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Comment by binkies3d | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm one of the team at Binkies3D over in Holland. We just launched Hotspot 3D today. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it. :)

Whilst there are websites that let you compare the specs of phones, we wanted to compare the shape and size. There are currently 19 phones on Hotspot 3D, but we actually have the models for many more. We just chose the most popular ones for now.

It's especially difficult to tell the difference between 'plus' models without a physical reference, so that is where this idea came from.

The phones themselves are around 1.5MB each and are rendered using our own custom engine in webGL. The java-script itself is only 40kb, and works on mobile as well.

Thanks for taking a look, and I would love to hear any feedback or comments you have.

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I love the lighting effects. Is that a diffuser umbrella showing up in the reflection?

Is it possible that the Hotspot version will ever contain a comprehensive catalog, or would that dig into sales of the main product? Could you add a back-catalog to Hotspot without impacting sales?

Can you handle phones with moving parts? e.g. QWERTY sliders like the Xperia Mini Pro, or addons like "Moto Mods" or the Essential PH-1 360 Camera.

Are you in discussion with any of these "websites that let you compare the specs of phones"? That sounds like a great match.

1.5MB sounds a bit large when most phones have quite simple geometry. Where does the file size come from?

That is indeed a diffuser umbrella :) If you count all color separably we currently have over 1500 phones in our catalog. We plan to add these to Hotspot and also make sure that new phones are available on the Hotspot website close after launch. We will probably announce new releases on our Facebook page.

Moving parts is something we have experience with but have not included in the current version.

1.5MB might indeed sound a lot if you compare it to a single image. On the other hand if you look at a regular 360 viewer this takes often about 10MB of data. Also we want the phones to look really (really) good. This means that we need to put quite a lot of detail into things like corners and buttons.

Please include more older compacts for a full size range and permalinks to send around.

Permalinks is definitely something we want to add in the short run!

I noticed the models are loading JSON. I'm guessing GLTF2.0?

We know about GLTF but are not (yet) using it in production. Main reason for this is that our scene description is a bit more complex that the GLTF format currently allows.

Looks promising, this may be nice for cars.

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