Transcript: WGAN-TV Intro to Metareal Stage 3D Virtual Tour Platform (Demo)11332
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| WGAN-TV: Intro to Metareal Stage Virtual Tour Platform Demo/Discussion | Wednesday, 25 March 2020 (Credit: WeChalet/Le Vertendre) Transcript: WGAN-TV Metareal Stage 3D Virtual Tour Platform Demo/Discussion Hi All, Below is a transcript of: WGAN-TV Metareal Stage 3D Virtual Tour Platform Demo/Discussion[/b] with Me Key Takeaways ✓ Metareal Stage 3D virtual tour is amazing. Unlike Matterport, the Metareal Stage 3D virtual tour can be shot with nearly any 360º camera and because of how Metareal creates the 3D virtual tour, the tour can be shot much, much faster. ✓ Metrareal Stage offers both automatic tour and floor plan creation service or DIY tour creation (to save money) ✓ Compared to Matterport, Metareal offers a more cost-effective 3D virtual tour solution ✓ free publishing to Google Street View ✓ Metareal Stage is a serious contender for Service Providers to offer to real estate agents I look forward to our next WGAN-TV Live at 5 show (date TBD) when you will do a deeper dive demo and discussion of: ✓ Metareal Stage plug-in for Autodesk Revit ✓ Metareal Stage SDK Best, Dan Transcript - I'm Dan Smigrod, founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Wednesday, March 25, 2020. And you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. We have a great show for you today, an introduction to the Metareal Stage 3D virtual tour platform. And our guest today is Gareth. Hey Gareth, good to see you. - Hi Dan, nice to see you. - Gareth Morgan is the CEO and founder of Metareal. So, if I understand correctly, Metareal is the company, and Metareal Stage is the service. - That's right, that's the product, yeah. - Awesome. So Gareth, maybe perhaps the easiest place to start to talk about the Metareal Stage 3D virtual tour platform from 360 photos. Show us what it looks like, and then let maybe begin a discussion. - Sure, what I'll do is I'm going to share my screen. So, just clicking on this. And, I think I've got the right screen, it'll probably pop up there, is that right? - [Dan] Yup. - Okay I'm going to move this over here, because I need access to those tabs. So, you've probably all seen the Metareal website. This is a example of a customer site. It's one of our customers they use it in France. They do some really wonderful tours, actually. And so, this is an example of a Metareal tour embedded in a site. We got a little intro screen comes up that explains what the interactions that you can do when viewing the tour. In this case, the site's in French, but the tour's in English, because my browser is in English. If the browser language, the locale was set to French, it would also be in French. So we can see we have the tour here, and we can see we have some icons. So the first thing you notice is that the movement is obviously very, very smooth. The tour is actually a 3D reconstruction from the panoramas that the photographer shot. And I can move around the house. When we have a navigation possible through a door, we can click on it and pass through the doorway, and back into the space. There's a bunch of other features, things like labels. Just going to move up the stairs here, and take a look around. And you can see it's got a beautifully complete reconstruction of the entire space. Navigation is easy, I'm just clicking to move around. There are simple navigation points that tell me where I am. Although we're mostly focused on interiors we can as easily use outdoor panoramas, as indoor panoramas. In this case, MiaVisite has not decided to hide all the UI elements of the tour. These are options that you have when you're making the tour. You can also show a model view and a plan view if you want. But, in this case you've decided to hide those. Another thing that's interesting about these tours is that if you, these are actually fully 3D tours. And if open the tour using a web VR compatible headset, it'll actually be straight away in VR, stereoscopic, scaled correctly and in 3D. So you'll see all the depths and you can move around in 3D using the headset. So we have customers using Oculus Go and Oculus Quest. They're very good headsets for this kind of thing. And if you are aware of VR compatible platform, you'll also see a little web VR icon, allowing you to go into VR mode. - Gareth, I notice this looks very much like Matterport. And I know from having looked at Metareal Stage tours before that you have a dollhouse version, but I don't see anyway to get to the dollhouse version, or to the floor plans on this. - Right, so in this case, in this tour the user's chosen to hide all the UI. I think he just wants a very seamless experience. I can pop to our website and to our gallery-- - Right, it's metareal.com ... - Yeah Metareal.com, and if you go to the website, you can click on the gallery area, some example. Some of these tours, some of them are ours, some of them are our customers. And I want to find one that has some UI elements. So here, this one, we've chosen to open it full screen. So here you can see we're in the player, and we have some more UI elements. So in this case we published it, with certain UI elements available. So we have our main view. We can click here and we'll go the model view, this is the 3D model view. So this is actually the 3D model that is constructed as a side effect of building the tour. And we also have a plan view. So we can click between the different floors in the plan view. So this is an automatically generated plan view again that comes, as default it comes as part of building the tour. You get this for free and you can choose whether you want to show it, or not. Everything is constructed scale accurately, it is actually a 3D model. So we have measurement tools that you can use within the environment, to measure distances, and you actually choose to expose that for the user to be able to make measurements as well. And we've also got a room chooser here. I've got a selection of different rooms. So each room in the tour by default gets a view here. So we can click on the room just to instantly teleport to that room. And then we could choose to move back down to the other space that we're in. So there are a variety of options for the user interface as the player, you don't have to use them. Here they've put a title, an address. You can also add a, there's nothing here, you can a nadir logo if you want. And you can also add a top right logo to the screen here, underneath where our little thumbnails are. - And I don't see any Metareal, Metareal Stage logos on this tour. - No, there's no logos. In fact, if you're on a pay plan, there's actually no Metareal branding whatsoever. The only thing you'll find is the Metareal.com URL is in the tour. Of course if you decide to embed your tour into a page, that's pretty much mask, as well. So there's no Metareal branding. On the free plan, we do put a watermark. There's a little Metareal watermark that appears on the screen. - And so, I as a photographer can either add my branding, and/or my client's branding in the nadir, where the tripod was, or in the top right. - Yup, yeah. And in addition to the tour itself, you can also choose the gallery. These case, these galleries are generate from the tour, but you can also choose the gallery thumbnail image. And that also becomes the starting image for the embedded tour. So you can actually, I'll just reload this page, and you actually choose this image as well, if you want. It doesn't have to be one of the panoramas. - So is there a gallery created on the fly by the account? - No, we don't generate user facing galleries at the moment. That is something that's on our roadmap. So you need to do that with your own web page. However we do have an SDK, which allows you to have quite a lot of control. And, also get quite a lot of data from the navigation in the tour. For example, while I'm in the tour it's embedded in a page, the page can have access to where I'm moving around in the tour, what I'm clicking on, information about quite a lot of the other different interactions. You could also drive the navigation of the tour from the SDK. So if you've got a tour embedded in a page you can actually control it from your web page. - Okay, can you go back to the dollhouse once more? - Sure. - Is that what you call it? - We call it a Model View. It's a 3D Model that's generated from the reconstruction process. You can see this is, it's fairly low quality textures at the moment. One area we're investing an enormous amount right now is really improving the quality of the textures in the dollhouse, in the Model View. But it's really a full 3D model. We're displaying it with back culling, so you see into the house as you move around it, because the walls and the ceilings facing you, indeed the floor facing you are culled away. - Can I fly into that model? - You can get pretty close. You can click on it and you can navigate in. We don't have any way to go directly in and out of the model and the tour, because they're two different things. - It's very close to being, gosh, almost a digital twin of Matterport. Do you like that analogy, do you not like that analogy? - I think it's, you know, it's a 3D reconstruction of a real environment that's presented as a virtual tour in several different ways. We're very different from Matterport in the sense that we work directly from panoramas, and you introduce your own very clean geometry from those panoramas when you're, when you're doing a reconstruction. It's really not the same thing, we're not using scan data, we're using the panoramas, which gives the user the opportunity to use whichever camera they like. In many cases what we're looking at here is DSLR imagery that's been stitched. So you have the all the opportunity to shoot with the quality of a DSLR, and yet you're still able to create a true 3D virtual tour. - So for clarification as a service provider I can use virtually any 360 camera, - Yeah, yeah. - to create, or to capture the space. - Yes, absolutely. - And do I need to be shooting similar to Matterport where I'm going every five to seven feet? - No, there's no requirement for that. Because of the way we do the reconstruction either doing it yourself using the app yourself and the DIY service, or having our production team do it for you using the full service option. You have a choice. The shooting requirements are really quite, are really quite relaxed. They're not nearly as onerous. At the very least what you can do, actually I have a little diagram I can pull that up. Maybe it'd help get a better idea. - I think it would be helpful if you could tell us about what it's like to shoot a tour. And since many of us actually shoot with Matterport, how that might compare with shooting with Matterport. - So, I think the minimum shooting requirement for creating a tour with Metareal is one panorama per room, or per enclosed space. With enough panoramas to have line of sight between them, so that you can build a navigation that doesn't fly through walls, or, you know, isn't otherwise uncomfortable for the viewer who's going on the tour. - So I can shoot more 360s, so if I want someone to be able to view that living room from each corner from the middle of the room I can. - Yeah. - But I could also choose to do that room in one or two spaces. And maybe a best practice is make sure that I have line of sight to get to the next scan, so that I'm not, - That's right, yeah. - having somebody walk through a wall, or walk through a window. - That's right, exactly. If you for any reason don't have line of sight, or it's just not an option, we offer a teleport navigation option within the tour creation process. Which avoids the traveling, the nice, smooth traveling effect. And you can actually choose to do that. So if you have two disconnected spaces within a tour for example, you can navigate between them without any discomfort. So it's always an option. - Was that similar where you were showing that outside, going from outside, inside, I was going from an outside through the front door to get into the space? - I think in that case we were actually going, flying through the door. But, you would have the option to go to teleport from the two points, yes. - Okay, so. I think I'm hearing two advantages. I'm trying to think of this through the lens of a Matterport Service Provider of how this is different. Or, perhaps I'm thinking about getting, I'm thinking about which camera, which platform to use for either 3D, 360. So you're showing, it's very interesting is a virtual tour platform that's 3D, but created with nearly any 360 camera. So it sounds like one advantage is I get to choose my camera. I'm not tied to a specific camera. - Right. - A proprietary camera, and second, is that it sounds like I could shoot the space in far less time if I chose to than using Matterport, because I'm not required to go ever five to seven feet to have each previous scan connect to the next scan. - Right, that's the idea, yeah. - I think of shooting with Matterport 1,000 square feet, is 1,000, maybe 1,500 square feet an hour. Do you have some comparable? - So, let's say, we tend to think in terms of two, three bedroom apartment, or a three bedroom house let's say. So a three bedroom house with a 360 camera like an Insta360 One X or something like that. You know, it's half an hour, it shouldn't be more than that. You could probably do it quicker if you wanted to cut some corners, but if you're doing line of sight navigation it shouldn't be more than half and hour. - Half an hour, I'm sorry, how many square feet again? - I'm thinking at three bedroom house, so let's say three bedrooms, probably bathroom, maybe two bathrooms, hallway, kitchen, dining, sitting room. So what are we talking, 1,500, 2,000, 3,000 square feet maximum? - 1,500 to 2,500 square feet could take a half hour. Maybe for a Matterport photography maybe take an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours depending on if you've got a lot of furniture and you're trying to capture all the data behind all the furniture. Which is not a constrain that you have of how you create the 3D view of the Metareal Stage 3D tour. - Right. - Okay, cool. - I mean the other key thing is that it's very flexible, so you get to decide how much time to invest in the tour. You know if it's a tour that's on a fairly tight budget where you're pushed for time, you can do it very quickly. If you want to get more quality out of it and as you say have a larger number of navigation points you have the choice to do that too. And if the customer's willing to invest more in the production of the tour, then you have the opportunity to make it, to go further with it. - Okay, Gareth, you should us what a Metareal Stage tour looks like from the front end. You've talked about how to shoot it. Before we go into the back end is there anything else to share either about the front end, or about shooting a space? - So I think we've covered shooting a space pretty well. I mean the other thing to get across, which is I think kind of unique about the way Metareal Stage works is that we have kind of two ways of doing things. So there's the do it yourself service. Which is you sign up, you upload your photos, you use the platform to build your own tours, and then you're publishing yourself. And that's extremely cost effective. The other option you have is the full service option. So if you don't want to learn or take the time yourself to build the tours, and use the tool yourself, you can actually pay for our production team to do it. And we charge per panorama for that service. The cost depends on subscription plan you're on, it gets cheaper-- - Let's visit pricing towards the end, we'll go through the tour. It's good to know that there's two choices in terms of the back end is one, either to have Metareal create the tour and the floor plans for you, or for you to do it yourself. Can you walk us through the backend if I'm interested in, - Sure. - either ordering a tour from you to create, or doing it myself. - Yeah all right. So I'm going to hop back onto show my screen again. Okay, so here we were looking at this tour in the gallery. Actually what I'll do is I'll pop into my account. Excuse me. So here I'm actually logged in I'm on the Metareal website. I'm going to go to here Stage, which takes me to my project browser. This is where all my projects are. We actually have two kinds of account. There are individual accounts and team accounts. If you're an enterprise plan you can have a number users sharing the same project, project folder so that you can actually, in theory work on a large number of projects as a team. There's an extensive range of sort of filtering options we can add individual tags to projects. We can actually show the projects as list view. We can add filters that are persistent, that are there when you come back. So in theory you could create a tag that's team. - I might ask it a little differently. As a service provider I work on multiple clients. So, would I need an enterprise account in order to manage the logos and agents? - No, all data is project specific. So you can set whatever you want on the project level. So for one client you'd add that stuff to the project. I'll just pop that in there. So now we've got an option here, so we can do things like project assignment. And we could also just quickly, oops, didn't mean to pop into the tour. So if I set these like, just ... this. What I could do it Mike could come in here and say, I just want to see a view for Mike. So when Mike logs in, Mike would have a view where Mike only sees projects that are time too. A bunch of management tools like that to help managing large numbers of projects within there. - Okay, so let's say I'm ready to create a tour. I've gone out, I've shot 15, 25, 50, 360 degree panorama images, photo spheres. - So the next thing you do, actually what I'll so I'm going to work in a pre-existing project. But I create a new project for a start. And just so you can see what an empty project looks like. So when we create a new project we can decide what kind of project is whether it's just going to be a floor plan, whether we're just going to have a 3D model. We have a lot of customers that use the 3D reconstruction tools, just to generate in the 3D models. Which will then take into other applications. The Metareal 3D tour, indeed a Google Street tour as well. So I'm just going to create. - Can you talk a little bit about Google Street View? - Sure, my phone is waking up, Google is listening. Obviously any public space you can create a Google Street View Tour. That's something that you can do with a platform, we don't charge for it. When you publish a tour you can publish it to Google Street View, you log in with your Street View account. And we'll send the tour to Google Street View. With the free account we limit the Street View Tours to fifteen panoramas, but there's no limit on the pay plan. - So on the free plan as long, We'll hold off on dollars and I'll ask you about that when we take a look at pricing. Suffice to say with Metareal Stage you can publish it toward a Google Street View. - So, if I was going to upload from scratch, and I won't do this now, I could upload images. I can either drag and drop my images here to upload them. I can upload directly from Dropbox or Google Drive. So if you've got a team that's working with those services, you can upload directly from those. That's cloud to cloud, so it's very fast. Obviously browsing locally we've got to upload the images to the server. - Awesome, I get that. Maybe you could pick it up, now you have a tour that has X number of panoramas in it. - Sure, so here, first thing I would do is load up the panoramas. And after a bit of processing we'll see them appear here. We can actually go and check them all out. We've got a viewer, which allows us to quickly zip through each panorama, check it, we can either see it as a rectangular or as the panorama. And then, the next process is, the next thing we want to do is do three reconstruction. - Before you do that. If I did not want to do this construction myself, how would I order the tour? - Very good question. So what you'd do is you'd upload your panoramas. And you hit 'Build it For Me' ... here the green button. And, you can then choose the tour components that you want. So the virtual tour itself on a premium plan, it's $2.00 per panorama, if you want it built for you. And that includes the basic generative floor plan and the 3D model. And you can also order a high quality vector floor pan as a PDF. So, I'm just going to click here and show you what the vector floor plans look like, So this is what they look like. These are actually scalable vector PDF images. And you can order those, as well. There's a surcharge, basically it's most of the work involved in building a vector floor plan, is the same as building the tour. So there's a small surcharge for panorama. If you just want the floor plan, we can do that, too. And that's basically the same price as building the tour. - All right, we'll talk more about pricing when we get to your rate card. Also, just to point out CD and Canadian dollars. - [Gareth] All right, for sure. - So for all of us in the United States will be pleasantly surprised that everything is at a big discount versus the exchange rate for US dollars. - Hopefully not too much of a discount. - Well that CDN $2 is about USD $1.40. So, for us it's a pretty big discount. - Awesome. Yes, that's absolutely right. - If I wanted to put in a disclaimer on my floor plans, is that were I could add that? - You can do that when you get the floor plan. In fact, you could certainly, if you wanted to say we need a disclaimer, you could add that. Any production notes you want you can add here. And that'll go through to the team if we can accommodate, and we will. - Can I add a logo? - Yeah you can probably do that. The way you would have to do that is you'd say, I want to add a logo, And here, what you can do is you can attach, there's attached assets, allows you to attach anything you like, any binary file you like to the project. And that will be sent to the production team, along with the job. - Okay, so I think the important thing that I wanted to get across here is that if I'm not a do-it-yourself kind of person, I can have you do everything for us, for X number of dollars. And we'll talk about what those dollars are in a little bit more detail when we get to your rate card. - So the other thing, when you have us do the production work, we'll do the reconstruction, we'll do as much of it as you want. You could also have us do the basic production and then finesse it and publish it and so on, once you get the project back, as well. - So there's kind of three options. One is, please go Build Tour For Me, then I could choose to modify it, which would be the second option. And third is, I just completely just decide to do it myself and not incur any charges for doing that. - [Gareth] Effectively. - Okay, so let's say I want to go build this tour myself and not have Metareal do it for me. - So the process, and I'm going to zoom through and just show you a quick, so we've kind of covered the process. Is for reconstruction is that we basically build the tour by uploading the panoramas, creating rooms, assembling the rooms together in the tour, finalizing the tour UI, how it's going to be presented. And then sharing it with clients. So what I want to do now, we'll go look at, dive into the process of creating rooms, which is the 3D reconstruction process. So, with a new project what I have is just panoramas. And what I want to create is my list of rooms. In this case the tour is already done, so I have my rooms. I'm actually going to recreate one of these rooms. We'll do a fairly simple one to start with, so we can get the idea. So I'm going to select these two panoramas, and then just going to hit new room. I'm going to hold down control, and that creates a new tab with the room editor, which is where I'll do this video reconstruction. I created as a new tab, because it allows me to pop back quickly between the different areas of the application without having to reload the web page. Excuse me. So now I'm in the room editor. I'm going to have to move the little window a bit, because it's over my. And, the room editor basically has a big panorama view. On the left here we have the list of the panoramas in the room editor. We have a little tool bar. And then for each tool we have a panel on the right for the options of the tool. So the first thing I want to do is kind of decide which is my reference. And in fact, the automatic, you've made a good decision for the automatic reference, it'll be this one. And what I'm going to do-- - Sorry I'm lost. How did the panoramas for the bedroom get into the bedroom? - Okay so, I was on my project dashboard, and I selected my two panorama-- - Ah, ah, yes, yes, yes, okay. And then where had you selected the bedroom. - Then I just selected new room to create a room. - Okay. - So what I have now actually is I have a new room here with no geometry yet. - [Dan] Yes. - So it opens, it creates the editor with the two images loaded. - Ah. - What I could have done, another option would be to create, to hit new room. And then from the room editor, add images. And then I can choose my images there. Both approaches work. I think it's a little quicker to create the room with the images already loaded, so you can select them first. - [Dan] Thank you, Gareth. - It's kind of a short cut. Then I would name my room. And I'm going to call this bedroom demo, so we know which one it is. Now, one thing is very important for the 3D construction process to work is for the panoramas to be very level. Unfortunately, most of the leveling units in the prosumer and consumer cameras, they're very close to the axis of tilt. So they're not particularly precise. Usually not precise enough for the 3D reconstruction to work. So what we're going to do is, I'm going to first of all just move this little red line. This basically allows me to make sure my room is square with the 3D world grid inside the room editor. Which just helps the tools that are very optimized to do right angles, be a bit, the work flow be a bit faster. - I lost you there. - Okay, sorry. - So there's a grid that came up, and you're making sure that that red line is parallel to the grid? - So, what we have here is a couple of 360 images. What we want to get out of this is a 3D model with the 360 images located in space relative to the 3D model. So we're doing, we're building a real 3D room out of the images. And to do that, we want to make sure that the images, so there's a kind of 3D world view. And if I go here and switch on the grid, it's the same as, I can click with the G key. I can see my grid of my 3D world, superimposed on top of my 360 images. And, what I want to do is just make sure that the grid is nice, and at right angles with the room it makes-- - How can I tell that though? Are you just eyeballing that that red line is parallel? - Yeah it's I eyeball that the red line is parallel, and then I can see that my room is pretty nice and straight with the grid. Eyeballing is perfectly accurate enough for our purposes. - Okay. - So I actually, before I go any further, I'm just going to finish the kind of tour of the interface, there's this panel up here. So I go up a bunch of visual guides, and we'll find out what those are about in a minute. We have three views, we have a Panorama View which is the view I'm in. And we have a Plan View, which gives us a flat projection of the room basically onto the floor plane. And that's very useful for alignment and things, we'll see more about that in a minute. And we have a Leveling View, which is basically locks the vertical axis of the Panorama View, so I can check that the verticals are actually vertical. We're going to just, we need to draw 2 or 3 level lines to make sure that the panorama is level. So I'm just going to find things that are non-verticals in the room, and just drop a couple of lines on them. Two is normally enough for the leveling calculation to work, I'm going to add a third just to sort of verify it. We'll lose the Grid View there. And if the third doesn't do anything, then we know the other two are good. So it didn't do anything, so we know the other two are good. So now we know that our panorama is perfectly level. - Sorry, lost you there. So if there was a problem, what would have happened? - Well if these two were not giving me a good level result, then probably what would happen is when I hit the third I'd see the leveling change. Because the leveling didn't change at all, I know that we've got something that's super level. Generally speaking, you're fine with two leveling lines. So, it's really just a check. So now I've leveled my panorama. First thing I want to do is draw my floor outline. So I'm going to pop from Plan View, and quickly popped into here. And start drawing my floor outline. I'm just going to trace that around. I've got now a floor point. I'm going to position that on the corner of the room there. And I wanted to be in the plane of the wall, so I'm just inside the skirting the baseboard there. I've got some snaps here, which allow me to, I'm going to switch on the protractor, and it allows me to snap to 15 degree angles. Which makes it much faster to draw precisely around my room. So I'm now just popping in here. One thing I forgot to mention which I'll come back to in a second. And now I want to make sure, I can't see this corner back here, but I want to make sure I find it. So I'm going to switch on with the two key, or clicking over ere at the second protractor. So now I can snap to that corner, even though I can't see it. So, if I go back to my Panorama View now, we've got a, we're starting to have a 3D room wire frame super-imposed onto my panorama. And now I'm just going to lift up my ceiling to height. And now I've got a 3D model of my room, just like that. The next thing I want to do is align the second panorama with the first panorama. What's quite useful to be able to do that is if I can align it on more than just the room shape itself. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to insert using this cube tool here. Quickly insert a volume here in the place of this piece of furniture. Thinking about the actual shape, rather than the shape of the lid, the top of it. Oh, smash that up. So now, when I switch to my second panorama, which I'll do that now, what we can see, it might be a little bit confusing at first, is we've got my wire frame of my room, and my second panorama not aligned with it. What I'm going to do very quickly is go to my alignment tool, we'll use the interactive mode. And now I'm going to move my panorama to where I know it should be. And there's a variety of, there's a couple of different ways we can do this, but I'm doing it with the interactive mode. Just like that, we want to be just inside the baseboard there. And we can that we're actually getting a really good fit with the piece of furniture there as well. There's a little scale issue, which means my panorama isn't the right height. So using the same pivot point I'm actually going to just scale it a little bit. There's a tiny bit there. And, I'm going to move it again a little more, and nudge it around. So that's... Now I have panoramas, and my two panoramas are done. So basically now I can move between, smoothly move between the two panoramas in the room. That's basically it for the 3D reconstruction. What I need to do now for the purposes of making the room show up correctly on the plan, is to mark things like the windows. And you'll notice when I move in 3D, when I move into the room, if we look at the bed while I move, notice it kind of distorts strangely as blend between the two panoramas. What I need to do to make that work better is to add a volume for the bed. So I'm going to go, you can see we're just a little bit out from the floor there. I'm going to go and draw another volume. Push this up to there, let me push that in a bit. And generally we go this kind of rounded check you want to be somewhat inside. So I dropped a volume just down there, and now when I move the bed actually looks much, much nicer as I move. If I hide all the guides, we'll actually be able to see, whoops, I just want the / bubbles on there move. We can see now that it's really looking much better. So I can leave it like that. The one thing I do need to do is to create a, switch these back on, switch it ... Ah sorry, there we go. Is I need a doorway. Doorways are how we connect the different rooms together when we assemble the tour. So, in this case I could either draw a new door here, and then set what side it opens on. Make sure the depth is the right depth for the wall. And then decide whether it's opening inwards, outward, whether it's a single or double door. I can delete that and go, we've already got the corridor built. So if I go to.... Bedroom to stairs, I just need to... Just need to know which is the bedroom. Not sure if I have a door here. Okay, so I'm just going to draw a door. If the door was already created I would be able to place the door in the room to make sure that it would connect properly. I think that may be the one, so I'm just going to tighten that up. And, in this case give it a little bit of thickness, because it doesn't look like it has one. I'm going to turn it around. So I've now created a doorway in the room, so that when I connect the rooms together in the tour editor, there'll be a hole in the wall, and I'll be able to navigate through it. That's basically it for the room. If we wanted to make sure that the, this door here shows up on the floor plan, I might also add a door here, and make it a sliding door that's double and it's closed. And that will just to make sure that when I look on the floor plan, we'll see the right symbols presented on the floor plan, showing up correctly. So that's essentially it for reconstruction, obviously we can go as far as we like. I could put tables in if I wanted it. It's a question of how much time we want to invest in building the tour. Now I've got my new room, bedroom demo here. And then next stage in building the tour is to assemble the rooms together. So I've got my other rooms. If I go now to the Tour Editor, so this is basically the two editors, it's a Room Editor and the Tour Editor. I'm actually going to go to the Tour Editor. And here we can see we've got mostly the tour mostly reconstructed. But, we can see we've actually got this, backing up a little bit. So within the tour editor instead of seeing panoramas on the left panel here I have all the rooms I've constructed. And I have a plan view by default, where I can assemble the rooms. So this is where I put all the rooms together to make the tour. |
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
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| - So, I'm confused where that floor plan came from. - So in this case, well what I can do actually is this was a tour we'd already built right? - Yeah. - So, the room is already constructed. And, I'm actually, I'm going to reset the tour to blow it away. So now there's nothing, oh I got to reload the, hold on a second; going to reload my tour. So I open the Tour Editor again. I basically removed all the connections between the rooms. - Okay. - Which is actually a very good thing to do in this case, because I can show you how it all works. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to rebuild my tour for my rooms. We'll start with the kitchen, I'm going to drag it out here. So now I've created, inserted my kitchen into my tour. And if I go to the Model View, let's say we have just our kitchen. That's one I made earlier. - I see that in meters, can I have that in feet and inches? - You sure can. In the Default Settings for any tour, you can set your units either metric, or US imperial. You can also set your lens height, and it's quite important to do that, because setting the lens height allows us to triangulate all the scale and the measurements accurately. - So a lens height is literally referring to the camera on the tripod. - Yes. - I want to go where my lens is on that camera and measure from there down to the floor. - Exactly yeah. From the nadir point to center of the lens down to the-- - And, I'm going to guess that's really critical in terms of getting the measurements to work. - Getting that value right is really critical. You do have an option in the Tour Editor, in the Room Editor. If you have anything which has on the floor that has a non-size, you can actually calibrate it by measuring it in the editor. So if for any reason you don't know, you're not sure what height, a individual panorama was, you can actually go ahead and calibrate it. - So let's say I carry a yardstick with me, and I take one extra panorama. I might not use it for the tour, but I could use it to double check measurement. - Sure, or you could with a tape measure say measure the width of this piece of furniture, this chest, and then draw a line to calibrate against that size. And that we can derive the height from that. - Okay, thank you. - But yes, absolutely. It's really important to get that measurement precise, because we triangulate all the other measurements from that. So back in my plan view and my Tour Editor, I'm now going to start dragging the other rooms. And, as I drag them and drop them they snap into place, because they share a door between them. So we know in this case there's a doorway, in fact there's a door with no physical door, it's just a hole. And that allows us to automatically connect, because the room shares a door, so it knows to connect it to the other rooms. If I drag this one in, we know to connect it. And we can see that-- - How does it know that. - Because when we built the room, we named the doorway, in this case bedroom to stairs. - Ah, okay! - So that makes it a lot easier. You can manually collect them if they're not-- - No, no, no, no, I really want to good to know I need to name the door, I need to name the windows so that it's common and it snaps together, that makes sense. - As long as, even if you don't bother to name it, as long as when you build the next room, say I've just built the corridor here, the hallway, and then I build this room. If I drew the door on the corridor, I can actually go choose that door and place it. And as long as I place the same door we'll know it's the same door. Obviously if you've got a bunch of doors, it helps to name it, because you know, salon one, salon five, bedroom one, bedroom five, it gets out of hand pretty quickly. It's very good practice to name it. So here I'm going to drop the salon and it retakes and fits. I'm just going to nudge that so it's a little better position, there we go. And, here we can see now we've got, we're starting to have our room now. The second thing we want to do is to have a second floor, because we now kind of built the ground floor. Everything else is on on the second floor. And although they'll locate themselves in space, automatically based on the doorways, we want to have a user interface in our tour for the users to be able to present the two floors separately. So in that case what we'll do is, I'm going to try this out. This room is actually on the second floor. So I'm going to create, that's just block, we'll call it the first floor, because the other one's the ground floor. So we'll create that as first floor. We go back to no floor assignment, I'm actually going to create these as ground floor. This is a logical floor, another space office physical floor. And then I can quickly assign all these other rooms to the ground floor. And we separate the idea of sort of spatial floor from logical floor because buildings often have variety of different heights and placings and we want to be able to choose What the logical grouping of the rooms is in the finals. And then for the first one now I've got my stairs. I'm going to add my bedroom. Oops, it looks like come back to that one. bedroom two first. That will connect. Yeah, so that one's connected. We've got a little washroom upstairs and downstairs. Come back to that. Bathrooms upstairs. There we go. That's connecting in there. Upstairs so long. It's there. And we go back to ground floor. We've got the washroom there, and bedroom. So this is the one we made and I probably didn't use the right name for that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put that in here. Yeah, there we go. And I need to move that to the first floor because to that and add it to first floor. And so the other thing is in this model, we'll see that the sample is actually a double height room. It's a two floor room. So if we go back to this view, the ground floor, I'm going to take sell on, I'm going to say I want it to show up on first floor as well. So now I've got my first floor plan with my two rooms. And oh, my ground floor plan. And if we go look at our Model View, we'll see, apart from my room that we just made, which hasn't been, we haven't generated the textures for that one yet. So I'm just going to click there's a little flashing icon up here. And now we'll bake the textures for the room for the model. Long. And there we go. So that's the room we just made. So now we got a 3D model built; we have our Plan View build. And that's essentially that process. That's where that That plan comes from. So hopefully a little bit long winded. I hope that answers that question. The next thing we want to do is we want to make sure that the navigation is elegant for the customer, and for the end user. So what we can do is we'll go to the third view in the Tour Editor, which is the preview. And we can actually this actually, this shows us the tour as if it was from the end user view and allows us to control all the presentation options. So you can see we start to have the UI for the customer view. And we can do a bunch of things. For example, we can set the tour starting point in this case, I'm going to set it as here. So now I've created a starting point when I open the tour when the customer starts to tour, this is where they're going to go to appear. We've also got a number of other options. One of them is that we can add labels to objects in the tour. So in this case, say for these labels, basically the text dialog here, you can put any kind of rich text you wanted here. So it can be anything, any web font that's accessible. You can use, you can set font sizes, you can put images in there, anything like that can be put in there. And you can make it into a link if you want. You can also, if you don't want to use any text, but you just want to have an icon you can upload an icon either as a PNG or an SVG file and place it there and use that so you can add any kind of call out button and link it to anything you want within a video. [Dan] Can I add video? Not using the label tool, however, using the SDK, you could easily create an overlay div with a YouTube video or something in it, but you'd need to use the SDK to do that. but that's something that we get requested quite a lot. So it's probably on the way somewhere. The other thing that's interesting here is that we can add so we can set the title thing and we can set the location. I should probably put an accent on the back here. Yeah. You can also set the logo image. Let's do that quickly. Now logos in here so we can just go out grab our logo and that uploads and that appears up here. And we can also choose different or thumbnail I won't do that for now. We can also set a nadir patch which will appear here I actually haven't set the nadir size. Ordinarily, when starting a tour I would set the nadir size to the actual size of my nadir we didn't do that. So we've got a bit of a gap between my nadir and my patch but i think you get the idea. - Can I do it after the factor? No, no, when I began my tour I needed to size my logo first. - You can you can do it after the fact but actually you have to go and do it per room which is a little tedious. - If I had set it correctly to begin with, then I can say, Apply All. - Yeah, I can apply it to I can actually go change it here. So if I say, five, and I can apply it to all the panoramas in the room, but not all the panoramas in the tour, which is a little now little bit laborious, so it's a good idea to remember to set it at the beginning. So that's those options for those logos. The other thing we can do is control the field of view limits. So we don't necessarily want our viewers to be able to zoom out that far. So we can say, Well what's reasonable for our tour? And also maybe we don't want to zoom in too far. So we can say well, - Can you apply that to all panoramas or do I need per panorama? - The settings were applying here in the Tour Editor are global to the tour so they affect everything. So they apply globally. Um, - Is there some point where things are saving automatically so I don't lose anything if my power went off in - Everything is saved continuously. And in fact, every room has a continuous undo stack. So you can always even if you've done two weeks ago, you can always undo and go back. It's everything saved in a kind of complete history, very much like Google Docs, for example. So we can save continuously. There's no way to lose it a thing. You never need to save - So let's assume I'm done with the tour. And I'd like to publish it to Google Street View. - Okay, - I recognize this as a house and we wouldn't normally publish that to Google. But if this was a commercial space, and we were publishing it to Google, how would I do that? - Right? So if we go to Plan View, you'll notice we have Have an extra icon here. It's a map icon. If I switch this Plan View on it enables a Google Street View overlay and we can see our tour real scale real world scale over the Street View map. What I can do now is I can set the address I don't have the exact address off of my head but so what I'll do is I'll do Orford history in the right town, so let's say and let's try. Okay, so something like here, and there's a building here. So let's say that's our building. We going to set the orientation and the size correctly. Orientation and position correctly. The scale is synced with Google. So now I've got my location. I can actually select a Google My Business address. So I set the place name, and I set the address and select and it'll try and locate. Maybe I can click here. Yeah, I haven't actually got a real address here. But if I had a real address, ill be able to select it using select place, and it will show the Google My Business address, and then it will get associated with that business. Now when I go back to so now, my world location is set in the Google world. And extremely well. If I go back to my dashboard. And just as if I was publishing for the web. Here, by default, we publish for the web, I can also publish for Google Street View. And I'm going to go and click on that. If I hit publish, I'm going to have to stop after this. Now, it's just going to want a Google Street View ID login. So now I can log in with a Google Street View ID. I'm not going to do that because... - That's fine. I think we're all we're good there. So and then if I wanted to publish the tour, so that I could use this tour publicly, - So let's just I'll just pop back here, I'm going to make sure we're in a state where we can publish. so the last thing to do is to choose what UI elements I want. There's one thing I haven't covered quickly is for open a tour the Room Chooser here and we generate a location in the Room Chooser for each room automatically. However, if I want to have any specific features that I want to add in the Room Chooser, say we'd like particularly like this TV, I can go in here and create a new location. And I can I can go ahead and ... - The Highlight Reel we was automatically generated based on each room that was built. - Right - And now I could either delete. - Yeah, - We call it thumbnails. Or I could edit thumbnail or I can change the view within a thumbnail. - Yep. thumbnails, we call it a Room Chooser. But yes, so they're just thumbnails. These ones are automatically generated. That's what you get by default, but you can add, add an add and remove - How to change the view on one of those thumbnails. - You have to just add a new one. So let's say If I go to the washroom, say, this is the washroom, that's the one for that one. I could go in and choose a different thumbnail view and add that there and delete that one. I'm after the same thing. That's pretty much covered everything there, So then we can pop back to our Project Dashboard. And you'll see this list at the top here that says published notion. So there's a bunch of versions I've already published. In this case, I'm going to publish a new version, we want to publish it to the web. So hit Publish. And now what's happening is we're generating we're taking all those 3d models and assets and things that when the presentation settings we've done, and we're creating a optimized version that's kind of stripped down and optimized for viewing on the web. - And it may other publishing options? - While the other publishing options are basically in terms of targets. - Well, I saw you had some other options under publish. So I'm curious what else I can publish - So well these are coming soon. So right now that they're ghosted, but they're there. - Let's call it up just for a second so we could see what's coming. So the Android player Clara, Sketchfab, Unity, Unreal, Value Workshop, Vibe Workshop. - So that's a Valve Workshop is the youth personal user space for the Valve Steam platform. There's Unity and Unreal are the two game engines. Sketchfab is a popular 3D hosting platform. Clara is a web based 3D application. In fact, Unreal Unity, Sketchfab. And Clara already pretty much supported in the sense that they go here. And we have export options. So in addition to publishing where I create a web accessible version, or I published it To this other platform, I can actually go to various different files as well. So in this case, we can export the floor plan as a DXF vector file, which can go to AutoCAD, I can create an FBX or an OBJ files, which are 3D model files. I can export my panoramas as a zip file with all the panoramas in and these two are actually administration tools. So as a as a because it's my account, I can package up a project for support and send it support, or I can transfer a project between users. - Okay, is there an option for me to select 2D photos within the panoramas? - No, there isn't. At the moment the reason being, we kind of see that as well. You can kind of do that on screen, right? So it's kind of take a snapshot. - So I would do that ... So if I wanted to the photos, I would open the player of the panorama do a screen capture? - Yeah, yeah. - But I don't get any anything bigger if I wanted a bigger file. But not sufficient if I needed a traditional 2D photo So, would with the with that screen capture be sufficient for an MLS listing? - It's a good question. - Or most of your photographers actually shooting 2D with a traditional DSLR camera. I asked because a lot of our Matterport Service Providers are using Matterport actually to create 2D photos as well as the 3D model. - Understood I mean, certainly if you're shooting with a DSLR you've already got that imagery at the high quality anyway, right? If you're shooting with something like an Insta360 One X You know a Ricoh Theta Z1 Camera Screencap is probably good enough this you probably as good as you're going to get anyway. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting so I mean, we haven't had anyone requesting that feature yet. But and, you know, our working assumption for the moment is, in most cases, given the kind of cameras people are using, they can they can probably already do that. - Okay, maybe when we get to a little bit more questions and answers I know we have at least one We Get Around Network for member that's waiting to ask a question maybe hold asked that question. If I don't ask. But, who asked that question? Because it seems like that might be a good feature is to be able to export 2D photos with some depth of quality. So was there any other piece on the back-end that you wanted to demo? - Um, the only other thing I think it's worth Looking at so we looked at Google Street View we looked at we just touched on exporting and to export you do need a Metareal Premium Plan so these are not available on the free plan. The other thing I would love to show you is and, I guess I do need to share my screen again I've lost you Where are you? Not exit minimize, there we go. I was trying to find the button. - Incidentally we are live if you have a question simply go to WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com or WGANForum.com You'll see in the bottom right corner a player attack there's a button that says, Ask a Question Live. So we'll look to see if we have some audience members that would like to do that. Back to you Garth. - So yeah, so what I was going to do, so I lost my thread for a second. I'm in the the main 'hamburger' menu here, we've got access to tutorials, there's a reference manual. There's also a direct link to our recent news and announcements. We've also got a section here integration. So I'm going to actually pop into there. Now there's two things, which might be interesting to folks. One is that we have a plugin for Revit, which you can download. And I'm not super familiar with the Revit workflow, but I can quickly pop up in Revit. And - So I think this is probably relevant if a Service Provider has a client that is an architect, and they may ask the question to say, Hey, I work in Autodesk Revit. Can you give me the file as a .RVT Is that what you're about to show us? - So basically, yeah, essentially, the idea is that, um, the problem we're trying to solve here is that what we find is that founders that typically There are two ways to do high quality visualizations of Revit architectural designs. Oh, I'm going to need to sign in. - That's okay. Well, why don't you take us off of this and we'll cut we'll come at it here. I'll take this off screen share. So had you logged in successfully? Is there just simply a plugin that either goes into Metareal Stage or Is it a plugin that's going into Revit? - It's a plugin in Revit. I'm going to scratch that in a minute. It's a plugin Revit. And basically, what it allows you to do is to take a Revit plan, export it to a Metareal Stage tour. Now, what's really interesting there is that, first of all, Metareal Stage tours are super lightweight, super portable, they work in VR. They work on mobile, it works on desktop. It's very sort of lightweight web based tour. But the other thing that's super interesting is that because we work with with panoramas, you can render panoramas and the way our plugin works is we render the panoramas at super high quality in Revit. So you get that very high quality photographic feel, as well as having a 3D navigating virtual tour at the end of the day. And this is something that typically is quite expensive and time consuming for architects to achieve. They either tend to work with just with images or video. Or if they've got the budget, they'll do something interactive. But that means going to a game engine and significant investment. And what we think our plugin offers is a kind of nice midway between the two, you get the high quality visuals, with the interactivity of the more expensive kind of tour. - You have one that you could demo? um, off the top of my head. - While you're looking, I'm going to speak because I think what you've just showed us is really a super powerful solution. So I had it backwards. If you're a service provider, and your client is an architect, a question that the architect might ask this and say, Hey, that house is not yet built, but I already have it in my Autodesk Revit. Could you take my Revit file? and somehow magically bring it into your Metareal Stage 3D virtual tour platform so that anyone could look at my Revit file on a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop or in virtual reality. And I think that's exactly what Gareth is showing is possible with the with the Metareal Stage 3D platform is that this is really crazy exciting, magical way. I mean this is like a whole business opportunity in itself is to be able to talk to architects and say, "Hey, your places not yet built but we have a way to easily and seamlessly convert it to ..." a whatever you want to call it I'm we're obviously this is the Metareal Stage but it might be the We Get Around tour - nevermind that it's powered by Metareal - and I just find that crazy exciting. I mean, that I'm going to guess there's no charge on from Metareal Stage to import that model into your platform. It's just another digital assets that correct? - Right. It's I mean, once you as long as you're in a pipeline you have access to - Awesome. So don't tell anybody, there's no charge for you. But just because it's free to a service provider, doesn't mean you could charge a lot of money for that, because that's like this, like, missing link of how does an architect take a very big, big, big, big, big, big file and let anyone see it smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop, because the challenge is that Revit file can only be used can only be viewed in a really fast computer that can handle a lot of big data. And so it's not in a portable way. So and typically an architect may even be in another state or another country. And so the file is not usable, viewable or showable. And so the architects probably printing it out and sending a PDF of a flat file, and it's lost all the value that's actually in the Revit file to be communicated to a client. I'm thinking as an end customer on that Revit. It sounds like, literally the architect who has that that rich file in Revit. Through a service provider could now enable, let's just call me as an average person that wants to see what the vision of the architect is I put on the VR, and now I am immersed in a space that doesn't yet exist if I summarize that, okay, Okay. So do you Do you have one that we can see? - So the difficulty is we have some customers working on projects, but then none of them are public yet. - Okay. So fair enough. What we would ask is when you do have a client that is willing to share their Revit file within the Metareal Stage, 3D virtual tour platform is please start a new discussion in the We Get Around Network Forum , that that tour can be embedded in our Forum. And that would be super-cool to actually be able to see a model, I presume, would probably be an icon in that model. So if I opened it on my smartphone, that it would have a little icon for VR device and I could literally put on whatever VR device I use, and now immediately be immersed in a space that doesn't exist. - That's right. And if you if you view it on a Google Cardboard phone with a cardboard it'll work if you open it The Oculus Quest browser, you'll get a better experience and it'll work there as well. Yeah, um, the other thing, which is the we have a very good integration with Revit and native plugin. And we also have some customers who are working in design visualization. So they're using other design packages. They're creating their own 3D files. And they're incorporating them. So they're actually there's a pipeline to do that. - Is that in your SDK? I'm not quite sure I understand is that mean? Here we've been talking about Revit but somebody might be working in DWG and they can bring that DWG file into - They need to create the right file. So they need to create I think it's an FBX file. They need to have the panorama data every basically everything we export from Revit. They need to be able to create that zip file with all the pieces and you can import it as a package and it'll create Random at a real tour. - Okay, great. Garreth, I'd love to get you back on the show when you're ready to show and tell specifically around Revit and these other file formats that loves it. - -Yeah, yeah. - So moving on from Revit. The other thing I would love to quickly show you and I'm going to pop on the share my screen, again, is the Metareal Stage Player SDK. So we have recently launched our SDK. And essentially, this allows anyone with a bit of web JavaScript development skills, to instance, our viewer as a custom object in their page. And we've got some examples here, I'm going to quickly go into so here's a page a player created using the SDK. Basically, fairly similar to creating it using a using the embed code. Which I think I didn't mention them will pop back to that in a second. We can also create multiple players, we can control the player from outside from the web page. So in this case, I've got I'm adding objects, I'm actually these are objects are being added by the SDK, this limb logos, and I'm controlling the player navigation from the web page and can actually see it. - So that might be an embed of a video? - Could be an embedded video, it could be navigating through the tour controlling up from the page. We've got an example of a Data Explorer here which start the tour. We're now showing us all the elements and the structures inside the tour. So if I move around, okay, I think I have to refresh it. - Tell you what, let's do this. Because I think there's a for the average service provider. This is like an advanced course in these features. So I want to say it's good to know that Metareal has an SDK, it's good to know that there's plugin related to Revit. Let's do an entire show that mash up those two topics while we've been talking to a viewer is sent me a message to say he has a client that is an architect that would be delighted to share his Revit model. So I'm going to close it after the show, I'll connect you with the We Get Around Network Forum Member that sent me a message to say he's super-excited about that feature. Would love to see an internet and demo and we'd be happy to make the model public so that we all could actually see it on WGAN-TV Live at 5. I meant to take you off of screenshare there. - But the one thing I wanted to show you one more thing we said, okay, forgot to mention this. All right, I'll put the screenshot back on. And it's ... so we talked about publishing and we created a new publishing link. Now often it happens that your build your tour, and you get it published and it's integrated into a listing somewhere or into somebody's web page or something. And then you need to make a change. And so we have a feature for that is you can refresh, you can republish it or to the same length using this little refresh button here. So any downstream integrations stay, you don't have to reprogram everything. Also, maybe you've got a customer and they're, not paying or there's a problem or for some reason, copyright issue, you've got to take the tour offline, we have the ability to hide the tour without click on it without breaking the link. So you can hide it and you can republish it at any time. And the one other thing here is embed code. So we have a little embed code that you can grab. So really easy. Page embedding is done that. So that's it for all the future stuff, I think. - Awesome. ... I'd like to move into pricing. But before I do, I just, we didn't really get to put a bow in the Do It Yourself versus having Metareal build it out. I think it's great to see a demo. I think, for someone like me, I thought, Well, that was great to see that demo, but that seemed like a lot. For me personally, I'm geeky, but that's a little bit too much for me. So I think I just want to stress what I heard that I don't need to understand or know any of that. All I need to know is, Create Tour For Me . Create the tour. Create the floor plans and it's done. And, if I want to learn how to do that it's available it'll save me some some dollars in terms of pain to have it done. Or if I want to be able to just tweak something I might want to learn it enough just to say, Oh, I'm going to guess ...you don't really ... I'm not sure what you called it tags, labels. So I'm guessing you don't on your post production you're not adding the labels. So I need to know enough at least that so I can do the labels probably makes way more sense for me to do the labels, but nice that the tours constructed for me the floor plans exist for me. So, two very distinct solutions. One, you'll do it for us Metareal will do it for us, or Do It Yourself . And maybe a hybrid if I want to modify what - I think you know, the 3D construction is obviously the heavy lifting part there. And if you know, don't want to do that. But you still want to do some of the presentation options or make those changes even, you change your business logo, few months later, you can go ahead and get in and do that quite easily using tutorials. - Okay, that said, how many houses do I need to do myself to feel like I'm as adept as you are in terms of moving through that tour to create it. - As adept as me? I'm, not the most adept. We have our production guys way faster than I am. But, um, we, I think, generally, it's probably, a week or two to learn it. We have tutorials that take you through every step of the way, getting started doing more complex things, like to hide rooms and that kind of thing. So it's really not that complicated to learn it all. Some people find it more difficult than others. We're very happy when somebody wants to learn how to do it once a bit of a hand, we're very happy to hop on a call and take them through some of the sticky spots with their content. So we're very open to doing that. There's a Chat box in the tool. There's usually somebody on Chat and you can just get an answer straight away. We're and it's to become professional. It's just a question you get faster as time goes on. So I would say once you've done four or five houses I don't know we looked at John Kristof's work just now and he's probably done. he's probably, I don't know, 20 or 30 tours there. And he's definitely one of the guru artists Metareal. You know, he does all his own work. So I think it's a it's from me a couple of weeks to get to understand The tool set and how it works and probably over a period of five, six, maybe 10 tours you become proficient and up to speed. - Okay. And for those WGAN-TV viewers watching this who are into that type of thing and master it, are you ever looking for new artists to work? - Sure, we actually were hoping at the moment we have our production team is all a contract team. But what we would love to do as a kind of longer term business development initiative is have a Certified Artist Program. And so that's that will be folks who've got to a certain level of proficiency. And we'll be in due course putting up a page with a directory of Certified Artists so that people will be able to find service providers in their region. - Okay, so if I press that button - Build Tour for Me How long does it take? - It depends. In general, we aim to be within about 48 hours. If there are any kind of custom instructions, or it's the first time we've worked with you, and you have some special requirements, it can take longer. But if it's a vanilla tour, or floorplan high quality floor plan, normally it's about 48 hours. - And do I need to do a little bit of work beforehand in terms of naming those panoramas or somehow magically, you figure out what everything is, - um, what will happen is when the tour is submitted, it'll go through, first of all, it gets reviewed, and we leave it if it's accepted, it means we've checked it, and we've decided that the job can be done. If the job can't be done, we'll bounce it back. And there may be questions we may say, and we'll probably get in touch with either chat or email, depending on how we initially know connected. And we may say, Oh, well, it looks like there's a panorama missing at the bottom of the stairs, so the navigation isn't going to work. Or maybe, sometimes we get, tours where all the doors are closed. So we can't, if you haven't been on site, you can't work out how to connect the rooms together. So, we might ask for a diagram to say, you know, what the connectivity is that kind of thing. - Ah, so there was an opportunity to put I had asked about putting in a logo, so I would I might actually do is attach a little sketch and I might be able to help speed-up the process or be able to say, Panorama 1: kitchen Panorama 2: pantry so I could literally give some schema to help the artist maybe goose the process and get it back less than 48 hours because I've helped - Guys are pretty good. And they're very used to deciphering stuff from the imagery so that that's pretty good. Obviously, it helps a lot if there's line of sight between the panoramas If there isn't, but it's only one or two rooms, then it's pretty easy to guess and to do it anyway, that one usually slow things up. But if it's a whole apartment building, I've had I've had back in the day, I've had jobs where we had to look out the windows of the rooms to work out which rooms are adjacent, put it together. - So that's the puzzle. three dimensional puzzle. Okay, but you know, if it's a typical house or condo or I don't need that label the panoramas I just upload it and it'll get done. |
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| - Yeah, you're good to go. - How about showing us your rate card? And let me ask some questions there. In fact, even before you take, if you don't mind, Just one other question before you go. Go to your rate card. So who owns the digital assets? - Oh, Yes, of course. So if you our unit is on the side, you can pull it up and check it out. Um, the way it works is you own everything that you put on our site, we it's all yours, we don't do anything with that, what we do reserve is right to publish, because we have to do that in order to host the tours. And the only other thing we do is, we also reserve the right to extract some anonymous statistical data from the usage of the platform and that kind of thing, which is what we use to optimize things to improve the service. - Who owns copyright? - We talked about logo, so there's no Metareal logo on it. So on my logo, I can put my logo or my clients logo. If I embed it, I won't even see the the Metareal within the URL. - Yeah, that's right. It's just just the the URL and obviously, if you're accessing it from a page that's hidden to - Off-line hosting. Ah, very good question. We're not, that's definitely on the roadmap, we get asked about it all the time. We don't, we're not able to do that yet. There are kind of two cases where people, either they want to host it in the cloud, but on their own service. So that's one thing we're looking at. The other thing is they will literally want to export a file of some kind and, and host it as a standalone thing. And that's another thing we're looking at. there's also folks that just want from a security perspective, to retain their panorama assets. And as a show, we can already ingest panoramas from Google and other file sharing services. What so the way we're going to approach these things is probably, we can probably quite easily enable an option in the not too distant future, to point at your assets and never actually put them onto our service. So you if you've got a Dropbox store or a file share box or something like that, you can point your material account to that Dropbox. And in that way, use less storage. So maybe you know not have to pay, say a Ppremium account, you can stick with a base account and use your own storage. Or, although we haven't worked out all the details around the business side of that yet, the other thing would be that we would enable a version of our player that you can host on your own web server. And then as long as you have an active account, your player can you can export from Stage the application to Metareal the player that you're hosting on your server. And then the final direction is this final idea is being asked to export something that can run standalone on its own, that's a longer more complicated problem for us and their own sort of Business and technology implications that we haven't thought through yet. But definitely something that comes up a lot. So it's something we're looking at actively looking at. - Today is Wednesday, March 25, 2020. So can I get some by whens? - Um, I would say, off the top of my head, probably, by the Summer, we would have one or more of those solutions up and running. - Awesome. Summer of 2020. Yes. Okay. And how about password protection? does that fit into this at all? - For tours? That's something that a few people asked and that's kind of we bundled that up with the user gallery thing. That's work that probably happened before and I do need to check with the team on this, but it could happen before the self-hosting. So let's have a complicated problem to solve probably. The question is exactly how secure again, it's another technical thing which we need to work through, but it's definitely on the on the roadmap. - Just saying if you can kind of, check the box that photographers own the digital assets, yes. own the copyright. Yes. have their own logo on it. Yes. No button that says Terms of Service and points too Metareal Stage. And I saw no Terms of Service button on there. Not an issue. The only thing I'm missing there I think is off-line hosting in different flavors and password protection. If hosted I suspect you got a magic formula there. For a number of our viewers, okay. - That's good to know. That's pretty good to know. I mean, we were working on those things, they're all issues that come up quite frequently. Self hosting being the big one, I think that that's that's definitely a deal breaker for a significant number of people. And we will address that. For us - as a completely kind of cloud based infrastructure. It's there several technical hurdles to get that I tourists are not static things their stream dynamically as you move around. And so there's quite a lot of kind of code going on to as the tour is being navigated and we have to find a way to kind of extract that and make it able to be standalone. Okay, - I highly encourage you to post in the WGAN Forum and engage with the Community with different flavors that they might want, what's the priority? recognize that you got to a SaaS business monthly recurring revenue, got to figure out how to address the money issue if you're going to let people hosted self host. But you might even ask some questions along those lines. And you might actually get some feedback that people are willing to pay a lot of money in order not to have it hosted in order to self-host or the security piece in their different flavors is you discuss how about we move into your rate card and we also have a special offer for We Get Around Network Forum Members. Can you share your screen on raid card take us through pricing? - Yeah, that's a great segue through to that. Okay. So, just over here, and I know we have at least one viewer has been very patient in our green room when To begin with pricing, I'll invite our guests to join us on here to ask you some questions too. - Okay, so back on my real site so this is a pricing page. So there are basically sort of four plans. - Forgive me, Gareth. I just have to point out CDN ... Canadian dollars. Yeah. I just want to do a quick translation. I asked Siri just before the show. CDN $39 per month is about USD $27.50. CDN $9.95 per month is about USD $7. and then I see some costs that you'll explain for per pano charges. CDN $4 is about USD $2.82 is about USD $2.82. CDN $3 is about USD $2. CDN $2 is about USD $1.39. That's as of Wednesday, March 25, 2020, according to Siri. - Thank you for deciphering all that. - Take us through your pricing. - Sure. Um, so it's, like you say it's a SaaS subscription plan, essentially what you're paying for is access to the tools and storage. So our hosted storage, and then obviously support and a certain amount of training and so on with that. So the creative plan is the kind of free plan and that's the idea is that you can try it out. You can use it as much as you want. You can actually do some stuff with it. And really get some value. But it's a it's limited in terms of storage. So you get 1 GB of storage which, rather than kind of have a hard limit on number of tours, or a number of projects or whatever, basically, if you've got small projects that you're doing, you can fit quite a lot in there. I mean, one gig of storage, you know, if you're using an Insta360 One X ... and if when you get storage, you can probably fit, you know, 20 small tourism to that, you know, into that plan. What, then then we have a professional plan, which starts at CDN $9.95 a month, that basically gives you more storage, access to the same tools and we unlock a couple of things. You can now export your floor plans as export vector files. You can also publish unlimited number of panoramas to Google Street View and the free plan is limited to the 15 panoramas and you can start to use custom logos. One thing I want to reiterate and I think we covered it before is that with the creative plan, there is a Metareal watermark So if you're on the free plan, you carrying our branding around with you, once you starting to pay, we feel that, it's a professional tool you shouldn't be, have to carry our branding around. And so you get to get through that. And then the sort of main plan which is premium, you've got significantly more storage 50 gigs, that's CDN $39 a month. And that gets you basically, priority response. And the other key thing with all of this is that you, you're able to so these are the fees for the DIY service. The full service is charge per pano. And so what happens is, on the different plans, the pricing per panorama for the full service gets cheaper. So if you're doing small amount of work, the creative plan works out very affordable. If you're doing lots more work, at certain point, it becomes much more cost effective to go onto a higher subscription plan and then pay the lower rates for the full service options. That is whether it's having the tour built or getting high quality panoramic, high quality floor plans generated. And within that, the response time for the support basically gets better so we prioritize the people on the the higher plans when we're offering training and support. And then we also have an enterprise plan. We don't talk about a sort of particular pricing with that it's typically in negotiation with larger partners, but when we have partners that are producing hundreds of tours a month, We negotiate, typically, we don't worry so much about the subscription plan, and we everything's around the number of panoramas being put through the system. And so we work the pricing out based on, we work with the customer to generate a set of forecasts for volume, and then we set the pricing based on the volume forecast. Because obviously there are efficiencies in terms of larger volume when we're working with a customer and they have specific requirements. Once they're set up and running, we can produce those tours very efficiently. Whereas it's it's less efficient with each individual requests that tend to be more customer requests per tour. When there's a large volume of tours, everything gets very standardized. We put together a an operating procedure document and we're able to produce that that stuff very quickly. In that context. We have the ability to, if need be reduced the time taken to do to turn around tours down to eight hours, if necessary. The key things that are different about the kind of account, as I mentioned earlier, it's a team account. So you get a bunch of team management tools you can add, remove team members from the account. You can have multiple users sharing the same project browser project database. And there's no limits on the number of tours or number of users you can have. So that's kind of what happens there. - Terrific. I'll talk about the the Special Offer for We Get Around Network Forum Members is that Gareth and his team at Metareal, have been gracious enough to extend two special offers to We Get Around Network Forum Members. The first offer is sign up for the free account and then private message me for the promo code for Metareal. So first sign up for a free account then Private Message me with your Member name for Metareal and I will Private Message you back a promo code that you can then go back to Metareal with either through chat or email and say, "Hey, here's my code please upgrade me "to the Metareal Premium Plan." And then for a month, you get the Premium plan totally free. So you get to experience the full deep, rich, Metareal Stage platform, totally free for that first month with all the features and then second offer that Metareal has been gracious enough to extend to We Get Around Network Forum Members if you're among the first 50 WGAN Forum Members that are Private Messaged me for what we just said. Then you'll also receive five free tours and floor plans created for you. - And I'll just add to that these are the high quality floor plans that comes back to PDF. - And that's offer is for up to 25 panoramas within the tour. Because I know we have some Members that would go - "Oh my gosh! That is awesome. I have a 20,000 square foot house and I'm going to go shoot every room and get that for free." So, not quite the offer so it's for the first 50 that Private Messaged me in the WGAN Forum ... Whom have already set up a Metrareal account ... that you'll get your first five Metareal tours and floor plans at no charge as well. - So Gary, thanks for extending that offer to We Get Around Network Forum Members I should say because we reviewed on YouTube, Vimeo and a lot of different places. So if you're not yet a We Get Around Network Forum Member, come to WGANForum.com ... And in the top right corner, you'll see a place to set up a free account. And when you set up a free We Get Around Network Forum account, you get 50 plus membership benefits totally free, including the offer that I just described for the first 50 that Private Message me so if you have no idea what Private Messaging is, come to the We Get Around Network Forum, join and then you'll see you'll be able to send me a message within the forum. It's good that I describe that okay, Gareth. - Perfect. - And we have a Member that's been so patient. Let me see if I can bring them into the studio to ask questions with you. This is let's see. And almost there. And let me unmute. And hey, Ahmed, can you hear us okay? Ahmed, can you hear us okay? So while we wait to see if he actually pipes in he has asked me some some questions by chat how to activate the WGAN promo code. So earlier today he actually requested the promo code private messaged me. And so what's the best way for him now that he has a Metareal Stage account set up ... How does he activate his promo code? - So all you got to do is when he's logged in, he can click on the chat box, open up the chat and give us his WGAN Member name and the promo code and off we go. - Great. Is it possible to embed the tour in any iOS or Android apps for the real estate purposes. - Interesting question. If I imagine if it's an app that's using one of the iOS or Android web page, things I think a lot of them do. And my guess is that you'd be able to use the SDK to embed a tutorial, you'd need to be connected online to do it. We're not, we don't have a way to do it. As we we actually talked about this a little while ago, the idea of exporting a tour as a standalone thing to bundle into the application itself. And we can't do that at the moment. But if your app is connected online app, then you will be able to open the tour up from within the app, meaning use the iframe, yes, essentially, the web. The web page within the app. Yeah. - Okay, yes. So what is the delivery time for the tour? I think we heard up to 48 hours typically. And then a fourth question, is it required to name the panorama or number it to make it easy for production team to build tour. - No. What does help however, is if you order the panoramas by room. That's, that's a big help. So if they're all in a fairly logical order in terms of shooting order, that's great. So shooting order works are good. If you kind of run around the house randomly shooting panoramas from different places, it'll get really tricky. - I would do that. I would, I'm probably the only one that would do that. I'm going to make it super, super crazy. Let me see if they can figure out this puzzle. I'll have to send it to Gareth who looks outside of windows to figure that out. So Shoot, shoot in an orderly pan. If you're if you're consistent. If you maybe you go left through the house or you go right through the house. It'll just make it a whole lot easier. And let's see, I think Ahmed has asked one more question just to see So we got here. Let's see. He actually is put put this in the chat windows a little bit harder for me to see here using arrows in the auto-play tour. oh eight right sorry, his microphones not working. He's asking about arrows in the auto-play tour. So I'm in a panorama, I guess I could see that there was a round circle on the floor indicating that that was the place to step next or go in that direction, do I have the option of adding arrows? - None of the moment however, we are presently working on a extending the SDK and a set of functions to allow you to skin the different elements in in the player. So so that could well be part of that, that that development so You got to change the icons and things like that. - Okay, so, thank you, Ahmed. That's Ahmed Attia, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, from Egypt is a We Get Around Network Forum Member asking some questions. I saw the post earlier today in the forum and sent a note in order to get the promo code. Gareth, is there any question? I haven't asked you that I should ask you. - I think we've pretty much covered everything ... - I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about COVID-19. The Coronavirus. Again, today is Wednesday, March 25, 2020. What have what have your what's your subscribers; members? what are they reporting back to you? I mean, it there is a lot, region to region. Obviously there are certain places in Europe that are on total lockdown now and they're not even allowed out of their houses and so in businesses basically come to a standstill for those folks. Here in Canada, things are a little bit a little more relaxed in that, from what we understand photographers is still able to work. What we are seeing, and I think so I mean, short term, it looks like there's a kind of business is really kind of constrained. What we're seeing longer term I think is people are quite optimistic about the long term demand for virtual tours generally. And we're having some folks came saying that there's going to be quite a significant increase in the demand for virtual tours in general. So I think slightly longer term if we can get over the immediate horizon of that the next couple of weeks. Things look really good for the industry. It's just right now business is pretty at a standstill and we're all we're all kind of hoping, waiting to see what's what's going to happen next. - We did a special Town Hall on this WGAN-TV Town Hall on Monday and what I think what Members were reporting was anywhere from a flurry of requests from new clients before a stay in place order to I've already not leaving the house, either because I'm under an order or I just want to do that. I know in my case, my mom lives at a senior living place about 10 minutes from my wife and I and so we we are actually in whether or not we have an order in Atlanta and now we actually do have some orders about shelter in place. But we've already been doing that in anticipation in the event that there's an emergency with my Mom, we want to make sure that we're not infecting her or her community, and, frankly, we're not even allowed to go over to visit as it is. I can say we've been getting a flurry of requests. And again, I'm not out shooting I've just been sending those requests out to other members of the We Get Around Network Community that might be continuing to shoot. That said, we did get a an urgent appeal, a very passionate appeal from one of our Members in the United Kingdom, who said, "Stay in place! We're about three weeks ahead of the United States. And from what we can see in the UK, you don't want to infect anyone!" His wife is already infected. He was out shooting tours, and he gave the coronavirus to his wife because he was out trying to sneak in as many tours as he could do with it. The last time his request kept coming in. And so his wife has the the coronavirus and he has asthma. So he's in an at-risk category as well. So his advice to our Community is whether you're under a shelter in place, order or not, do not go out and scan. So that that's his advice. Frankly, we've been adhering to that even before we heard that. I think none of us like to be opportunistic and take advantage of a bad situation. I think that said, I think if there's some good in our industry to come from something really bad, is it's obvious that there are a lot of people who are learning about 3D virtual tours - 360 virtual tours - and this has been their motivation; to figure out how to learn about it and implement it. And I think that's probably the consensus of our Community is once we all are able to again, the demand for our service, the demand for our services will be that much higher. - Yeah, so no, I think that's I mean it applies across all the different, whether it's a real estate listing or a tourist attraction or whatever. I mean, we've got some customers who are working with museums and galleries that are shut down. And right now, they're looking for ways to continue to have a public presence to have an offering for the public eye cultural offering for the public. And so we've got some some projects where they're actually using the virtual tour that become the sort of the main vehicle for communicating with the public at the moment. So I think there's Yeah, the long term things, things look, quite good for the industry as a whole. And I think people are really starting to realize the value of what these things offer and that's been a challenge for some time. So, hopefully you know that the like you say that some kind of a, an optimistic kind of thing for the future. - So sounds great, Gary, thanks for being a guest on the show today. - That's an absolute pleasure, thank you so much. - Thank you, Gary. So we've been visiting with with Gareth Morgan. He is the co-founder and CEO of Metareal. Their product, Metareal Stage, is a 3D virtual tour solution. And I think, my three high-end takeaways ... Wow! This is unbelievable. It's a 3D virtual tour that is created with nearly any 360 camera. Second, is that it means how the tour is constructed, can be shot way faster than how many 3D tours are presently shot. And three, even though there's a do it yourself solution, they'll build a tour for you and the floor plans. So I think that's really an amazing thing to see from Metareal and to see the Metareal 3D tour 3D virtual tour platform. So, Gareth, thanks again. Good to see you. I'm Dan Smigrod founder of the We Get Around Network Forum and you've been watching WGAN-TV. |
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ahojman private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Dan, I cannot read more than 30 lines. Sorry. I am old... I opened that tour and it looks like a Matterport improvement. Are they using Matterport to do that? This image from their webpage looks interesting...  Transitions are good but I prefer to move in the tour using the arrows, not the mouse. |
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| @ahojman Quote: Originally Posted by ahojman Ha!  Free course in Metareal ✓ WGAN-TV Training U: Metareal Stage 3D Virtual Tour Platform Quote: Originally Posted by ahojman Ha! (again) A Metareal 3D virtual tour certainly looks like a Matterport Digital Twin. Quote: Originally Posted by @DanSmigrod Quote: Originally Posted by ahojman You can use nearly any 360 camera to shoot it. While these two $$$$$$ cameras will produce excellent results, Metareal should swap-out these images to use more likely cameras such as Ricoh Theta Z1 and Insta360 One X. You can shoot a Metareal 3D virtual tour in a fraction of the time of a Matterport tour. We discuss that during the show. Plus, there is a special offer for WGAN Forum Members discussed - spoiler alert - near the end of the show. Dan P.S. Time for a social distancing walk. I may be slow to reply, if you comment quickly. |
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Hi All, Reminder ... Dan |
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