality.

If you want to fix the white background then click on the advance options menu and select 'white background correction', once in there select the location of your background in x and y coordinates and press preview. Play with the options until you get that perfect white background, then hit recolour.

Here also delete frames that are extra, for example extra frames not needed for a 360 rotation.

Step 5: Add Interactivity

Once you finish beautifying your frames, click on the SETTINGS at the top menu, here you will be able to add the interactions. Click on the interaction button on the left menu and play with the drag speed, drag and check the speed in the actual shoogle on the right. Once you get your desire drag speed then you can check out the other options like if you want an slider, play button, etc.

You can enable the loop drag option to make the movie loop when is dragged. If you find that the sequence does not loop correctly because you have extra frames then just return to the FRAMES section and delete the extra frames by selecting them and hitting the DEL key.

You can also Invert the drag if you need to do it.

Tune the interaction to your heart's contend.

Step 6: Publish the Shoogle and Embed It on Ebay or Anywhere.

Finally press the PUBLISH tab on the top menu, add the title and description and press Publish. Done, that was easy :-D

Once you finished publishing your shoogle a window will pop showing your shoogles. Click on the one you just produced and it will open a new window with the place were it is hosted. On the bottom part you can copy the embed code, then paste it on the description as HTML. All done.

Hope you like it, Please let me know if a step need expanding or if you have any questions.

Extra note: I have created like 5 auctions on ebay with 360 product photography and usually I get something like 20-25% more money for my products compared to the ones with simple images. I hope you can also profit from having 360 spins.

Thanks for reading my instructable and good luck.

The example shown below is here:

http://www.shoogleit.com/342-0_Shoogle%20Demo%20for%20Instructables