Video: Matterport ShopTalk 14: Matterport Betas for Android and iOS | Video courtesy of Matterport YouTube Channel | 16 December 2020

Hi All,

Below is the transcription for the Matterport ShopTalk #14 Webinar that aired Wednesday, 16 December 2020: Matterport Betas for Android and iOS

Presenting

1. Matterport Marketing Content Manager Amir Frank
2. Matterport Senior Director of Product Management Kirk Stromberg
3. Matterport Vice President of Product Marketing Indy Sen
4. Matterport Senior Product Marketing Manager, Platform Elizabeth Fabozzi

Transcript (video above)

Amir Frank:
Welcome Matterporters, thanks so much for joining us today. I appreciate your attendance. We're going to give a couple more seconds here for other people to come on in.

Amir Frank:
But in the meantime, I just wanted to go ahead and let you know who we've got with us and what we'll be talking about. Today with us, back again, is Kirk Stromberg. Thank you so much Kirk for joining us.

Kirk Stromberg:
Hey everybody. Thanks very much for joining us. I'm going to be talking a little bit about Matterport Capture on Android and a little bit about Capture with iOS LiDAR.

Amir Frank:
All right. Very much looking forward to that. I know a lot of people are waiting for news about Android and its compatibilities and whatnot, so looking forward to getting into that. We also have with us again Elizabeth Fabozzi who'll be helping us with questions and whatnot. Hey Elizabeth, how are you?

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Hi team. How are you?

Amir Frank:
Okay. So let me just go ahead and get the slide show going here. All right, here we go. So, Shop Talk 14. Again, thank you very much for participating.

Amir Frank:
And as Kirk just mentioned, we'll be talking about Beta, its functionality for Android and the iPhone 12 Pro with LiDAR, so very exciting stuff. And yeah, let's take it away. Okay, Kirk, what you got?

Kirk Stromberg:
All right. Let's take a look first at our lineup of cameras and devices that we can use to capture space. And we'll talk specifically about what the Android Beta supports at the moment and what's going to be supported in upcoming releases.

Kirk Stromberg:
So starting on the left, we currently support the Matterport Pro2 Camera. And at the moment we don't support the original Pro1 camera, but that's going to be coming very soon. So you can use that with the current Android Beta.

Kirk Stromberg:
Moving over, the Leica BLK360 is the high-end LiDAR device, and we currently don't support that in the Android Beta, we do obviously on iOS. This is in the queue for support later, but right now we're focused on the original Pro camera and the 360 cameras.

Kirk Stromberg:
Speaking of 360 cameras, let's move over into the center section. So we have six 360 camera models that we currently support. In the middle we have the original Insta360 ONE X with the Theta Z1 and the Theta V. These are the original cameras that we supported on iOS, and these are the 360 cameras that we originally supported in the early part of the Android Capture Beta.

Kirk Stromberg:
Now, over the summer, Insta360 announced and released the Insta360 ONE R. This is a modular camera, so that there's different modules that you can use with it. When you have the 360 module installed, we can support that with the Android Beta as well, because we capture a spherical image with it.

Kirk Stromberg:
The other modules are narrow field of view cameras, and we don't support those because you can't capture a full spherical image to create the space. Now, recently we also added support for the Ricoh Theta SC2, this camera's been around for a while, so we were a little bit slow to the game in getting support for that, but that is now supported in the Android Beta as well.

Kirk Stromberg:
Last month the Insta360 team also introduced the ONE X2, and that is also supported with the current Android Beta. Now, we'll talk a little bit more about the specific cameras, their known issues and what we're still working on in a second. So that's the lineup for the mid-range 360 cameras, an ever-expanding set of options that you can use to capture a space.

Kirk Stromberg:
Now, on iOS we also have Matterport for iPhone, and that allows you to capture space just with the phone that you've got. And this involves you rotating around in a space, capturing a 360 image, we convert that to 3D. And then you move to your next position, do another capture, and create your space that way. Again, no external camera connected, just with the phone or iPad that you have.

Kirk Stromberg:
That mechanism or that technique is not yet supported in the Android Beta. That will be coming in our second Beta, our second Beta 2, which will be coming in Q1. And that will allow you to use your Android phone to rotate around in a space, capture a spherical image, and then synthesize the 3D from that.

Kirk Stromberg:
Initially, we're probably going to be focusing on flagship Android phones that have ultra wide cameras, similar to the iPhone 11 and the iPhone 12. The ultra wide cameras give you a really wide field of view, and it lets you move through a space and capture that imagery in a much easier fashion than the narrow field of view cameras where you have to capture more stops.

Kirk Stromberg:
Every time you do an additional stop, you introduce a possibility that there's parallax and stitching issues between images. So we'll start there, but we intend to bring the full complements of support to Capture on Android.

Kirk Stromberg:
So the next slide, I'm not going to go through these details. This is something we're going to pop up on our support site. As we get more and more cameras out there and we support a variety of different capture methods, it's important to try to keep up to date.

Kirk Stromberg:
And I say this just from the rule of thumb, is that you want to keep up to date in both your versions of Capture, but you also want to keep up to date in the firmware that runs on your cameras. So there are some specific cameras that I just want to call out, where it's very important that you have a minimum version of firmware on those cameras.

Kirk Stromberg:
The ONE R in particular, we started supporting over the summer with a Beta build. That Beta build is not automatically updated from the Insta360 application. You have to manually go do that in terms of downloading the latest production build of firmware and cut over to that with a manual method, not using the Insta360 app. So you can go to matterport.com/beta and there's more instructions there on how to do that. That's one call-out.

Kirk Stromberg:
The ONE X2, it's a new camera. [inaudible 00:06:04] the 360 team is updating their firmware fairly rapidly, so there's a new build out as of a week or two ago. Again, you want to keep checking probably with your Insta360 or your Ricoh Theta app or take a look on the website in terms of what the latest firmware is.

Kirk Stromberg:
The Matterport Capture app will start reminding you when it sees a connected camera that has out-of-date firmware. And we just do this to make sure that you're aware that you've got older firmware on there, and it's always a better option to try to keep up to date, to make sure that we've been able to knock down bugs or performance issues or enable new features.

Kirk Stromberg:
So we'll get some help on the support site. I know it's an [inaudible 00:06:43] but we want to make sure we've got a reference for what's the minimum build of different Betas, of different versions of Capture, what's supported with what camera, because it's getting to be a longer list and we need to make sure we have a nice crisp reference.

Kirk Stromberg:
Okay, so let's talk about the Android Beta in terms of what's new. We've got a bunch of recent updates to the build. And again, you can get this on the Play Store, I'll go through some details about how to get it.

Kirk Stromberg:
As I talked about the newer cameras; the SC2 and the ONE X2, they're still in what I would call a shakedown phase. They were still working with both of those teams to work out any kind of performance bugs, any kinds of issues that we're seeing, interacting with those cameras.

Kirk Stromberg:
Sometimes that leads to a firmware change on the camera, or sometimes it leads to a change in Capture. So those you still might expect some performance issues. We are still working on image quality improvements for those, especially the ONE R, the ONE X2, and the Theta SC2.

Kirk Stromberg:
In general, Capture sets Auto HDR and Auto White Balance with those cameras so that we can get a consistent capture across the entire space. And then we do the final tuning for image quality in the cloud pipeline. And every camera is a little bit different, so we typically are tuning and trying to adjust parameters for those.

Kirk Stromberg:
So as you're capturing in the Beta, this information is awesome, it's super helpful for us to be able to get a sense of where are we a little bit off and where do we need to make some tuning adjustments there.

Kirk Stromberg:
We're in the phase for the Beta 1 where we're now trying to work through our feature parity item. So we're trying to get to the point where basically we can say okay, aside from Matterport for iPhone, everything you've got on the iOS version of Capture you got on the Android.

Kirk Stromberg:
So one of the things that is recent in the last two weeks to the Beta is being able to convert a place 360 to 3D. And to folks that are not familiar with this technique, this is more common with the Pro cameras where you might be trying to Capture something in bright sun and the near-infrared is interfering with our sensors in the Pro cameras.

Kirk Stromberg:
And so when you can't capture depth data in that situation, what you can do is you can take a 360 view, which is without depth data, place it into the model, place it into the location that you'd like it, and then on the menu you can tap 'Convert to 360'... 'Convert to 3D', excuse me.

Kirk Stromberg:
This will synthesize a 3D depth image from just the 360 imagery. And it's not affected by sunlight or near-infrared like a regular 3D scan would be. And this is one way that you can fill in outdoors in challenging areas. So this is now available on Android in the latest Beta.

Kirk Stromberg:
Another thing that we personally brought to the build is what we call Visual Assisted Alignment. And you may have heard of something called AprilTags, I should have printed one out to show everybody. This is a technique and a feature that you would want to use when you're in perhaps a large open space with a lot of repetitive imagery or any place where there's going to be a challenge because the space looks very similar from scan to scan.

Kirk Stromberg:
So for instance, if you're in an auditorium where there are just rows and rows of identical seats, or you're in a really large open space like maybe an open warehouse or an open ballroom floor where every time you're moving a different scan position, the imagery is very, very similar. And so that sometimes can confuse our alignment algorithms.

Kirk Stromberg:
And so what AprilTags do is they provide a unique marker that you can print on paper, put up, and their unique tag, and when you turn on this feature in settings, when you scan and we attempt to align, we will now look specifically for AprilTags and we'll pay attention to which AprilTag we see in the scene, and that will help and assist the alignment process.

Kirk Stromberg:
And so in a repetitive environment where some of the folks who have been doing Matterport scans for a while might remember that at one point you used to have to put objects like trash cans and cones and something different in the scene to differentiate it.

Kirk Stromberg:
We now make sure we're supporting AprilTags so that it's a little bit more... It's easy to do and it takes just [inaudible 00:10:55]. And especially for super large spaces, you now have unique markers that you can use.

Kirk Stromberg:
All right, working on the list. So I'll talk a little bit more about export and archive single jobs in just a second. In general, we want to make it easier for you to take jobs off of a device, keep an archive of them, get them onto a different device if you need to switch devices, and we know this has been an issue.

Kirk Stromberg:
Now, there's third-party tools called iMazing and iExplorer, which are super useful. And Amir has a whole bunch of videos and instructions off on the support site for how to use these tools to be making archives and moving things back and forth.

Kirk Stromberg:
What we're doing now, and I'll show in a second, is within the app itself, we're making it easier to do a backup of your jobs and get them off to some other location. We're supporting firmware updates for the Pro2 cameras. Again, firmware for the third-party cameras, you have to do that through their applications or manually, but we will start warning when we see out-of-date firmware.

Kirk Stromberg:
Okay, let's talk a little bit about known issues. So it is, again, it's a Beta, that means that everything is not going to be perfect. If you're using the Android Capture for commercial jobs, please keep that in mind. We know everybody wants to use it as fast as they can. We're trying to work through the performance issues.

Kirk Stromberg:
But right now if you're comparing iOS and Android, you'll see that Android is a little bit slower in terms of capturing, transferring, and aligning. And we're working through our performance improvements there.

Kirk Stromberg:
We've been trying to work on the underlying architecture for how we do this to make it more consistent and modern on both Android and iOS. And so part of this process has us working through a new architecture on Android and working the performance angle, so that we can get to the point where it's just as fast as iOS.

Kirk Stromberg:
There's always going to be some bugs and stability issues. Again, we're trying to knock those down and play whack-a-mole with them. We have improved crash reporting and bug analysis in both versions of Capture now. So we're getting a little bit better about methodically finding out what's the top issues, what are the top crashes, and knocking them down.

Kirk Stromberg:
Again, if you used both iOS and Android, you'll see that there's some visual differences. And we're now into Phase 2 where we're working performance, final bugs, and we'll get the finishing polish to get all the i's dotted and the t's crossed to get ready for release coming in Q1.

Kirk Stromberg:
So I mentioned before, we want to be able to bring what we do on the iPhone, Matterport for iPhone, where you rotate around, we want to bring that to Android. And that will be coming in Q1, but that's going to come in the second release of Capture on Android, what we'll call Beta 2. So we'll start Beta as soon as we've got something prototyped. And again, we'll release Android V1, and then we'll get the Beta going for Smartphone Capture.

Kirk Stromberg:
I just want to give a preview of something that you'll see in the current build. And this is an example of where in my Android Capture instance, I have a whole bunch of jobs. And for whatever reason, maybe I need to move that particular project or job over to a different device, or I just want to clear up space on the device, and I want to basically get this thing off and archive it.

Kirk Stromberg:
So in the Help & Support menu inside Capture, you can go in and pick 'Export Jobs'. And when you open your Export Job menu, you'll see a list of the jobs that you would see in what we call the job browser; the view that you see [inaudible 00:14:25] each of the jobs, and it should match exactly the names you've given them in your job browser.

Kirk Stromberg:
So for [inaudible 00:14:32] I'm going to pick the Donner Lake Theta Z1 job and select that. And then Capture is going to go off and chew on this for a little bit, and it's going to wrap up all that data and package everything up and create a zip file of that, with the name that you've got from your job, and then give you the Share menu.

Kirk Stromberg:
So you can decide to keep it locally onto your device, pop it up to a cloud storage. On Android, on more modern Android devices, there's a device-to-device nearby sharing, which is similar to the mechanism on iOS. So if you happen to have another Android device, you could essentially [inaudible 00:15:10] over to them and so forth.

Kirk Stromberg:
So again, what we're trying to do is make it easier for you to manage your files. Anybody who's gone into the Jobs folder on Capture knows that the current folder structure is such that... It's not really meant for users to be working with, because you'll notice the names of the folders are these really long alphanumeric strings, they're meant to be unique IDs.

Kirk Stromberg:
And so it's really important to not change those, because that's how Capture references all the stuff. So that's why we're trying to wrap these things up, give it friendly names, make it simple and easy for you to manage folders and files and move them back and forth.

Kirk Stromberg:
And for both iOS and Android, one of the next parts they'll be working on is seamless import. So you say, "Okay, great. I want to pick up something that I've archived or exported from somebody else, let's pull this in to my local instance and take care of it there."

Kirk Stromberg:
It's two things here; one is, this is all local, right? This is not a cloud restore or what we call cloud restore from Matterport's cloud, that is also in the queue, where you'd be able to say, "Okay, I've got a good internet connection, I can browse my models, and I want to be able to pull that down." That's not yet... This is all local to your device and any other cloud instances that you have available but it's not tied into our system yet.

Kirk Stromberg:
One obvious question would be; okay, transferring jobs between Android and iOS. There's still some wrinkles we're working out there. You may find that transferring from Android to iOS is easier, iOS to Android has some wrinkles if it's a duplicate. So I'd say right now try to keep it within each platform. We're working out the kinks between export and import across platforms.

Kirk Stromberg:
Okay. Yeah, let's go to the next slide then Amir. Thank you. All right. So if you're not already using the Android Capture Beta, again, it's for external cameras, not for connected cameras. We've got a couple of items that we support on iOS that are not supported yet but they're coming; the original Pro camera, the BLK360, Smartphone Capture.

Kirk Stromberg:
It's important right now to be on Android 8.0 or above. Android's fairly fragmented, there's a lot of wireless carriers that kind of drag their feet in terms of doing Android updates. We've gone back to... We support 8, 9, 10 and 11. For Android, that's still not a giant portion of the market, because it's so fragmented, but that's where we've cut our line so far.

Kirk Stromberg:
The other element is that what we do is fairly performance-intensive. You need a device with decent horsepower. And so at the moment, for Android, we need 3GB of RAM or more. You should be able to find out how much RAM's in your device.

Kirk Stromberg:
But this is one of the common things; if you go to Play Store and you can't install Capture, it doesn't seem like it's available for your device, the typical reasons would be the older version of Android before 8, before Oreo, not enough RAM, physical RAM in the device. And again, this is not storage, this is working memory in terms of being able to process things in real-time.

Kirk Stromberg:
There is third element that will also prevent you from installing Matterport Capture, and that's if you've unlocked your bootloader, if you've rooted your device, then right now that's an unsecure environment for us in terms of our IP, so we don't allow installations on unlocked bootloaders or rooted devices. And if those terms don't make any sense, then don't worry about it because it doesn't apply.

Kirk Stromberg:
So again, open Beta, all you have to do is go to the Play Store, search on Matterport, you'll find Capture, no sign-ups required. We highly recommend Auto Update, Play Store will keep you up to date.

Kirk Stromberg:
This is a little bit different than how we do Betas on iOS, we have to use a separate app to TestFlight. Android, it's really easy, you just use the same Play Store; you just find it, pop in, install and you're good to go.

Kirk Stromberg:
All right, so next topic. We'll do Q&A shortly. Just real quick, so switching gears here. Back on iOS. Okay, so iOS Capture, we have a new Beta available. And again, you go to matterport.com/beta.

Kirk Stromberg:
Capture 4.1 is available. And on iOS you have to use a separate app called TestFlight, this is Apple's distribution mechanism for Beta apps. So basically it's like the iOS App Store but you opt in to TestFlight and then you install your Beta apps to TestFlight. And so these are kind of separate distribution channels.

Kirk Stromberg:
So what's really exciting is that obviously everybody's probably heard about the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max supporting LiDAR. So they have active depth sensors that as you rotate, you sweep and you get active depth sensing kind of like a Pro camera or a BLK360 camera. And you can get, in a narrower field of view, actual depth; whereas currently we would synthesize that kind of like the 360 camera.

Kirk Stromberg:
So the benefits are that you should get more accurate data and the general stitching and alignment of the scans will be more robust because we are now actually reading the environment versus synthesizing or guessing as to what that is.

Kirk Stromberg:
This is also available on latest iPad Pro, the 2020 edition. That's a little bit more challenging because the camera array is off-center. So again, with any of these [inaudible 00:20:42] mobile phone captures, it's really important to do exactly the opposite of what you probably would expect with a pano.

Kirk Stromberg:
With a pano, I am usually rotating around myself. And the thing is, here, what we want to do is we want to actually rotate around the phone, because we want to capture a spherical image and as much imagery around us without moving the phone too much because that can introduce what we call parallax errors. And that means you'll get a glitch in the stitching from image to image and device to device.

Kirk Stromberg:
And the end result is that your model might have glitches in it, might not look that good. And in the worst case, it might even not align scan to scan.

Kirk Stromberg:
It may be a little bit hard to see in this particular screenshot but we used the wide field of view camera to capture this space. The LiDAR sensor on the iPhone has a narrower field of view. So you'll see right around the target circle, you'll see a little dot pattern, that's where we're actually getting LiDAR data.

Kirk Stromberg:
And so what we'll do here is basically, where you've got LiDAR data, we're going to use that for depth. When you don't have LiDAR data in a particular spot, we'll continue using just as we do now, we'll synthesize with our Cortex AI and we'll synthesize the depth around that.

Kirk Stromberg:
And so that way you get to capture the whole space and you'd be able to get a higher fidelity read on your space as you go through this.

Kirk Stromberg:
Now, one obvious question is: can I move around and paint the space like I see with a lot of other third-party apps that are really focused just on depth and the [inaudible 00:22:15] and the mesh? You can do that as you capture. The danger is that you want to try and keep your phone as close to center as possible, because the more you move it around, the higher the probability of introducing errors.

Kirk Stromberg:
There's two other phones in the iPhone 12 lineup; the plain iPhone 12, and then the iPhone 12 Mini. Neither of those devices have the LiDAR sensor on them, so we will continue working just as we do on iPhone 11 and the earlier phones. The same way with Smartphone Capture, we'll just use the imagery to synthesize gaps.

Kirk Stromberg:
[inaudible 00:22:53] that it is available, that's Capture 4.1. Outside of iPhone LiDAR, we'll also continue to chip away at bugs and features and performance improvements. So even if you don't have an iPhone 12 with LiDAR, jump on the 4.1 Beta, you should see some important performance improvements.

Kirk Stromberg:
We're continuing to hammer down on bugs and issues that we've seen in prior releases. And again, no sign-up necessary, go to matterport.com/beta and follow the instructions there. But the simplest method to get into TestFlight if you've never used it before is to enter the URL that we post on that site into mobile Safari.

Kirk Stromberg:
And if you do that on your device in mobile Safari, Apple will walk you through installing TestFlight and automatically enabling you for the Beta, and automatically enabling you for that build in there. It's really easy. If there's any problem, you email capture-beta@matterport.com.

Amir Frank:
Fantastic. Awesome. Thank you so much. That was a good amount of data to take in all at once. Happy to answer all the questions that you guys may have regarding all that stuff. I know it's a lot to take in, but really appreciate that Kirk.

Amir Frank:
By all means, you guys can feel free to tackle the questions panel, enter in any questions you want and we'll get to them shortly here.

Amir Frank:
With that said, just wanted to touch on how else you can get support on all your questions. If they're related to this, now is a great time. If they're not related to this, if we have time today, awesome.

Amir Frank:
If we don't, go to matterport.com and you'll see the resources tab there at the top, and if you click on that, you'll find support, that'll get you to our support hub where you can find the most common frequently asked questions, link to our support center where you'll find hundreds of articles that talk about everything related to Matterport, and so on and so forth. As well as the phone number, this phone number that you see on the screen, (408) 805-3347 is relevant to anybody in the U.S.

Amir Frank:
If you're not in the U.S. however, and you go to that page, scroll down to the bottom where the phone number is located and you'll see the correct phone number for you. You can also email the support team at support@matterport.com, and that's about it.

Amir Frank:
As always, I mention this every time, but it's super important to always make sure that your contact information in your account is up to date. Any time we send out an email that is relevant to your account, things that are really important that you want to make sure you get, they're sent to the email that's registered in your account. So if you don't update that and make sure that it is current, you won't see those emails, so super important.

Amir Frank:
And then if you're interested in just keeping a finger on the pulse that's everything Matterport, check out our Facebook page at Facebook.com/Matterport. We're constantly updating all the updates that you'll see there, relevant to latest Beta releases like we're talking about here, anything that's coming down the pipeline and recently released, you'll find it there. So a good place to get some more information.

Amir Frank:
And we have a Facebook group as well called MOUG, that's M-O-U-G, for Matterport Official User Group. You can find that by searching MOUG on Facebook, and you'll get to become part of a really amazing group of people who are using Matterport day in and day out and know it through and through.

Amir Frank:
So if you have any I guess support... not technical-related questions but more like business related like, "How can I penetrate this market in my geo?" That's a great place to ask those types of questions.

Amir Frank:
And we do see in MOUG a lot of really amazing spaces being posted. It's a great place to get better by showing people who are doing this your work, your scans, and get some feedback from them. And if you want, you can go to go.matterport.com/nominate-your-space to nominate your space to be put in our gallery of spaces and Destination Everywhere site.

Amir Frank:
Also looking forward to seeing some of your amazing spaces there. And with that said, I am going to go ahead and stop sharing so we can just get a better glimpse, or at least so I can get a better glimpse of the Q&A panel here. All right Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
All right.

Amir Frank:
[crosstalk 00:27:53] questions.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Yeah. We've got a couple of questions here. First question comes from Jim says, "Do you have any suggestions when using Thetas in large homes for improving connectivity so it doesn't take so long to complete the scan if you're having to go a further distance to stay out of the image?"

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
"We use a Matterport and the Thetas. When using a Matterport, this isn't an issue, but with the Thetas it takes longer to complete the scan while you're trying to further your distance from the camera. We are using an iPad."

Amir Frank:
Okay.

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah, I'll take that. So it's a good question Jim. And this is something that folks have noticed too, the 360 cameras in general tend to have a little bit lower range. And I have definitely experienced exactly what you're talking about, where you've got to sometimes peek your iPad or your iOS device around the corner just to get a little bit better line of sight to the device.

Kirk Stromberg:
So there's a couple of things you can do. One is, and I believe this is correct, it's been a while since I've checked, the Thetas I think you can, in the Ricoh app, you can switch between 2.4 and 5 GHz.

Kirk Stromberg:
So 2.4 generally has better range but slow bandwidth. 5 has higher bandwidth, slower range. That might be a help, that might not be. One of the things that's in our queue, for folks who have been with us for a while know that our queue is what we call slip mode or half-and-half mode, and so the notion here is you could be near the camera, take one shot, walk around to the other side, take another shot, and weave the ratio from the shot.

Kirk Stromberg:
The Ricoh cameras also have a plugin environment, and so third-party developers can create plugins for the Ricoh Theta, and one of them is a timer. And so one of the common requests has been, "Can we get a timer of some sort so you could set it off then go run and then come back?" What was the downside there is just the hassle of reconnecting and so forth.

Kirk Stromberg:
What we want to do is try to provide a method for all cameras, not just the Thetas or the Insta cameras who are trying to provide a mechanism to do that in larger spaces, such that you could capture that without having connectivity distance problems.

Kirk Stromberg:
So no great solution for you yet. Take a look to see if you can switch the device to a different frequency. Obviously in apartments or places where there's a ton of WiFi going on, your range typically could be a little bit more challenging just because you're fighting for bandwidth.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Awesome. Thank you so much Kirk. Next question comes from Rob. And there was another question along these same lines earlier is that, "Do we see a day coming when we use LiDAR to capture measurements to convert to things like true plan with either iPhone or the Android devices that have a LiDAR component, or floor plans as well?"

Kirk Stromberg:
As we go through and expand the array of devices that we're supporting, characterizing the measurement quality and characterizing the quality of those spaces is the key thing to do.

Kirk Stromberg:
And this is unfortunately a thing where it would be great to have just one simple number where it's like, "Oh, it's plus or minus X." But the problem is that, I think as everybody knows, it depends on the space, how you're capturing the space, what kind of measurement you want to do, is it a big measurement or small measurement?

Kirk Stromberg:
So your tolerance of most things are going to depend. And unfortunately the answer is: it depends. So we are trying to characterize, through the Beta we want to characterize what LiDAR brings to us in terms of the improvements of that. Because obviously if we can get to the point where we can say, "If you're doing a good scanning technique, this is now sufficient to be able to enable a bunch of assets where you could reasonably, reliably take those kinds of measurements and create those kinds of assets."

Kirk Stromberg:
So I think right now stand by for more on that in terms of us characterizing what we think that's good for and when it's not. We want to give guidance to be able to say, "Okay, in these situations, this is looking pretty good. In those situations, probably need to use a different technique." And I don't know who's the best one at it [inaudible 00:31:51].

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
No, I thought that was excellent. I think that's exactly why we need to... We are approaching assets that include measurements with LiDAR this way, we just want to make sure that we are producing things that make sense for the use case.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
The next question we have here is from Juan, it says, "On a Pro camera, I can switch to 360 panorama to 3D?" So I think this is around the 360 to 3D conversions.

Kirk Stromberg:
Yes. Yeah. On any of the devices that we support or any mechanism by which you would capture... I'll back up a second. So our normal mode of operation is you're capturing a 3D shot and we're synthesizing that and we're trying to build a model from it.

Kirk Stromberg:
There are instances where that is not really desired. For instance, if you say I've got a model of a structure, but I really want to give a view from the street, but the street is 50 meters away, and I don't want to have a long path out to the street because it'd just be annoying for the viewer to actually walk down there.

Kirk Stromberg:
You can take a 360 view and place it 50 meters from the model or some distance from the model to give the impression for the user that you're going out to the street, you're seeing the structure from the street and you're going back. So that's one bucket where you would use 360 views placed in the model.

Kirk Stromberg:
Obviously folks will use 360 views if they just want the imagery, they want to be able to incorporate that into their tours. So what Juan is talking about is when you place the 360 next to the model, like what I was referring to earlier, there are instances where you really do actually want that to be part of the 3D tour.

Kirk Stromberg:
If you can place the 360 in that location and then you tap on the little circle icon, there's a menu option that will say 'Convert to 3D'. And when you do that, what we're going to do is we're going to use Cortex just like we would with the 360 camera, synthesize the 3D data, take the location that you've placed the 360 and the surrounding 3D scans and attempt to align it.

Kirk Stromberg:
Now, you do need other 3D scans around to align too. But we found this was fairly successful in circumstances where it's challenging to take a normal 3D view. So absolutely, yes, you can do that with any camera or any source.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Awesome. Thank you Kirk. This one's kind of a fun one, this one's from Linda, it says, "If I'm getting a new phone for Christmas, which phone would you suggest for the benefits, easy of use, and support?"

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah. I think our recommendation for Android or iOS is there's some parts that are totally common. The thing that's not obvious about using Matterport with these devices is that RAM is really important.

Kirk Stromberg:
You want as much horsepower as you can get, but [inaudible 00:34:42] is a little more subtle. And again, this is not storage. So if somebody says it comes with 512 MB of storage or 1 GB of storage, that's storage, that's long-term memory. What we're talking about is RAM and that's working memory. And you typically want as much as you can get, as much as you can afford.

Kirk Stromberg:
If you're thinking of doing really large spaces, the amount of RAM you've got is typically one of the actual dating items to do [inaudible 00:35:10] spaces. If you're not doing giant spaces, you're not talking about hundreds of scans, then it's no big deal, it should be fine. As modern as you can, latest OS.

Kirk Stromberg:
If you are thinking about doing phone-based capture, so we're [inaudible 00:35:26] your phone around, for Android I would bias towards a phone that has an ultra wide field of view angle camera. Almost all the flagships from all the vendors have variants that have an ultra wide field od view camera.

Kirk Stromberg:
That's where we're going to start first. We'll bring it to the other cameras as well as but it's more tedious when you're using a narrow field of view. So I think Pixel 5 finally has one, all the galaxy... You have to work through all the different models, there's like a billion models, so look for ultra wide field of view cameras if you're thinking of doing that with your phone. I hope that helps.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
That was great. Thank you so much. Next is from Rich, "Are you looking to add processing of mobile data, i.e. data coming in from mobile sensory systems such as the BLK2GO?"

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah. So that was a great question. Okay. So there's a lot of other systems that will capture 3D data. And so we are always looking at ways in which we could incorporate that into our system.

Kirk Stromberg:
Example, the BLK2GO is, I don't know, it's a big brother or cousin to the BLK360. It's a mobile handheld platform, and so it's a fairly expensive professional piece of gear that you can go to a space and wave around and basically paint the space. And you're capturing point cloud data and some imagery from that as you go through.

Kirk Stromberg:
Typically, this is used in more documentation situations where you need to really document the space. You need a 3D model, you need a high-definition 3D model of this. It's probably not so good for what we do primarily, which is tours, because you don't have that spherical imagery and the really high-resolution imagery for that.

Kirk Stromberg:
But there's a really good reason why folks would say, "Hey, I would like to have a simple tour, and I'm not necessarily concerned about the visual fidelity of that." So we are looking at experimenting by taking colorized point clouds with or without imagery, injecting them into our system and creating Matterport models for situations like that.

Kirk Stromberg:
But that's still in experimental right now. So we'll have more on that when we can graduate from experimental stage.

Amir Frank:
And my understanding of the BLK2GO is that it's a 270-ish field of view because you don't see yourself, you're holding it out in front of you and it doesn't see you, it's just everything around you. And that's [crosstalk 00:37:54]

Kirk Stromberg:
Right. [inaudible 00:37:54] if we were able to pull that in, is you would be, well, what does a tour look like, okay, when you rotate around? It would depend on your coverage. There's a lot of details.

Amir Frank:
Yeah. So that's a complete one.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
All right. Next one, I think I'll give you a break Kirk, I think this one's for Amir, it says, "I received the Pro2. I'm very much enjoying Amir's..." Sorry, the question [inaudible 00:38:22]. "Enjoying Amir's videos. I believe that it was possible to auto start the highlight reel when visitors enter an asset, but I could not find out how to do this. Is this possible?"

Amir Frank:
Yes. Yes. It is possible. And the way you do that is by adding a parameter, a URL parameter to the end of the link that you share with your customers, or if you're embedding it, that's the one that you embed into your landing page.

Amir Frank:
And you can find all those parameters if you go to our support page, where I mentioned before, if you just go to support.matterport.com and just search for URL, you'll see a little page there on the left that says URL Parameters.

Amir Frank:
Basically, if you are embedding this, then what you do is, I think it's Play=1, it's &Play=1, I believe. Actually, no, that loads... Maybe it's HL, I think HL for highlight reel. So HL&, you have your link, at the end you add &HL=1 and that should automatically start the highlight reel.

Amir Frank:
Forgive me, I don't remember all of them. So my best recommendation is just go to that URL, parameters page in the help center and check it out.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Awesome. Thank you Amir. All right, next it's from Chris, "Is it possible to update the firmware of Matterport Pro2 Camera by using an Android tablet?"

Kirk Stromberg:
Yes Chris, it should be. So make sure that you're on the latest build of the Android Beta. Currently, that will show V140, that's the build number, we just keep on sequencing those.

Kirk Stromberg:
So you need to be signed in, and then when you're connected to your Pro2 camera, you should receive a little notification if your camera firmware is out of date and there's a newer firmware package for you and you follow the flow there, and it should prompt you to be able to transfer the new firmware to your Pro2 camera and update it.

Kirk Stromberg:
If you are trying that and you're having problems, write to us at capture-beta@matterport.com because I'm very interested in if there's issues.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Great. Next one is from William, "Any potential for the ability to blur Mattertags in the future?"

Kirk Stromberg:
Yes. Hey Will, good to hear from you. Some of you may remember when we first introduced AprilTags, we had an option to try to erase or blur AprilTags automatically.

Kirk Stromberg:
So the context of the issue is I might be capturing a space that I really want to be able to have a great set of visuals for, but I actually don't want to have the AprilTag markers visible in the space because they're a distraction, right? They take away from the beauty of the shot.

Kirk Stromberg:
The problem is when you require them to be able to actually capture the shot. It's kind of a chicken and egg, you need them but you want to get rid of them.

Kirk Stromberg:
We did some experiments where we were trying to auto erase them, that first round was doing more damage than good, so we skipped that, and we're going to be taking another run at that. But generally, the notion of, "Here's the thing, let's get rid of it, let's [inaudible 00:41:33] without it being too distracting" is still on our radar right now. But I don't have any [inaudible 00:41:38] for that.

Amir Frank:
[inaudible 00:41:39] a couple of times, I don't know, this is probably a few months ago, introduced the blur tool, which doesn't have the date but it's more manual, right, it's not automatically going around and looking for AprilTags. It's a little bit more work on the user's part, but that'll probably be sooner than what you're talking about.

Kirk Stromberg:
That's a good one. Yeah. Amir, that's a good one. So that's exactly the right [inaudible 00:42:05]. You will have the ability to blur manually a workshop when the manual blur tool comes out.

Kirk Stromberg:
We were trying to be ambitious and just have a button to say, "Hey, I'm using AprilTags. Find them, get rid of them. I don't want to see them." We got work to do there.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
All right. Juan's got another question for you Amir, "Is any improvements on the ability to create videos from scans?" So I think probably some of the auto-generated videos and then maybe the easiest way to generate a video for a Matterport model.

Amir Frank:
Yeah. Yes. Right now I think the best and most predictable way of doing that is by recording your screen basically. The way I do it, I use QuickTime, I set up a highlight reel the way I want to move through the space, and I just hit record on the screen recorder and it plays on my highlight reel, and just sit back and let it go through that.

Amir Frank:
That's probably the most predictable way of doing it, and the best way that you can also manually navigate through the space. I know there are some differences, sometimes the highlight reel does things. I mean, we've recently updated it so that you can more predictably rotate in the right direction and so on and so forth.

Amir Frank:
But some things you still have a little bit less control over, so you may want to manually use your arrow keys and the A, S, W and D keys to move around.

Amir Frank:
There is some secret things, like the letter P is a good one to always keep in mind. If you're in showcase and you hit the letter P, you'll see a little tiny menu come up in the top right corner that allows you to hide the little pucks that are on the ground, the little scan positions that are on the ground. So that can help with recording.

Amir Frank:
That's something that I believe does actually automatically happen with the highlight reel. So if you are manually going through and you don't want to see the little white circles, use that.

Amir Frank:
It also allows you to change the speed at which you pan and move through the showcase. So if the highlight reel is going through there a little bit too fast, you can change that. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet have control over the rotation of the dollhouse and zoom of the floor plan. That is probably best done through the highlight reel and just recording it.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Awesome. Thank you. Next one's from Daniel here, "Is there a roadmap to improve the resolution or renderings when you transition between scanned locations and a space? Specifically, when a user is walking through a space, the polygons are very blocky. I would love to see a transition rendered with smaller polygons."

Amir Frank:
Yeah.

Kirk Stromberg:
Yes. Great question.

Amir Frank:
Go ahead Kirk.

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah, that's a great question. This is one of the things that the teams are constantly looking at, so this is the balance of how to stream enough data to your device for showcase to make sure that it's a really awesome experience but also make sure it's fast and responsive.

Kirk Stromberg:
If we were to stream the full resolution of everything that we've got, the problem is that most of the time a lot of folks would have a very sluggish, chunky transition. So one of the things the team has been looking at is how do we optimize and do a little bit more like the online gaming in terms of locally streaming the best highest resolution where you're locally in the tour. And then as you move the tour, you adaptively move that.

Kirk Stromberg:
We don't have the time frame for that right now. There's a lot of experimentation going on through how to optimize that and how to improve the tours. Because we want to make sure that, again, the whole ultimate goal is to make the viewer feel like they're really there. And so we want to try to minimize those distractions. So it's definitely a thing in work, but I don't have the time frame for you.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Great. Thank you so much. And then [inaudible 00:46:02] this is Daniel again, "Will there be an option to give the users that are walking through a space the ability to toggle Mattertags on and off?" So a little bit of customization in showcase.

Amir Frank:
Oh yeah. That actually goes back to the parameters that we were recently talking about. There is a parameter that you can use to add to the link that will eliminate Mattertags from your model.

Amir Frank:
Unfortunately, it's not something that the user can do. So once you have that link sent out, it's not like the visitor, the person who clicked on that link can just click [inaudible 00:46:38] and go back and forth between with and without Mattertags.

Amir Frank:
The link that you provide either provides the Mattertags or it doesn't, and that's it, there's no way of easily swapping between the two. But that parameter is... If you add &MT=0 (for Mattertag), add that to the end of your share link and you'll no longer see those Mattertags.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
And then, "Does Matterport have any plans to add features that would make it easier to integrate to an eCommerce website and to scan spaces? We sell decorative home accessories, so we scan staged homes and showrooms, we want to be able to tag our products so you can see in the models and then pull the shopping experience into the model." So I can take this one.

Amir Frank:
Yeah. By all means Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Sure. Daniel, so wonderful that you're using Matterport to help keep businesses going during this COVID-19 time. I'm not sure if we... Did we do a Shop Talk on any of the dev tools yet?

Amir Frank:
We did a while back. We haven't done an update on that.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Okay.

Amir Frank:
I do have that planned. But yeah, we talked with Dominique back when [crosstalk 00:47:53]-

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Yeah. One thing I would suggest, Daniel, is to take a look at some of our developer tools, especially our SDK, software development kit. It really helps generate a more shopping type experience for you.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Through the SDK, you can do things like organize your Mattertags, search those Mattertags for metadata so you can do things like, "All of the red Mattertags are items that are on sale or on clearance." And people would be able to navigate through the model that way.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Now, integrating a shopping experience, that's a little bit more advanced. We definitely support the ability to, within a Mattertag display, a 2D photo or some more detailed view of that particular item, and then link out to a shopping experience.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
So we don't have anything integrated today, but we are starting to delve into the world of retail since Matterport is really key to keeping these places open during COVID-19. So just go ahead and check out some of those items in our SDK and our developer tools. You should be able to create a more shopping view of a Matterport tour through those kits.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
All right. And then I'm not sure I know what this system is but maybe one of you guys do. It says, "Will Matterport be supporting customized Nadris anytime soon? N-A-D-R-I-S."

Kirk Stromberg:
Oh, the [inaudible 00:49:25]. Yeah, that's the bottom hole in the sphere. At the moment, no. So for context, a common question is, "Can you add your custom branding of your company to those panos [inaudible 00:49:37]?" So if somebody looked down they would see 'Shot by XYZ'.

Kirk Stromberg:
At the moment, we don't. I know that's common in some other platforms. At the moment right now, that's not high on our list. That's where we are at the moment in terms of [inaudible 00:49:54].

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
We've got a question, "Is there a speak option for labels?" Maybe Juan if you can just follow up with a little bit more information on that question.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Another question is, "What is the possibility of supporting a lead generation tool or chat bot?" Tim, are you referring to a lead generation tool for photographers? Are you looking to see if Matterport has a chat option for you to communicate with us? If so, yes. We have a chat on matterport.com, you can reach ourselves and support team through those chats.

Amir Frank:
If, Tim, you're looking for a lead generation tool embedded in a Mattertag for example, that's a totally different direction but possible. Maybe you want to just elaborate on that.

Amir Frank:
But that is actually possible. There are some supported forms with Mattertags. We do use Embedly. So if you go to embed.ly, you can find out all of the providers that they support, and they do support some form generators. Unfortunately not something as ubiquitous as Google Forms, but there are forms available that you can actually embed directly into the Mattertag and people can fill in information that just goes right to you.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Oh. That's great. And then Daniel says, "Not a question, I just want to say I really appreciate that Matterport is doing this as a company. The product is amazing and has made the technology attainable to so many industries, and just a thank you."

Amir Frank:
Thank you Daniel.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
I think that is it for our questions today.

Amir Frank:
All right. Yeah. I definitely appreciate it. We do have another five minutes, if anybody's got any more questions, by all means, you can hit us up.

Amir Frank:
If you worked through and you've got more questions as they come to you and we just happen to not be live at the time, then you can always reach out to our support team who does everything they can to make it as easy as possible, providing you with as many platforms as possible to get your questions answered.

Amir Frank:
Not only do we have support.matterport.com, we can have access to tons of online articles. But if you go to support, sorry, I said 'support at', support.matterport.com there's a bunch of articles.

Amir Frank:
If you have questions for our support team, support@matterport.com as I mentioned before, is the email to be used, and they'll be happy to answer anything that you may have on your mind.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
One last thing before we wrap up. Juan said, he just clarified a little bit, "Instead of linking photos, is it possible to embed audio files?" I think we covered that a little bit, with anything supported through the Embedly site, we are happy to include in a Mattertag.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
So just hit up Embedly, I think it's imbed.ly, and just look at all of the media sources that they support. And there will definitely be video and audio files in that.

Amir Frank:
Yeah. And I know that there are in fact... That would be embedded in a Mattertag like we said Elizabeth, not so much a label. Just like the way you can embed a video from Vimeo and from YouTube, you can embed audio-only files as well from something like SoundCloud I believe. So yeah, definitely something to look into. We do have [inaudible 00:53:41] more minutes.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
And then just one suggestion, somebody would love to learn a little bit more about the SDK. So if we could maybe plan for covering the SDK and API and some of those capabilities in the next Shop Talk, I think that would be awesome.

Amir Frank:
Yes. I don't know that it's going to be international he very next Shop Talk, but I do believe that it is planned for an upcoming, so definitely keep your eye out on those Shop Talk webinars and what the content is going to be.

Amir Frank:
We do have that available if you go to matterport.com and go up into those resources tab that I showed before, you will see a link to webinars and events and things like that and you'll be able to access a page that has all the upcoming Shop Talk webinars and what we'll be talking about, so check that out.

Amir Frank:
Also, SDK, if you are actively looking into creating content and whatnot based on our SDK, we do have, again, just going back to our support team, there is somebody on the support team who is an SDK expert.

Amir Frank:
So at any given time, if you're running into issues working with the SDK, you can reach out to the support team and they'll be able to answer that. Okay. Is that pretty much it for questions? Do you think we're good?

Amir Frank:
Thank you so much. Really, really great webinar. Super excited to see all the stuff that's coming through the Beta pipeline and whatnot. And I appreciate you guys using is and giving us all your feedback, it's just amazing. It helps us obviously make it better-

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Yes.

Amir Frank:
... For you all to enjoy.

Kirk Stromberg:
Absolutely.

Amir Frank:
Again, I appreciate your time. Kirk and Elizabeth, thank you so much for helping us out with this Shop Talk.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Of course. Thank you Amir for hosting. [inaudible 00:55:35]

Kirk Stromberg:
Absolutely. And again, like Amir said, Thanks everybody for great questions and also the strong Beta participation, it really helps a lot. Thank you.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Yeah.

Amir Frank:
Appreciate it.

Elizabeth Fabozzi:
Everyone have a wonderful holiday.