Shoppable 360° product panorama

Problem

AEO's editorial team wanted to push past flat product photography on category pages — to give customers an experience that felt more like walking into a store than scrolling a catalog. The challenge: do it on the web, on existing browsers, without requiring a plugin install or breaking the shopping flow.

Approach

I built a shoppable 360° panorama using the Pano2VR framework. The panorama placed products in a contextual environment, and clickable hotspots layered over the scene turned each product into a direct link back into the shopping experience.

The technical pieces:

• Pano2VR's player + skin as the panorama engine, with custom hotspot styling matched to AEO's brand
• A fallback experience for unsupported browsers so the page degraded gracefully
• Modernizr-based capability detection to choose the right rendering path

Outcome

• One of AEO's earliest immersive editorial experiences on the web
• A repeatable pattern for combining environmental storytelling with direct commerce
• Demonstrated that immersive shopping experiences were viable on the web — years before VR/AR commerce became a serious product category

What this says about how I work

The hardest part of this project wasn't the panorama — it was the fallback. Building immersive experiences that gracefully degrade is the difference between a demo and a production feature. The pattern here (capability-detect, choose path, never break the underlying shopping flow) is the same pattern that later guided more complex personalization and experimentation work.

The demo requires a desktop browser to view the panorama itself.