MEGAVISOR

It’s been quite a journey. We started back in 2011 as a direct response to the growing e-commerce market's need for high-quality product visualization. The reality was that many manufacturers simply didn't provide high-quality images or detailed descriptions for retailers. So, our idea was to create a marketplace to bridge the gap - connecting those who needed quality visuals with professionals capable of producing high-end product photography and 360-degree views.

We built a cloud service designed to bring everyone together. This wasn't just for retailers and photographers; museums, exhibition organizers, architects, real estate agencies, and bloggers all needed an affordable solution for high-quality 360-degree views, interactive galleries, and virtual tours.

Equipment

But first, we had to perfect the content creation process itself. Our goal was to minimize costs while maximizing speed and quality, establishing best practices that we could share with our community.

We engineered our own 360-degree rotating platforms, controllable via smartphone or computer, focusing on simplicity, affordability, and reliability.

One of the critical challenges was synchronizing platform movement with the camera and lighting systems. Consistency is key - maintaining identical lighting conditions across all shots requires accounting for every variable, even power network fluctuations. The ultimate goal was to drastically reduce post-processing time and complexity.

We also founded Gate 9, our own product photography studio. It served as the perfect testing ground, allowing us to put our ideas and equipment through their paces in a real-world environment.

Here is one of our early prototypes:

We also provided instructions on extremely affordable shooting setups for DIY enthusiasts or anyone wanting to experiment with our platform at home:

Highload Architecture

Uploading and distributing massive amounts of high-quality imagery was a significant technical challenge, especially in 2011. We built our server infrastructure from scratch, leveraging the cutting-edge technologies of the time.

Our stack included:

• Golang for the core server-side logic
• FFmpeg for robust video processing and image conversion
• Redis for high-performance caching
• Postgres as our primary database
• Nginx for efficient load balancing

The result was a robust system capable of easily handling massive traffic spikes when our widgets were embedded on top news websites and major e-commerce platforms.

Dynamic Taxonomy

A standout feature of our platform was the ability to license User-Generated Content (UGC) and curate assets from our extensive interactive catalog. We developed a proprietary dynamic taxonomy engine (where category structures and properties adapted based on the entry point). This allowed us to organize highly diverse content in a way that was intuitive to navigate - a sophisticated take on folksonomy.

Hypermedia Player

We didn't stop at single assets; we wanted to weave different types of interactive content together. Imagine viewing a product in 360 degrees, clicking a hotspot to jump into a 360-degree view of the room it's placed in, or opening a map to see the physical location. We used "hyperlinks" inside our media to create seamless transitions, effectively building a "web of content".

Developing the widgets presented its own set of challenges, given the practically infinite usage scenarios. Since our business model relied on embedding these interactive reviews into third-party sites, we needed a widget system that was flexible, customizable, and bulletproof across all browsers and tech stacks. We started with Flash, eventually migrating to HTML5 canvas. Remember, Web Components didn't exist yet, so we innovated with everything from iframes to custom HTML/JS snippets to make it work.

The Exit

In 2016, we successfully sold the project to a major Russian e-commerce holding. It was a successful exit that allowed us to close that chapter and move on to new challenges.

Many of the core ideas and technical strategies we developed back then remain relevant today, and we continue to apply that hard-earned experience in our current projects.