Web site w/ 3D products, how to do?

[Charliey]

Ok, ive got a job where i need to set up a web site for a local sports store, and the owner wants the site to have the products viewable in 3D. Now my question, how to do this? ive got some ideas:
QT-VR: i dont know how easy this would be, but i know it can be done somehow
Flash: take a bunch of images and then put them together to rotate to make it look 3D,
Javascript: same as flash but java based.

any other ideas? im meeting w/ the owner tomorrow, so ill get a better idea what he wants then, but id like some more things to suggest to him.

Thanks alot,

[mairving]

I guess that you need to explain things to him a bit. It is quite expensive to do that regardless of whatever program that you use. Every angle of an item will have to photographed, which means a lot of on-site time for each item. It also means mucho editing on the backend on your part. About the only things that I have seen done like this are cars and houses. I guess because of the expense involved in doing it. I would explain this to him. If he still wants it, I would then do a test run on a couple of the items and then give him a price per item. And if he still wants to do it, try to get him to limit this to just a few of his higher priced items. Also in your expenses, you should probably consider what the host would charge you for all the bandwidth that this would eat up.

From what I have seen QT-VR would be the way to go.

[mhayes]

I agree with Mairving on all accounts and QT-VR is definitely the way to go!

[Charliey]

Thanks for the info. QTVR would be the way, but wouldnt that be for high quality VR?

I saw an example at www.stars.com where they used flash and only 8 or 10 picutres from different angles around an object to give a semi 3D look.

The other thing i have considered is taking one of each side, and maybe one of the top, so its only 5 images, and it gives a view from each side. if i put this together with java or flash it would be fairly smooth, just not as detailed.

Any more suggestions?