Video: Matterport ShopTalk #9 | New Features and Updates & Part 2 of Customizing your Model | Video courtesy of Matterport YouTube Channel | 14 October 2020

Hi All,

Below is a transcript of Matterport ShopTalk #9 Webinar video above.

Presentators

✓ Amir Frank, Matterport Marketing Content Manager
✓ Haakon Erichsen, Matterport Chief Software Architect
✓ Indy Sen, Matterport VP Product Marketing & Platform

Best,

Dan

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Amir Frank:
Welcome everybody. Thanks so much for joining us in this ninth edition of [Matterport] ShopTalk. I appreciate your attendance today. We've got an incredibly packed schedule with a lot of really, really good stuff, so I don't want to waste any more time. We've got a 14 minute video coming right up, so let's go ahead and just get right into it.

Amir Frank:
In this ShopTalk we're going to be talking a little bit more about Workshop, customizing your Matterport models, what we started last week. So this is part two of that. I'll be covering more tools, the 360 Views and photos. And then later after that we'll be talking about the Blur Tool with Haakon, has joined us again. So thanks very much for that Haakon [Erichsen]. And then, we've got Indy Sen who's back joining us, talking about the LiDAR with the new phone, the new phone that was just introduced, so the iPhone 12. And then we'll talk more about updates coming up with regards to support for the Pro1, new account features and educational promo. And then of course we'll have the Q&A, which we're looking forward to at the end.

Amir Frank:
So yeah. Today we do have with us Haakon and Indy. Thank you guys so much for joining me today.

Haakon:
Thanks for having us.

Indy Sen:
Yeah, my pleasure.

Amir Frank:
So as I said, we've got a lot of stuff to cover, so we do want to get going. But again, thanks guys for taking the time. Let's just go ahead and get right into the first video. We'll talk about the 360 Views photos. I even talked a little bit about the P key. This is something that not a lot of people know about so we'll cover that a little bit. Without further ado, I'll just go ahead and share this video with you guys.

Video:
Welcome Matterporters. Thanks so much for joining me. In this video we'll cover the 360 Views tool and how to place those as well as photos, how to save and grab snapshots from your Matterport model. So let's go ahead and dive right in and get started and look at the 360 Views tool. You can see it's right over here. It's got a little 360 icon. And if I click on that, let's just take a quick step back and overview what we have going on in this tool. First of all, the panel comes out with a thumbnail of all of my 360s. In this case, I just have the one of the backyard over here.

Video:
As with the other tools, I can collapse or expand this panel to see more or less of this window over here. In the top right corner of the view you can see its number right here. If I had more listed, you would see two, three, and so on. In the bottom right corner I have the Preview button. This allows me to get a full view of this 360 View. So if I tap that, it'll come in here, and I can just look all around and see what this 360 View captured.

Video:
I also have a three dot menu right here that allows me to rename or remove this. It's not going to delete the 360 View from this panel. It'll just remove it from the model. So for example, if I press the number two to see my dollhouse view, you can see my 360 View is placed right here. Also in this pin is the number one so that I can easily reference which 360 View that's referring to. And from the menu here, I can press Remove and it'll just remove it from the model.

Video:
So if you want to go ahead and place a 360 View in your model, you can just go ahead and grab it and drag it into the model this way. I can see my 360 Views either from the dollhouse or the floor plan view. So if you want to see it from a floor plan perspective, I can just tap the number three, zoom in, and move over here, and I can just click and drag this 360 View. Now, when I do that, you'll see this dotted line pointing towards the 3D view that it's going to be connected with. What that means is if I move this 360 View closer to the home, it'll suddenly snap and be connected to a different 3D scan. If I have it placed over here, it'll snap and connect to this 3D scan that's positioned in the middle of the yard.

Video:
Now, it's really, really important to notice the rotation of your 360 View. It's not going to be enough to just position them where they were captured. You also want to make sure that the 360 View is rotated properly. So you can either tap the 360 View and then press the Rotate button here, or you can just tap the thumbnail up here to select it, and again, just press the Rotate button here. You'll see that the 360 View expands, and to get a better image I can just kind of move it over here, zoom in a little bit, and I can grab it and rotate it. So this is really important to properly rotate it because this is going to affect the user's experience when they navigate to the 360 View. So this looks right. Now I can just go ahead and click anywhere to make that go away, and I can zoom out again.

Video:
Now, let's go ahead and test this and see what it looks like. So I'll go ahead and zoom in here to my 3D scan, and turn around and you can see the portal is right here to my 360 View. If I just click on that, it'll take me into my 360 View and you can see why that rotation was so important because I'm still facing the same direction. I have to turn around in order to see the house, as well as get back into the 3D scans from which I came.

Video:
Now, I just wanted to point out one last thing and this is really not that critical but if you just want to give that extra little something for your visitors, if you'll notice, when I'm in the 3D view or the inside view here, this thumbnail appears when I roll over the portal with my mouse and it just kind of gives me a quick preview of the 360 View that I'm going to enter. Now, in this case, you can see that I'm looking at this play structure, but the thumbnail is of the house behind me. So if you want to kind of give your visitors that extra little something with their navigation, make it just a little bit more intuitive, you might want to make that thumbnail of what they're going to see when they step in there.

Video:
So in this case, it might be a thumbnail of the play structure instead of the home behind me. Unfortunately there's really no way of adjusting this thumbnail after the 360 View has already been captured when you're out there on site. So this is really something that you have to kind of think ahead and see. Again, not super critical but just a nice to have feature.

Video:
So when you're out there and you position the 360 View and you know roughly which direction they're going to be coming into that 360 View from, then you can position the camera accordingly to process the thumbnail. And what I mean by that is if you're using a Pro2 for example, the direction the Pro2 is facing when you first start your rotation, that's going to be most of the thumbnail. So it's going to be a little bit more than just that. If you roughly point the camera in the direction of the 360 View and where you're going to be when facing that 360 View, then you'll know that the thumbnail is going to be pretty close to accurate. So in the same way that you would point the Matterport Pro2 in the direction of the thumbnail that you want to be associated with your 360 View, you're going to want to do the same thing with a 360 camera. Point the front lens in the direction of the thumbnail that you want associated with your 360 View.

Video:
With the Ricoh system that front lens is going to be the lens that is on the opposite side of the shutter button, and on the Insta360 cameras it's going to be the exact opposite. So their front lens is actually on the same side as the shutter button. Keep that in mind if that is something that you're interested in doing with your 360 Views.

Video:
Now on to the photos tool. The photos tool is just below 360 Views and you can click on that and you can grab a snapshot of anything that you have in your model. This includes 360 Views as well as 3D scans. Before we jump into how exactly that's done, let's just take a quick look at everything this tool has to offer. Up here at the top you have your zoom buttons. You can zoom in. This will zoom in by 10% or zoom out by 10% increments. I can also do the same thing with the roller wheel on my mouse, zoom in or zoom out. If I grab the little dot, I'll be able to zoom in or zoom out more granularly so you can see that the percentage is going up just one step at a time. Anytime I want to reset this back to 100, I simply click this icon right here.

Video:
Over here in the top right we have the option of capturing either a 2D image or the full 360 degree pano. Now this is true for every scan position including 360 Views. You're not only limited to downloading a 360 pano from 360 Views. You can also download the full 360 degree photo sphere from 3D scan positions as well. Over here I have a settings button that allows me to select whether I want to include things like measurements and labels as part of the image that I download. Now, this is only going to be true if you choose to download the 2D image. If I'm capturing the full 360 degree sphere, it's not going to include those as part of it.

Video:
Below that by default my photo grid is displayed. I can choose to turn it off which will hide these lines, but I really like these lines because as I'll show you in a second here, they help me tremendously with lining up my image. I'll just go ahead and click this to escape. At this point, while I'm inside the photos view, I can navigate through without leaving the photos tool and I can just move, drag anywhere I want and just quickly press the camera button down here to grab a snapshot of what I see. I can also press the number two to go and see the dollhouse view if I want to grab this as my photo, I can grab a snapshot of this, or the floor plan view as well. So anything that I see in my Viewport here, I can grab as an image that I can use in my marketing campaign.

Video:
Now, if I'm in the inside view and I want to just grab a shot of this house for example, sometimes maybe moving the mouse is not going to be very easy in order to position the image the way I want it. So what I can do is use the left and right arrow buttons, as well as the I and K keys on my keyboard to move or pan and tilt the image left and right or up and down. You can see based on my image that this can be very confusing because the image is just moving way too fast. So the way you would slow things down in order to more accurately position your image is by using the letter P on your keyboard. So if I press the letter P, you'll notice that up comes this little menu up here, and I can take the rotation speed slider and just move that all the way down. Now, I'll go ahead and press the letter P again to make that go away. And now when I press the left and right arrow keys, as well as the I and K key to move up and down, I can very easily position this exactly the way I want it.

Video:
I'll just go ahead and press the reset button right here so I can look at this at 100% and now I can move to the left making sure that my photo grid line right here is perfectly aligned with the edge of the wall. I can press the I and K key to move that up and down. And then I can move back in any direction left and right knowing that these lines are going to remain perfectly straight up and down. So once I'm happy with this image, I can just come down here and press the camera icon to grab the snapshot.

Video:
Now, let's go ahead and quickly look at what this would be like if I was to include measurements in my photo. So what I'll do is go ahead and navigate my way to a room where I've already captured a measurement. And now all I need to do is go into my Settings button right here and choose to include those measurements and labels. Once I've done that, you can see the measurement line appears. What I'm doing now is just moving around to make sure that the straight vertical lines of this image are nicely lined up with the photo grid and I can go ahead and grab the snapshots.

Video:
A nice little feature as well after I've captured the snapshot, you'll see there's this view button right here that I can click and quickly see the image that was just captured. Now I can choose to download, delete, or use this as my start location. I can also choose to rename the image right here. I'll just go ahead and close this.

Video:
Another very interesting thing that you can capture using this photos tool is images of the mesh view, as well as the wireframe. So let me show you what that looks like. If I simply press the zero key on the keyboard, you can see that I get this mesh view. And if I press it again, I get the mesh view along with the wireframe view. The wireframe view is not something that you can select to see from the icons down here below. Only the zero key will get you there. If I press it a third time, you'll get the inside view with the high resolution 2D images along with the wireframe view. So this is really a neat way of getting both the idea of this being a 3D model. You can use these in your marketing material while still presenting your clients with a high resolution 2D image. I'll just press it again to make the wireframe go away and we're back to normal.

Video:
Now, if I wanted to download the full 360 degree pano, I can't do that from the dollhouse or the floor plan view. I have to be on the pano itself. So let me go inside here, and now I'll just choose the 360 photo right here. You can see the photo grids go away because in this case it doesn't matter where I'm looking at. As long as I'm positioned on that 360 view or 3D scan, that's the position that will be captured.

Video:
Now, if I come down here to capture, with the pano option selected it'll capture the entire 360 sphere. And what I can do is press the View button. I can download it immediately or the other way of downloading and looking at all of the images and panels that I've captured, I can go to the Photos tab. And the way to do that is by getting out of workshop. So let me go ahead and close that and exit the workshop. And I go into this tab right here, Photos.

Video:
Now I can see all of the images that I've captured here. You'll also notice that down here are images that were automatically generated as your model was being processed. The 2D images that are captured automatically or manually by yourself are towards the top, and if you scroll down towards the bottom, you'll see the 360 panos available down there. And I can choose to download any one of the 360 panos by using the arrow key. I can also delete it if I don't want it to be part of my model data here.

Video:
As for the 2D images, I can choose to select it using the check box right here. I can select more than one. What's going to happen if you choose to download more than one image at a time is that you will be emailed a link to a zip file that will contain everything in one document, so you won't have to download multiple files. If I just want to download everything, I can use this checkbox up here and then hit Download or I can use the checkbox to unselect everything. I can also select any one of these images to see a larger thumbnail, and here too just as before, I can choose to change the name, erase it, download it, or set it as my start location.

Video:
I really hope this information was helpful to you and that you'll be able to very easily go into workshop and take advantage of these tools to customize your model. (singing)

Amir Frank:
Okay, thanks for sticking through all that. I know that was a long one. I appreciate your patience. All right, so with that, Haakon, what's going on? Thanks for joining us again.

Haakon:
Hi. How's it going?

Amir Frank:
Super. Super. You're here to talk to us about an incredibly exciting new tool that I just can't wait to have out in the workshop.

Haakon:
Yeah. So as you may know, we have this automated face blurring feature already that we've had in beta for a while, but today we want to talk about an addition to that which is a new blur brush tool. And this will be a little bit of a sneak peek. It's not ready quite yet. We want to show you what it's all about and how it works.

Haakon:
So we call it the Blur Brush, and essentially what it will do is give you full control of what you want to blur in the space. This is in addition to the current automated face blurring. So you can basically use both. You can use the automated face blurring first and then you can go in and basically blur more things as well and obviously not faces. This can be used for anything.

Haakon:
So we have a little preview video for you. Amir, if you can run that, that'd be great.

Video:
Today I want to give you a preview of a new tool coming to a workshop called the Blur Brush. The Blur Brush lets you blur out anything you don't want your visitors to see in the space. It could be something like family photos or people that somehow got in the shop, or maybe house numbers, or car license plates or something like security systems. Basically anything you want to hide from your visitors.

Video:
So how does it work? Let's go ahead and click the blur icon and add a new blur. The cursor turns into a brush, and you get this little slider here that you can use to control the size. Let's keep it fairly small for now. Then just click on things you want to blur like these photos here. The more you brush back and forth in the image, the more it blurs. When you're done, just hit the check mark. All right, that'll do it. At this point, you can click around and select the blurs. I kind of blurred one of the photos a bit too much so I think I'll just redo this one. That looks great.

Video:
Now, I just need to do the other angles. Let's see this photo as well. So let's do this one real quick. Let's go a little bit smaller to size here since I zoomed in. All right, and then one last angle that also sees these photos. All right, I think that looks good. The blurs also appear in the drawer on the right here. So you can click through them and make sure that they all look good.

Video:
Then all that is left is the last critical step, applying the blurs. This takes a couple of minutes as the servers have to make sure all the proper files get blurred. You'll see it says processing on each blur while this is going on. And that's it. Once the blur is finished processing in a few minutes, you can safely share the space with anyone. And that's how you use the Blur Brush.

Amir Frank:
Awesome. That is super, super exciting. I can't wait for that to be out.

Haakon:
All right. So that's basically just a little teaser just start to recap what you just saw, the Blur Brush tool will basically let you blur anything like faces, license plates, house numbers, sensitive information in the environment security systems, basically anything.

Haakon:
I just want to preempt a couple of questions that I'm sure you will have. First off, as I mentioned in the preview, how long does it take to apply a blur? So what happens here is as you're doing the blurs in workshop, it kind of makes a preview of what the blur will look like, but they're not applied yet. Our servers have to go through and actually apply the blur to all of the files that make up the space. That'll take a couple of minutes, but after that you can basically safely give the link to a showcase to your visitors.

Haakon:
Now, can I undo a blur? It's kind of fundamental about these blurs that we want them to be fully secure. So once you've added a blur, the only way to undo a blur is actually to reprocess the model. So if you have access to reprocess the model, that's sort of the only way to remove a blur after it's been applied.

Haakon:
And then which subscription plans will get it? That's still to be determined. I don't have details to share on that today unfortunately, but we will of course share that as soon as we can.

Haakon:
And the last big question, when will this be released? Unfortunately can't give any details just yet, but look for this in the next couple of months.

Amir Frank:
I'm looking forward to that. I mean having been here four and a half years, I know it's been a very, very highly anticipated and very well requested feature, so I can't wait for this to come out.

Haakon:
Yeah. The team is very excited to bring this to everyone because it's something we've had requests for a very long time and it's very understandable too because if you scanned something that you forgot to hide or something that you just couldn't remove, you really need this. So I'm really excited to bring this to everyone.

Amir Frank:
Yeah. This is great. Awesome. Great job. Thanks so much. All right. So now let's kick it off to Indy. Indy, thanks again for joining us in this ShopTalk and enlightening us.

Indy Sen:
Of course, yeah. Thanks for having me here Amir and Haakon, I can't wait to use the Blur tool. It's amazing. So I'm really looking forward to that. So yeah. Good morning and good afternoon, good evening where you might be here in this world, just wanted to give you a quick update. As some of you might have seen, Apple came out with the announcement of the iPhone 12 yesterday. And this is something that we were anticipating. I think we know that when they released the latest set of iPad Pros that incorporated LiDAR, it was something that we just started very closely observing, working with them as well, and just wanted to kind of give you a sense of how we're thinking about incorporating these latest technologies into Matterport.

Indy Sen:
So what I wanted to kind of walk you through today is just give you a sense of obviously if you haven't caught up to the news, give you a sense of what the news was, what it means for the Matterport community and why we're so excited about it, and then also as a reminder of what you can actually do with your iPhone today. Back in May we did launch Smartphone Capture on the iPhone whereby anybody with a iPhone 6 and above can actually create Matterports by just using the phone in their pocket. We just also wanted to remind you that this technology, even though Apple has just announced LiDAR on their latest lineup today, is also the ability for you to render 3D spaces using just your iPhone and the Cortex engine is available to all Matterport users.

Indy Sen:
So I'll walk you through a couple of examples of what we've seen because I think that's not something that we've actually talked a lot about and you'll see there's a couple of things that we have planned for you in social media this current week as well to give you a flavor of that.

Indy Sen:
So yeah. When we think about the lineup, I think what's really exciting for us is that overnight Apple has now with the iPhone 12 and the Pro line specifically, so I think there were four iPhones that were announced, the iPhone 12, the iPhone 12 Mini, but then the iPhone 12 Pro and the Pro Max. Hard to keep tabs on all of these, but the Pro, think of it as really the ne plus ultra of the iPhones, the latest wizardry in terms of onboard hardware and those kind of things. And this specifically meant that they incorporated LiDAR on the iPhone.

Indy Sen:
In their demos I think it's very clear that LiDAR obviously with the technology that it is, promises some really strong capabilities in the AR field, as well as helps them with their night mode vision which is very popular in the past cameras and it will only make it better because of the rich depth sensing that LiDAR brings on board.

Indy Sen:
But the way we're looking at it is that LiDAR is overnight, we're bringing really capable 3D sensing hardware into the mainstream. Think about Apple's install base, like billions of phones at this stage, and the fact that now everybody has LiDAR in their pocket. That's not lost on us. And I think we're really welcoming it because I think it it's really going to help us complement our offerings.

Indy Sen:
If you think about Matterport for the iPhone today, it essentially is taking two-dimensional pictures but with the help of our Cortex engine that has over the years and across billions and billions of square feet of space that it's captured has really been able to kind of apply using machine learning techniques like take those 2D pictures, once they're stitched together like apply and render 3D dimensions to them.

Indy Sen:
If anything, LiDAR will help complement our ability to serve the needs of folks who are using Matterport on the iPhone. And with LiDAR onboard what you can expect is pretty much more accurate 3D model rendering, more accurate measurements and crisper doll houses as well. So think of Cortex and LiDAR sort of covering for each other. When LiDAR has no coverage, Cortex can kick in. And when Cortex has its limitations, LiDAR obviously can kick in. So we're really looking forward to applying that.

Indy Sen:
And what you can see here, this is something that our product teams kind of shared with us a couple months ago when the iPad Pro came out with LiDAR. Just to give you a sense here, is this is currently a prototype that we have for capture on the iPad. What you can see here obviously with LiDAR is that the live mesh is being created and generated automatically. This is one prototype just to give you a sense of what you're seeing here. It's not actually using the ultra white camera right now. Apple by default did not let us do it, but we anticipated that now with the iPhone 12, that that might happen. So our plans are for you to leverage that ultra wide camera. We might not have the same type of live mesh preview. We'll probably create a similar kind of preview on our end.

Indy Sen:
And yeah, that's really it. We just want to kind of use snapshot and a sneak peek at what we're doing. I think we're again, very excited of this technology and its applications and look forward to giving you more updates on this, but rest assured that this development's not lost on us and we're really excited about it.

Indy Sen:
And then that was a lot of the news about the iPhone 12. If you're like me, you're probably looking forward to getting your hands on it. For those of us who are not there yet, and even for me, I have an iPhone 10 right now and I do use Matterport with it, I just want to give you a sense of like, of course, that you can still obviously use Matterport for the iPhone. And I think you can check our blog this past week. Yesterday we had a good post that kind of recapped what we've seen to date with the iPhone, and I'll just give you the highlights over here.

Indy Sen:
One of the things that we saw in the last three months is there's just been a huge amount of interest and support with what we're doing with smartphone capture specifically on the iPhone. We had about 100,000 downloads of Matterport Capture in three months, and I think, and lot of that was due to our announcement that we were bringing our technology to the iPhone. And out of those hundred thousand models, the top hundred models have generated well over 120,000 views.

Indy Sen:
There's a retailer in Chile that took a Matterport for store, and this is during shelter in place, and that alone garnered about 6,300 views on that shop alone, and she added Mattertags which is like e-commerce capabilities or call-in orders for the store and people can just pick them up.

Indy Sen:
So we're seeing a lot of interesting use cases on the iPhone. Think about the things that it enables. The top use cases that we're seeing are really around of course residential real estate. I think the fact that any Realtor can now take their iPhone in their pocket and do ... create a virtual tour, retailers, a lot of small businesses and clothing furniture, anywhere where MatterTags can make a difference and encourage people to either go to the retailer and visit or just get a snapshot and say, "Hey, this piece looks really nice. I wonder what ... Let me get more details on it." So all these experiences where unfortunately with COVID and shelter in place you can't no longer go be there, the iPhone makes it again very simple for you to scan it, share it, and open up your space to people.

Indy Sen:
Other use cases have been art galleries, and as well as just what you can see here, consumers, people like you and I sharing our personal spaces with friends and family. I have my brother-in-law who lives about 20 miles away from me here in Walnut Creek in the Bay Area just redid his garage and turned it into a home gym. It's amazing. He just shared with his family. I showed him that he could take a Matterport with it, so I think he's working on it. But I think there's just a lot going on. And a lot of edge cases that we ourselves haven't immensely thought about when we think about who we serve with the Pro2 and other technologies, but this is really about bringing 3D in your pocket and doing the most with it.

Indy Sen:
You can take a look here, I think. Amir, you have the slides, and if you even just click on this video, over here this is just a very quick flyby of what someone did with their own home office. So this is actually, if I'm mistaken actually a colleague of ours who took a Matterport of their home office and just annotated things. As we're all getting into shelter and place mode, how do we make the most of our space. And he very helpfully shared what he did and kind of put together a Matterport of his home office.

Indy Sen:
So that's really it. I think what we wanted to do is just give you a sense of, one, we're working on the iPhone 12. Obviously, we have to get our hands on the hardware. But once that is, it is something that's incoming, it's definitely a device that we're going to support and then some, and then also give you a sense of what's actually possible today.

Indy Sen:
Hopefully this gives you a sense of what you can do and we can't wait for you to see. So do take a look on social media. Like I said, we're going to highlight some of these examples. We actually have a really fun mini camping going on around like the top 12 iPhone spaces to celebrate the iPhone 12. So take a look at that, ping us, and let us know what you think. But just wanted to give you that update, and yeah, and with that, Amir, I'll hand it back to you.

Amir Frank:
All right. Thanks. Great. Very, very exciting stuff coming down the pipe, so I'm super looking forward to it. Let's check out some updates and then we'll get into Q&A. So Indy, actually maybe you want to walk us through this Pro1 support.

Indy Sen:
Yes, I will. Yeah, so starting January 31st, so here's an update on the Pro1. There's a couple of set of repairs that we will no longer be supporting on the Pro1. This has really to do with some of the sensors, the configuration, the Wi-Fi false that you might have that we might see on the camera, as well as cosmetic repairs. This is really based on the fact that the Pro1 has been in service for quite a many years and like any hardware manufacturer, we do phase some of these products out and focusing on hardware development. But what we want to do is give you a heads up on this. I think this is where the repair protocols will change as of January 31st, but what we will continue to service of course are things that typically are what people come to us for, issues with your batteries, Wi-Fi range problems, as well as motor or drive chain related repairs.

Indy Sen:
We're happy to review and investigate any damaged or malfunctioning Pro1 camera and try our best to repair them, but as a policy as of January 31st, there are certain set of repairs that we will no longer be able to service, mostly because of the hardware components not being available to us anymore.

Indy Sen:
But now, what we did also notify all of our Pro1 customers is that you will receive an exclusive discount on our Pro2 series if you choose to upgrade. To activate this promo and you can take advantage of it, I think there should have been some instructions in the email that every Pro1 user received, but you can enter basically in the following website, enter your Pro1 serial number which you'll be able to find on the device itself and just fill out the form and then we will validate on our end and hand you the coupon.

Indy Sen:
So you don't need to return your camera. I think that's one thing we want to emphasize to access the promo code. We want to keep this as streamlined as possible, but that's really ... We want to stand by you of course. And the fact that you've been, if you have the Pro1, that means that you've been a Matterport customer for quite some time, and we want to make sure that you can take advantage of this offer to upgrade to the latest hardware. So that's the update on the Pro1.

Amir Frank:
All right. Fantastic. Thanks for that. Another change that was recently made is in your account settings, and that has to do with changing your plan. Previously, you may or may not know or be aware of this, that customers were only able to upgrade their plan and any kind of other change that they needed to downgrade for whatever reason. But then they would have to contact Matterport. And that of course is a bit of an inconvenience and slows things down.

Amir Frank:
Now you can actually do all that on your own, which is a really nice benefit. So if you go to your settings, if you go up to the top right, there's little settings drop down there and go into the billing section of that. Of course, only the billing and account owners can do that, not any collaborator or admin has this kind of control, and you'll see that change plan button right there, so you can choose whatever plan you want very quickly.

Amir Frank:
And last thing is the education promo. I could probably use a little help with this one as well Indy and maybe you know more about this.

Indy Sen:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think I want to say maybe about two or three weeks ago we began running this promo with specifically right now we're focused on North America and K through 12 schools, so elementary through high school to basically offer some of these institutions the ability to get a free scan of their building and facilities. The rationale behind this is that as many of us and certainly here in North America and the US, we're still not out of the woods obviously with what's happening with COVID and a lot of schools are still basically doing distance learning. And this is all, we feel that there's an opportunity for us to kind of step in and help, and help some of our educators and these institutions to kind of go back and plan for what back to school looks like post-COVID or even during COVID what back to school planning learning can look like.

Indy Sen:
So where we decided to run this promo, it offers not only a free startup plan for folks who want to use and try Matterport and capture their school, but also up to 50 free scans using capture services for you to kind of come and capture your facility. You can find more information at matterport.com/education. It's something that we started. We're starting small, but if there's the interest here and as our capture services network is deployed around the world, it's likely something that we'll look to expand to other territories, as well as even higher education.

Indy Sen:
So if you are feeling very strongly that you want to help your local community and your school to help plan for what these contingencies are, let us know. You feel free to direct them to that link. We have had a bunch of submissions that we're reviewing right now and we're just trying to help here. So if you do have anybody or any parents or friends who are parents who are looking to maybe help their schools and local schools get back on their feet, do let them know about this and we're here to help.

Amir Frank:
Awesome. Yeah, that's really great. I love that. I went to my local school and offered it, and I think it can be extremely beneficial for a lot of reasons to any school, especially in this time.

Indy Sen:
Yeah.

Amir Frank:
All right. Great. Last but not least before we jump into Q&A. As you may already know, if you go to the Resources button at the top of your matterport.com page you'll find support right there, which is going to lead you to kind of the hub that is everything support related. So you can link from there to the Help Center. It's got the most common FAQs on that page, as well as phone number and contact information with a support team. If you are in the US, this here is your phone number, 408-805-3347. If you're not, on that same page if you scroll down, the relevant number for your location is going to be displayed, so depending on where you sign in from or log in from. And the email for everybody support@matterport.com. Please take advantage of that, and that's it.

Amir Frank:
So as always, for any admins out there, just make sure that your account information is up to date. This just helps a lot when we need to send out any kind of notifications or emails, we send it to the email that is on file. And if that's not up to date, then you just won't be able to get those communications. So just make sure that's there.

Amir Frank:
And finally, stay connected, get to our Facebook page at facebook.matterport. Just a great way of keeping your finger on the pulse. Everything that is Matterport related. All the updates, anything that is happening with the company or things like that.

Amir Frank:
And last but not least in our Moug community, that's M-O-U-G, another Facebook group that you can ... I definitely encourage you to look into if you're not a part of that already. We get a lot of views into these amazing models that people have shared with us and it's just great. So if you'd like, you can take advantage of this nomination form at go.matterport.com/nominate-your-space and let us know about your model, so we can put it in the gallery and in the destination everywhere site so everybody can enjoy it and see it and of course it allows you to add that model as being part of these platforms to your portfolio as well.

Amir Frank:
With that being said, I'm just going to leave this up and we can go ahead and check out some questions. Haakon and Indy, if you've got something on your lists that you can answer, go ahead. I'm just going to quickly look through these and see what's being asked.

Indy Sen:
Yeah, do you want us to just take these questions live Amir?

Amir Frank:
By all means. Yeah, if you've got questions lined up, this is the first time I've seen this queue, so I'm just going to [crosstalk 00:38:56]

Indy Sen:
Yes. I think there's a couple questions I see here that I could probably weigh in on. The first is from Chris Emen. Is there a product that will rotate the iPad Pro or iPhone Pro on a tripod to capture spaces? Yeah, a fantastic question. We are evaluating right now. I think there is a bunch of third party entities that are building some of these tripods for iPhones and whatnot, and I think we are testing a few of them. Obviously, we haven't gotten our hands on the iPhone itself, the new one, but the iPad Pro's certainly we've been looking at some of these manufacturers who are making tripods. Our plan is to evaluate and potentially recommend the ones we feel are probably ... provide the best outcomes. We're still in that evaluation process though.

Indy Sen:
But I think if you look on for example Amazon, there's probably a couple that you can be able to find. Nothing that we have sort of endorsed or recommended yet. I think we're still figuring that out on our end.

Haakon:
All right, and I'll take one about blur. A couple of people have been asking whether blurs can be applied to old models. And yes, when the Blur Brush tool is available, you can use it on even your oldest models. It'll work for basically any model you have, any space.

Amir Frank:
I'll take one from Rob here asks about 360 Views. Can we control the visibility of the 360 View icon from other 360 Views? Basically that's dependent on the distance of those 360 Views where they're pinned. If you saw in my video, which by the way we're going to have on YouTube and we'll link to so you can refer back to that along with some links in the description that'll quickly jump you to sections of the video, so you won't have to sit through another 14 minutes of that. But basically, the distance. So 15 meters. If you're looking at the floor plan view or the dollhouse, you see a little grid in the black areas. Each one of those lines is a meter in real space. So if you can estimate about 15 meter distance from other 360 Views, if it's more than 15 meters, you're not going to see the icon. If it's less than 15 meters, you're going to see the icon.

Haakon:
I can take another one. Blur Brush. So can the new Blur Brush tool be used on 360 Views as well? And the answer is yes. It will work for 360 Views outside views, anything like that as well because you're doing the blur per scan. So you have to do them for all the scans that see a thing, and that makes it also work for 360 Views.

Amir Frank:
Nice. I'll take another one, from Charles. I'm not entirely clear on this Charles so you may want to come back to me with a little bit more clarification, but basically the question is post-processing, so it is in the cloud? Yes, all the processing is done in the cloud. And can we input into any other software? There are a lot of assets that you can download in order to input into other software. Like I showed, the photos allows you to download full 360 Views, as well as 2D images.

Amir Frank:
You can also download assets like floor plans. Those come in both PNG format, PDF format, as well as SVG formats so you can more easily edit them if you need to in other applications like 3D applications such as AutoCAD, as well as MatterPaks can also be ordered which includes OBJ files, XYZ, point cloud files, and things like that, as well as a very different floor plan view. So it's like a 2D image of the entire floor and a 2D image of the entire ceiling along with a ruler that you can know the scale exactly. And those are also used for 3D applications that you can use to trace and so on and so forth.

Amir Frank:
So there's a ton of data that you can download and use in lots of other applications out there. The only thing is the 3D model itself can't be because that requires showcase, so that's a problem and that is just not possible. You can't have that out of the cloud.

Haakon:
Let's go to another one. When will the virtual be available and will it work on mirrors? So as I mentioned today was just a preview, so we will launch this feature and kind of slowly roll it out, hopefully within a couple of months, but I can't say an exact date just yet. And about the mirrors, yes. So it will work to blur if you for instance see yourself in the mirror, you can definitely blur yourself out. It might not totally remove you as a blur. You might see sort of some shadows of yourself in there, but it's probably a lot better than the not blurring at all if you had caught yourself or the camera in the mirror. It's definitely one of the use cases we see for the Blur Brush.

Amir Frank:
Another one here. This is a really good one actually. How do you get the 360 images into your business's website? Once you've downloaded a full 360 pano and you want people to be able to kind of pan around, which is the whole idea of downloading one of these, so there's a lot of different things you can do. One of them, they're scaled properly, so Facebook for example recognizes it as a 360 image. And so it'll just automatically work if you upload it directly to Facebook and your Facebook business site.

Amir Frank:
But if it's your own website, then what you need to do is probably have it hosted by a 360 image hosting platform. One that I've personally used in the past and seems to work, I haven't used in a while so you may want to go there and just see what the new offerings are, it's called Momento360. So momento360.com. I've posted some 360 panos to that website, and then I can actually take those panos and even embed them into Mattertags by using the share link. So you can also, in the same way I'm sure, embed those into your landing page or anything like that.

Indy Sen:
Amir, I'll add a couple questions here. Kathy Lee, what is the discount with Pro1 for Pro2? It's a good question Kathy. I was just also answering you directly, but I think it might be a beneficial for anybody who's tuned in who might be interested to know. The discount with the Pro1 for Pro2 is currently $700 off until November 30th, and then past that or if you have any issues or you want to take advantage of it, it will be $500 until December 31st.

Indy Sen:
Those are the parameters right now that we have set. If it extends into next year, there might be ... We haven't set a specific date. It's likely that we'll carry over that $500 discount through a certain point in time. Just stay tuned for communications from us. I think what we will do is that we will send a reminder to every Pro1 owner to take advantage of these. So just to repeat, it's $700 off until November 30th and then $500 off until December 31st.

Haakon:
All right. I have another one that is actually from last time I was at ShopTalk. I talked about some new changes coming to Highlight Reel that would allow you to change the speed of many different parts of the Highlight Reel. Someone is asking when is that coming? When will that be available? So good call out from last time. It'll actually be available to everyone in beta starting later this week. We will basically give everyone the capability to try out the new Highlight Reel as soon as tomorrow. It'll probably roll out over the next couple of days.

Haakon:
So looking forward to that and looking forward to your feedback on it as well. There's a little kind of feedback button still when you get access to this feature. So we're looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks about that. So that way you don't have to use URL parameters anymore to control the speed of a Highlight Reel tour.

Amir Frank:
That's actually also very exciting, looking forward to that. All right, question from David. How are you able to get scans outside and be able to have that same feel of the 360 scan? Personally when I go out and scan, I'm a bit of a traditionalist. When I'm inside, I do 3D scans of course. But anytime I go outside, I'll do the 360 views, and the reason for that is because of the dollhouse. I like the dollhouse. I like to see into my dollhouse. When you scan 3D scans outside, you're capturing that exterior wall and that's not going to allow me to see through that and into the room on the other side inside the structure.

Amir Frank:
So for me David, I like to do 3D scans inside, 360 views outside, and just place them as I showed in the video, all around the backyard. You don't want to go too nuts with it. It's not necessary. You can just have one or two in the backyard, another couple in the front to have that kind of nice hero shot from the streets of the home, and that's about it. And that's true for any industry if you're doing construction insurance, whatever. You're outside, I like to do 360 views. And if you're inside, I like to do 3D scans. That's, again, just my way of doing it.

Haakon:
I have another one about Mattertags. So is there a way to upload several photos to a single Mattertag? And there may be a service that allows that, that you can use through Embedly which is the way media meta tags work today, but I'm not aware of exactly which one that would be. That's not something that we see a lot. You can use links. So you can add several links in there, but not actually have the full photo. What I will say is, this is a problem that we are looking into in general. So sometime next year, we are looking to improve meta tags and make things like using images in Mattertags easier. So stay tuned for that.

Amir Frank:
Yeah. And just as a workaround also. You could have images as pages in a PDF document for example. It's not a great workaround, but for the time being you could do that and just embed the PDF. When you embed a PDF in a Mattertag, it does allow you to actually scroll through all the pages in that PDF. The only problem is where you're going to store the PDF. So if you do have some kind of web space online, you can easily put it there. But I haven't really found a great solution like you would have for photos and things like that to host the PDF. But yeah, if you've got some web space and go to GoDaddy and just get some of that, put it in there, and then you can link to that PDF.

Indy Sen:
I have a few more. Diana Cecilia has a good question. Could you do the same community service that you do for the elementary schools for some of the voting election sites, like the ones that are located in the middle of 55 and above senior housings? That's a really good suggestion Diana. Certainly something our team can look at. I think for us just operationally it's standing up for promotion and then maybe making some kind of announcement.

Indy Sen:
If you do have any suggestions on maybe some specific facilities that you think about maybe. I'm just looking at the date here. We're fast coming to what those elections will be and where that information will be relevant. Let us know if there are specific sites who are, and maybe we can have a more targeted approach. But I do like the idea, so I'll talk to our content team about it and the promo teams about this because it might be worth looking into.

Indy Sen:
Okay. And then can you ...

Amir Frank:
Got a question from Mallory. So Mallory asked, I'm looking to upload the showcase of the 360 into my website. So basically Mallory, if you go to ... If you're on your own page and you go to the share button in there where you get a little window and you'll find two links there. One is the link and another is embed. So if you're putting this ... If you want to embed the showcase into a landing page on your website, then you would just click on the embed link, and that copies the entire embed code so you can easily pop that into your website and embed an iframe of your showcase basically. You can tweak that a little bit if you want to, adjust for size and things like that, but yeah, that's basically how it's done. It's really easy.

Amir Frank:
All right, anybody else? We're reaching ... getting close to the end. We probably have a little bit more time for a couple more questions if anybody's got lined up.

Indy Sen:
Yeah, I see one here. David Leon. Can you talk a little bit more about the advantages of using Pro2 or Leica versus using iPad with LiDAR capabilities. I can take that Amir. I know you probably have some thoughts here too. Yeah, I think here the essential is that it really it's about the right camera for the right job. If I think about the Pro2 and the Leicas, those are really used in industrial use cases and commercial or residential real estate use cases where the quality of the image matters, the draw distance, the ability to kind of capture outdoors versus indoors are all of paramount importance, and even being able to take pictures in 4K.

Indy Sen:
And then of course also speed of capture, like with the both the Pro2s and the Leicas, the ability to kind of very quickly capture things within a couple seconds and move it to the next point. On the iPhone, unless you have a tripod, you're still kind of ... you have to find the right piece of equipment to capture things in the right way, but also it's more of a manual process. They're more like wings that you got to capture versus the Pro2 and the Leica being just one shot because of the field of vision.

Indy Sen:
So I think that's how I would talk about that. I think of course right cam for the right job. I think the iPad with LiDAR and the iPhone with LiDAR are going to be very capable as well. So I think it's probably going to be more of a matter of what is the use case that you're going to have as a photographer. Are these quick residential real estate jobs or even like specific rooms? If you're a general contractor, are these daily site conditions you're trying to capture versus things that need to be eventually captured and analyzed at millimeter level precision? I think that's where the hallmarks of the Leica and the Pro2.

Indy Sen:
But we see these things as complementary. I think typically what we expect to see is that customers will be looking at either some of these higher-end cameras as you mentioned, but also potentially augment their understanding of side or/and equip themselves with the iPad and the iPhone as well. Yeah, so we see as highly complimentary, different cameras for different jobs.

Amir Frank:
Yeah, definitely, couldn't agree more. One last question I just wanted to address and then we're just over nine o'clock, but Kevin asked, and this is kind of in the same light as your question there Indy. My scan luxury home's using the pro camera, including exteriors of dusk, but then pulled the Z1 to take a few additional shots so the water appears in the pool which is actually a really, really great trick, good for you Kevin, in the pool from the dollhouse view and that has to do with Cortex and whatnot, as you know being able to get the water in there. Misalignment is very common unfortunately with these Z1 shots. It's just a trial and error process. What are the best tricks to get the Z1 shot to align with existing Pro scans?

Amir Frank:
So the problem with scanning Z1 and other 360 cameras outdoors Kevin is of course you're dealing with a Cortex engine to convert those into 3D data to help with alignment. This kind of goes back to how the Cortex engine works and the fact that it's based on machine learning, which requires a ton of images and 3D, proper 3D data from things like the Pro1 and Pro2 to back that up. So we just don't have that much of those outdoors and that's where those cameras come in, and have a little bit of difficulty because of that. So as people scan more outdoors and even if you scan 360 and if you scan 360 views, the 3D data is still captured.

Amir Frank:
So all those shots, when you're using a 3D camera like the Pro2 or BLK help with making Cortex better. What I would recommend Kevin is basically to have the Z1 shots really on top of the Pro2 shots. So scanning with the Pro2 outside as you know can only be done during dusk, dawn, things like that when the light is not so much infrared light from the sun and so scan that with the Pro2. And of course as you know, it's not going to capture the water from the pool, but have the Z1 maybe as close to it, if not right on top of the scans that you just created with the Pro2. So there's just as much overlapping data as possible and that's the best we can do right now.

Amir Frank:
With that said, we are just over the hour, so again, thank you so much to Haakon and Indy for joining me and helping out with the webinar. It's really amazing stuff, really appreciate it.

Haakon:
Thank you Amir.

Indy Sen:
Thank you.

Amir Frank:
And thank you everybody for joining us and asking all these great questions. This is exactly why we do this and why and try and help this way, giving you as much information as possible so you can take advantage of the tools at hand. So please come back in another two weeks. We'll be back with more information and hopefully more questions to answer. And until then, take care and stay safe. Thanks again very much everybody. Bye-bye.