We don't often release blogposts or social media, as we usually let our clients' Micrio projects speak for themselves. But, maturing as a platform and having a lot of things to share with you, here we are.

Micrio started as the tech developed for its inception project "The Garden of Earthly Delights" in 2015. The project, created by an interdisciplinary team (public broadcasters, movie producers, composers, designers & developers), triggered its lead developer at Q42 to create an online service out of it, allowing others to create the same experience using their own materials.

Since then, Micrio grew from a single-project's technology, to an online platform used by a wide variety of customers, having created a a long list of beautiful projects, created in the Micrio dashboard, presented by the hyper performant Micrio Viewer, and delivered by our hyper performant delivery platform.

Over the years, we have received immensely good feedback and support from our users, which allowed us to keep improving. I am extremely grateful to everyone, which by now is a long list of people from many different industries.

So, that's it, then? Micrio is working well, it seems!

We're... done...?

Nope! Next steps.

A lot has happened with Micrio in recent years.

In this post, I will take you through the most important updates that we have launched today:

• New Micrio presentation methods
  New ways of presenting your collections and objects.
• A new dashboard
  2018 called, they want their code back.
• A new viewer
  Faster, better, cleaner, prettier, more accessible.
• A new website
  You're looking at it!
• Micrio as a business
  Going more professional.
• Pricing updates
  Getting the best bang for your buck euro.
• Platform migration
  Google -> Cloudflare.

New Micrio presentation methods

We're proud to present three new, or greatly improved, Micrio features to you:

1. Albums and books

We have created an optimized method where you can upload or import your high resolution scanned manuscripts, books, or albums, and present them to the world using Micrio's high speed viewer.

Almost instantly, people can view your materials, while swiping through it in real-time. Each page can also be enriched with markers, tours, and storytelling.

2. Spinnable 360° objects

Combining Micrio's zooming capabilities with multi-angle photography, we were able to create a performant, high resolution spinnable object viewer.

Photograph your physical objects from all angles, and directly upload the photo sequence into Micrio. From there, you can immediately publish it, while also being able to add markers, hotspots and tours.

3. 360° virtual tours

While 360° images could already be uploaded to Micrio, it was a big hassle to connect multiple images to become a single navigatable virtual tour.

With our greatly improved 3D editor, you can easily spatially position each 360° photo at their originally shot location, allowing you to quickly connect adjacent spaces to allow for a natural user navigation.

New Micrio Dashboard

We have just launched a whole new Micrio dashboard. While the previous dashboard was solid as a rock, its underlying code was the same. Built in 2018, its codebase really wasn't up to 2024's standards anymore, and it was getting increasingly hard to maintain and add new features to it.

Together with our platform migration (see below), we have rebuilt a new dashboard from scratch over the past year using the latest and greatest in scalable, maintainable tech:

• SvelteKit using TypeScript strict for minimal-footprint, greatly maintainable code, combining its server and client components in a single codebase.
• Cloudflare Workers for edge-delivered, serverless hosting, ensuring optimal operating speeds all around the globe.

The previous dashboard

First off, for anyone using the previous dashboard: you do not have to do anything! Using the new dashboard is totally optional for you, and you can choose to keep using the previous dashboard.

Since the new dashboard runs in a new hosting environment, and to respect any legacy projects you might have in the previous version, we did not migrate or move your existing projects to the new environment.

Migrating your existing dashboard's project to the new dashboard is optional. If you would like that, please contact us.

New dashboard features

For the entire new dashboard documentation, please refer to our documentation pages.

Conceptually, the new dashboard does not differ much from the previous dashboard, so switching from the old to the new will most likely be effortless to you.

However, the new dashboard offers a lot of new features and upgrades under the hood. Amongst many others:

1. Truly multilingual

   

   Whereas the old dashboard had a few predefined languages, the new dashboard allows you to choose from 600+ international locales for your content, including right-to-left script, allowing to hot-switch between them in both the editor and viewer environments.

2. Create your own welcome screens

   

   An often requested Micrio feature is the ability to create your own custom welcome screen for your own storytelling projects.

   In the new dashboard, this is now easily doable, allowing you to welcome your visitors with text, image, or video, and adding your own custom action buttons to bring them the optimal viewing experience.

3. Style your own viewing experience

   

   While the Micrio viewer itself already comes with fully customizable styling using CSS, we have made this even a step easier for you.

   We now offer a group-wide styling editor, which will automatically be applied to all of your published images. Using our easy customization tool, you can easily set up the Micrio interface to match your own styling and branding, ensuring that all your project's visitors will be familiar with it.

4. Deeplink any editor screen

   Sharing editor details, such as a selected marker's popup content, was not possible in the previous dashboard.

   Now, every individual editing panel has its own deeplink, allowing you to easily share it with others in your team.

5. Micrio Image Processing app

   Sometimes, when uploading 10GB+ images through the dashboard, uploads could get stuck or it would generally just take too long for the full image to be processed.

   We have introduced an easy-to-use image processing app for Micrio, that processes your images on your computer and uploads the processed results straight to Micrio.

   On a 25GB image TIF file for example, the upload size was reduced to only 250MB, and the entire operation was done in 4 minutes!

   Additionally, for power users, or for server-side processing, we have introduced an NPM-based Micrio CLI-based tool capable of the same.

6. Dark & light mode

   You can now easily switch the dashboard from light to dark mode, based on your preference, allowing you to focus more on your work than on a distracting interface.

New Micrio Viewer

We always strive to bring the highest possible viewing performance for your Micrio projects.

With the first Micrio viewer originating from 2015, we have greatly improved it over the years, with the latest version, Micrio 5.0 as the latest champion.

A revamped, sleek UI

The default 5.0 Micrio viewer comes with greatly cleaned up, sleek new UI. Semi-transparent buttons, popup modals, better menus, and better mobile responsiveness allow for a clean and smooth viewing experience.

In the meanwhile, it also became easier to customize this UI using your own site-wide CSS variables.

Accessibility: WCAG 2.2 ready

To allow better interactivity for people with (visual) impairments, we have optimized Micrio 5.0 to be compatible with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2.

This means you can use your keyboard to easily navigate your way through all Micrio images, including markers, tours, etc, and all relevant elements and buttons are provided with helpful contextual screenreader hints.

Under the hood

For the Micrio 5.0 developer and integration documentation, please refer to our documentation pages.

On the technical side, the new Micrio viewer supports all new dashboard features mentioned above, and has greatly improved performance for multi-image viewing experiences such as the rotational 360° objects and albums, while still minimizing CPU and bandwidth cost as much as possible. Ensuring low usage footprints for any device.

Because of some changes made to the data model, and support for the newly added Micrio features, Micrio 5.0 is required for any projects published from the new dashboard.

However, Micrio 5.0 is fully backwards compatible, so it's safe to use it to view images created in the previous dashboard.

It is not required to upgrade any existing Micrio implementation to version 5.0. But if you want to upgrade from Micrio 4 to Micrio 5, you can use this guide. Additionally, the technical TS API documentation and CHANGELOG can be found here.

A new Website

With the basis of the old Micrio website made in 2017, it was high time to have a fresh new look to reflect our own grown mentality and updated visions for Micrio.

Together with design studio Fabrique and with help from people at EIDRA (see below), you're looking at the result!

Micrio as a business

Micrio thus far has been a rather small operation. Which is OK-- a small operational footprint brought us a lot of time and peace to grow Micrio over the years.

But, what we possessed in technical excellence, we lacked in having a good sense of doing business. Turning Micrio into a profitable venture is not as easy as might seem.

In 2020, Micrio's parent company, Dutch Q42, joined the Swedish EIDRA group– a consortium of expert companies for tech, consulting, and more.

This brought Micrio a great fresh wind. The first action of EIDRA to Micrio was: we need to professionalize. While Micrio has been growing over the years, it had not been profitable yet, and was mostly a one-man operation.

Long story short: instead of "just VC'ing" a bunch of money at us as a tech startup, we were given time and a small bright core team to rethink what Micrio is, and planning the next steps from there.

New Micrio Pricing

As we continue to grow and enhance our services, we are implementing a pricing update. We have not increased our pricing in years, allowing our users to benefit from our services at a consistent rate for a long time. However, to ensure we can maintain and further develop the high-quality service you can rely on, a price adjustment has become necessary.

We've introduced a new, stacked pricing model, designed to be more tailored to our customers' exact needs. From now on you will pay for what you use, ensuring you get the most value out of our services.

To be able to play around with Micrio before deciding to get a paid subscription, we have also increased the free trial period from 15 to 30 days.

New delivery platform

We have been using the Google Cloud for Micrio hosting since 2016. In the ever evolving network called The Internet, for our new dashboard environment, we have decided to use Cloudflare.

This means that the new dashboard, and all projects and images created there will be hosted by Cloudflare, instead of Google. A few key points for our reasoning:

• Edge-based delivery

  My opinion is: Cloudflare Workers kick ass. Instead of having a multitude of VMs running where you pay for mostly idle CPU time, Cloudflare Workers allow your websites and apps to run only when they are requested, as close to the visitor as possible.

  This allows for a serverless experience, minimizing global latencies, codebases, server architectures, and thus administration time. And maximizing the visitor experiences all over the globe.

• Still EU-based and GDPR-compatible

  As Micrio is a service located in the EU, we adhere to data and privacy standards under GDPR regulations. Micrio's Cloudflare services are physically located in the EU.

  However, as Cloudflare offers their datacenters from all over the world, if you would prefer to use a more local (non-EU) storage center for your Micrio account, please contact us.

The previous dashboard and all its APIs, databases etc are still hosted in Google, and there are no short-term plans to deprecate this environment.

Concluding

Micrio's parent company, Q42's motto is: "Software is never finished". This is also the case with Micrio.

We will keep working hard to find the most beautiful ways for you to create and present your projects to the world. We are excited to find new customers, partners, and people with crazy and challenging ideas to work with.

As for this huge update, it has been over a year in the making. For being important parts in this process, I would like to thank in no apparent order: Danique Drost, Erwin Verbruggen, Gert-Hans Berghuis, Ramon Forster, Jasper Kaizer, Mila Ernst, Cees de Jonge, Jiri Swen, Joost de Nooy, and everyone at Q42 and EIDRA who are supportive of Micrio.

And... Keep your eyes peeled for more updates coming later this year!

- Marcel Duin, Micrio founder