360 Images published plays slow and does not support touch inputs

May 08, 2024

Wesley Adams
By Wesley Adams

Large Publish File Size:
We have a client whom we're working with to create a 360 image exploration of their industrial machinery via a series of 3D rendered images. This is an offline Web build for tradeshows that has about 7 360 images to explore. The images are fairly large as a 4K image. We were planning to reduce them to 2K images but this tended to reduce the image quality pretty poorly and didn't really save much file space.

However, the main issue I've found is that when we publish the Web build, SL360 creates content that nearly triples the 360 image size totals. Outside of the 4K 360 images, there are half-sized images made and very large JS files I assume are assigned to these 360 images. See "largePublishedFiles.png" image attached.

While playing the course, at first it plays fine. However, the more you explore, the more it slows down to a crawl. The publish file size is about 300MB but when playing, my GPU is running about 8+GB on my graphics card.

We've tried separating out this 1 slide experience into several slides and several scenes to see if this could help as there did tend to be a lot of layers. However, even with these revisions, it didn't seem to make a difference. Actually the GPU usage was the same and would slow down more between slides/scene loadings too.

I've attached images of my GPU from the Performance in Task Manager to showcase the original "OldBuild_GPU_Specs.png" to new separated content in "NewBuild_GPU_Specs.png". These represent when I've thoroughly explored the experience thoroughly between every room/popup content. It's a fairly simple slide otherwise.

Touch Inputs:
We've also noticed that touch inputs are not directly supported for these 360 image experiences. Our client also uses a finger touch display screen that would be ideal for their tradeshow experience. I found in another forum here that you can kind of turn on these inputs in the web browser via Mobile features in Dev Tools. We were successful in getting this setup in Chrome. However, it was a bit of a complicated process that would have to be redone when you restart the computer/browser. Is this touch input feature still being worked on to work natively? It would be ideal for kiosks and exploration projects like these. 

Reference to forums about touch inputs:
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/360-images-not-working-on-windows-touch-devices

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/touch-screen-interface-on-360-content

Thanks for your time and support! I don't think I can share these files directly here but if you need to see them, I'm happy to share individually via a secure link to a SL360 team member.

2 Replies
Wesley Adams
11 days ago05/09/24 at 4:23 pm (UTC)

Here's today's update in prep to help showcase a better build for our cilent at their tradeshow...

So we did move the files down from 4K (4096X2048) to a 2K (2560X1280) with a bit of loss of to quality to 360 image visuals. They were anywhere from 9MB in 4K to now about 2MB in 2K. So total package size was 250MB in 4K to about 47MB in 2K. So a big improvement in file size.

However, the course still has some loading issues once all content is viewed (depending on your machine specs). Returning to the intro slide that has a video, for example, tends to slow down to a crawl. Thusly, the course needs to be reloaded to empty the memory to run faster again. Sometimes, in the last build we saw the screen go white in the intro slide noting that maybe memory. 

We also did separate out the content over several slides again and found it to only be marginally better in some of our testing. This may only be due to us using less triggers/layers per slide in the new "separated content into multiple slides" version.

Our QA has tested other builds many times before on several other larger coursewares and has not see Performance issues like this before. It may be getting hung up on the 360 images being loaded.

If you all have other ideas for better optimizing the 360 experience, I'm all ears. We'd love to do more of these but currently if they causing such a slow experience, we may have to wait til we can find a way to make this run faster. Attached is an example of my performance specs. I have a fairly high power machine it does well but still crazy how much resources it needs to run.

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