Video: Matterport ShopTalk 22: Matterport for Retail | Video courtesy of Matterport YouTube Channel | 19 May 2021

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Matterport Blog (3 December 2020) SURVEY: Retail Stores Go Virtual

"We wanted to understand how consumers felt about shopping during the 2020 holiday season, so we polled 1,000 U.S. adults to learn about their preferences. It was no surprise that 93% plan to shop online, but 70% expressed missing the physical experience of walking around the store and browsing product displays," reports the Matterport blog.

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Transcript below ...

Matterport ShopTalk Webinar | Retail Use Case | 19 May 2021

Matterport and the Retail Use Case. Join [Matterport Content Marketing Manager] Amir [Frank] on [Wednesday] May 19, 2021, as he hosts Stephanie Lin, Sr Director, Business Strategy at Matterport and an expert in the retail space.

We’ll cover high level use cases in the retail vertical and dive a little deeper into the best scanning tips and tricks for each use case.

Your thoughts?

Best,

Dan

Transcript (video above)

Amir Frank (00:02):
Welcome Matterporters, thanks for joining us in another Shop Talk session. Today we've got a really, really good one for you. I'm really excited to hear this because this is a use case that I definitely see getting more and more popular and a lot of companies using this. So, I for one would love to learn more about it and how these companies are using it and how to shoot for it if you are out there scanning. All right, so let's go ahead and get right into it.

Amir Frank (00:32):
Let's talk today with Stephanie Lin, who is our senior director of business strategy. We're going to talk about store design and construction, I'll cover some tips for scanning about that. We'll talk about visual merchandising and what that means, and general retail operations. And then of course, we'll open it up to Q&A at the end. You can go ahead and submit questions throughout the entire webinar, don't worry about it. You have a little Q&A button down there at the bottom of your zoom panel, just click that, open up the questions panel and submit your question that way. If you submit it through chat we might not get it, so please do use the Q&A panel.

Amir Frank (01:17):
Stephanie, hi. Thank you so much for joining me in this Shop Talk. Stephanie is having some technical difficulties with her Internet, and we were not expecting this but hoping that it would not happen. I don't see her on my screen anymore here, so it looks like Stephanie just now got disconnected. I'll give her a couple of minutes because she's got the first slide just to join us. Hopefully, we won't have any more internet problems. Let's see... There we are. Hey, Stephanie.

Stephanie Lin (01:55):
Hi. [inaudible 00:01:55] moving.

Amir Frank (01:57):
Exactly what we were hoping would never happen during the next hour just happened as I was introducing you.

Stephanie Lin (02:09):
Exactly. Fingers crossed we got that out of the way.

Amir Frank (02:09):
Right. Okay. I was just about to say hi and let you tell us how you're doing. I thank you very much, again, for joining us and being a part of our Shop Talk and telling us all about retail. Can you tell us a little bit about... You're relatively new to Matterport, it's been a couple of months but you've got an insane amount of experience in retail, why? I mean, I brought you on to this Shop Talk because you are the expert when it comes to this retail subject. So, tell us where you're coming from and how it is that you know so much about this.

Stephanie Lin (02:43):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. This is such a great opportunity. Yes, so I am fairly new at Matterport, I joined earlier in the year in February. But my background has really kind of teed me up for this wonderful position in a great way. I actually started my career in traditional architecture. I was designing and helping to oversee the construction of international supertalls, which are basically skyscrapers that are minimum height of the Empire State Building. As part of that program, there's always a very large retail component. Even before I knew it, I was involved in the retail space, planning the overall layout of the spaces that tenants and retailers would eventually go into.

Stephanie Lin (03:33):
And then from there, about eight years ago, I moved into the actual retail space, working internationally with Michael Kors for two years to help grow their APAC division of stores during the astronomical growth that was happening there. And then for the last six years, I was at Tory Burch helping to lead their international global store design and development. As part of that, really working a lot cross functionally with our various licensee partners internationally and really delving into the analytics of what makes a specific store successful and what are best practices that are then best tailored for different regions throughout the world.

Amir Frank (04:19):
Oh, cool. Very, very impressive if you ask me, that's awesome. Great. So, without a doubt you're familiar with retail, how retail can take advantage of a tech like Matterport to become more efficient and do a lot of things and that's exactly what we're here to learn about. Let's go ahead and go off to the next slide. Tell us about store design construction, kind of self explanatory but I think there's more to it.

Stephanie Lin (04:55):
Yeah, absolutely. Boil down to the simplest thing you know, store design and construction is creating the beautiful space that the beautiful product goes into that can attract people to go and touch the product, view the product, and eventually buy the product. A platform like Matterport, I think, is just so useful and one of the reasons I was so excited to join the company was because I could immediately see and think of all the times that my job would have been 1000 times easier had I been able to use a digital capture or a digital twin like Matterport. One of the first things that often happens as you're starting any project is the need to really analyze the space, right? So being able to capture in full detail, the NM-4K quality. The space really helps very simply reduce a lot of the various site visits that you need to go through. Often times when you start a project, there's the initial site walk to say, "Hey, yes, this is the space I want." Then there's the follow-up site visit to survey the space once it's all cleared out. And then there's more visits throughout the process to make sure that everything is aligning properly. And if there was more demolition work making sure that you're uncovering all unknowns as early as possible.

Stephanie Lin (06:15):
This is also tying into the ability to... When you see the space in three dimensions and photorealism, then it really eliminates the opportunity to be working on the wrong set of drawings. Which sounds crazy, but it's actually not uncommon when you're dealing with the retailed real estate market. A lot of these buildings that retailers and tenants are going into can be quite old, and sometimes, unfortunately, older files are mislabeled throughout the years, the decades that they've been available. So, oftentimes you might start designing a space and then realize suddenly, "Crap, we got the wrong files." So, that is definitely a very... It's a little soul damaging but you roll with the punches.

Amir Frank (07:06):
Yeah. Wow, that's amazing. So, you mentioned the wrong side of drawings that's exactly what you meant there is basing everything that you're planning on data that is just not accurate because it's too old, it's not up to date with what renovations have been done since then that kind of thing?

Stephanie Lin (07:29):
Yeah, exactly. So, not having the accurate capture or documentation of recent renovations or quite simply sometimes a space might be labeled in their overall plan or map of the space says like, "Let's call it space E." But actually, you might have been negotiating for space D instead right next door.

Amir Frank (07:52):
Got it, wow.

Stephanie Lin (07:55):
A lot of the process has historically been very manual and of course with any manual type of labor there is, of course, that percentage of human error that can go in.

Amir Frank (08:06):
Got it.

Stephanie Lin (08:07):
Yeah, absolutely. Some other things that I really find are useful is, there's the old saying, a picture's worth 1000 words. And for a lot of retailers out there, especially in today's market, you can deal with base group of stores here in the US, probably expanding internationally in EMEA and APAC and throughout that beyond just the timezone difference. Oftentimes, you need to rely on your local teams. And sometimes things are just simply lost in translation. It's amazing that all these international teams are able to communicate and work with headquarters in English. But sometimes simple miscommunication happens. And when you have a digital twin, a digital scan, like Matterport, that communication gap is often very easily closed. The fact that you can go in and tag notes alongside imagery and spin around the space and really understand the space is super helpful as well.

Amir Frank (09:13):
Got it. Relying more heavily on the visualization that Matterport allows you to lean on helps with translations and things like that in working internationally.

Stephanie Lin (09:24):
Absolutely, absolutely. Quite frankly, it can actually help cut down on your late night or early morning calls as well. Which is, I think, a large benefit for many people who do work with international offices.

Amir Frank (09:39):
Yeah, absolutely.

Stephanie Lin (09:41):
Something else that I love is just the, as I mentioned early, the platform captures 4K images. That means that at any point in time throughout your design process, whether you have a massing model and you're looking to test out the space and, of course, you want to present to your C-suite just to get their buy-in on something, it's really important to always put designs in context. Because if it's floating in a blank space it can be beautiful, but once you put it into context what does that scale look like? How does the materiality work across the entire space? And the ability to be able to go into the model, not have to revisit the site to take the exact view of what you're looking at is an incredible time saver.

Stephanie Lin (10:24):
And then going along with the C-suite, also the... I can remember many a times when we've spent six to eight, maybe 12 months on building a new store. And when you get the buy off on the design process, there's multiple levels of presentations throughout the process, but nothing really beats getting an immersive experience. And oftentimes, you might open a store, it takes a while to coordinate everybody, all the executive level schedules, to be able to go visit a store and do the walkthrough and get the buy ins, especially if you're testing out a new concept. With something like Matterport, it's much easier if you could be ready to open the store or get close to that point, scan the space and then immediately share the file. So, the feedback loop is much faster, you're closing that time gap between your moment of opportunity before your warranty might run out or before labor spreads onto new projects.

Amir Frank (11:26):
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's cool. Great use cases. That's impressive. Okay. So, anything else with designing and construction that you can think of that Matterport can lend a hand in making the process more efficient or should we move on?

Stephanie Lin (11:50):
Yeah, just one last thing, I think the fact that you can cap, again, the power of capturing everything in one go is that you have that resource to always go back to especially when you're calculating a rough order of magnitude cost system that's in the beginning. When you're trying to get approval to move on a project or to see how much money you can spend. The ability to continually look back at something that you don't have to always rely on a blurry photo anymore. I think that in and out itself is super powerful.

Amir Frank (12:18):
Yeah. Yeah yeah, absolutely. And kind of keeping everything in one place, right? You have a link that doesn't go away to this model, all the assets are incorporated into that model, it's all right there if it's PDF documents or information and tags or anything like that.

Stephanie Lin (12:40):
Exactly.

Amir Frank (12:41):
True. Cool. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about scanning for this use case. For design and construction we talked a lot about the process of building it, right? So, measurement is probably, if not definitely, going to be of some interest to the client and to the user of the Matterport model. So for that reason measurement is going to be improved if you use something like the Matterport Pro2 or the BLK. The BLK might be overkill it depends, but definitely the Pro2 is probably not recommended for measurement is the 360 cameras and iPhones and things like that because they just don't have as high measurement quality or accuracy.

Amir Frank (13:35):
So, the first thing you do basically when you get on site as with any job you do, is just walk around and familiarize yourself with the space even if it's pretty small, and some stores are... just have a quick lap and see where is the best place to start and the path that you would take going through there.

Amir Frank (13:59):
Start usually at the corner if it is a multistorey retail facility then you want to start the lowest floor and you start at some corner. We don't usually recommend starting at the front door because typically the front door is in the middle most of the time. So in the corner is usually the best place then you snake your path of align scans around, back and forth as you slowly build and flush out the entire model. Because measurement is a factor, measurement accuracy is a big deal here, you want to think about your scan density. Scanning at a higher density, more scans, I would say probably every five feet is pretty good. That'll improve and enhance alignment and measurement accuracy. So, just keep that in mind as you work through the store and that's pretty much it. It's relatively straightforward for this use case, it's just a matter of thinking about scan density.

Amir Frank (15:02):
You don't have to concern yourself too much with navigation because most likely what's going to happen is you're going to use the assets that are created based on your Matterport model to bring into AutoCAD and things like that. So the things like the MatterPak, you get the OBJ, the point cloud, all that stuff, you can provide that to your client or if you are the construction person, then you can just extract those and take advantage of those. With those, navigation does seem is irrelevant but this scan density is very, very much relevant. All right, let's talk about visual merchandising. What is that?

Stephanie Lin (15:44):
That's a great question. Visual merchandising is basically, I mean, it is an art form in and out of itself. So, anything that you see in a store. So store design and construction builds the space, designs the space, lays out the space. And then visual merchandising comes in and layers in that level of that brand identity. They are the ones that dress the mannequins, they're the ones that decorate the windows, they figure out what is the best cadence of colors of your products so that it makes a very cohesive shopping experience. So, it's a super important layer into what actually makes a store a brand image. And one of the most important things that is important within this department is really the ability to make sure that all the stores come off maintaining that brand image.

Stephanie Lin (16:41):
And so, we have a lot of retailers right now who are using Matterport to set up their showrooms which is part of the normal process. You said every time there's a new product launch or accompanying seasonal deliveries, oftentimes retailers just set up their showrooms, merchandise it in the way that they think is ideal for the product to showcase everything and also for customer flow, and then document that. And typically, there's a very extensive photoshoot involved, a lot of then post processing and photoshop and PowerPoint to put together a deck that can then be shared to all the various branches of stores throughout the world. Well something with Matterport then you can come in and do the same setup, but then basically condense the postprocess into one platform so you can scan the space. And again, the fact that you can then move through the space in three dimensions versus two dimensional photographs, it starts to then really convey the type of feeling that you want the stores to embody.

Stephanie Lin (17:40):
And that's just one way what I would like to call the top-down approach. So, that's headquarters, creating a document, and sharing those assets across their store portfolio. Another way to do it is thinking about, once that document has been shared, how do you make sure that the local stores are following the direction to a tee. One way to do this is to then have the local stores, the regional managers, visual merchandisers be able to capture the store. Again, this is typically a very two dimensional projects, where the store manager or VM might take a phone and take a photo, send it back to headquarters, headquarters might want a slightly different view. So, there's quite a bit of back and forth, but if you can capture the space you eliminate that back and forth time of, let's say, six hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, that kind of turnaround. So you start to get a lot more immediate feedback.

Amir Frank (18:38):
Nice. Yeah, I can definitely see Matterport helping in something like this if you've got a big display window and headquarters spent a lot of resources to put this thing together. And this is the kind of look and feel, like I said, for the brand it's super important. And they want to convey that to somebody across the other side of the country and another flagship store. I can definitely see how checklist and a couple of photographs or whatever they tend to put together probably wouldn't be as telling as something like the Matterport model, so I can definitely see that being a good use case.

Stephanie Lin (19:20):
Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of innovative uses for this too. We're having a lot of brands beyond just scanning and sharing how the setup should be. They're also incorporating a lot of the extra layer of information that is often held in subsequent meetings. So, they are tagging into the space to scan instructions on, here are the skews which color stories. They also can share folding instructions and specific upcoming order delivery cadences. So. it's really a full, not only just for visual merchandising but really an operational use case as well.

Amir Frank (20:01):
Yeah. I mean, again, we go back to everything being contained within the one model, where you have embedded videos of maybe somebody instructing the proper folding techniques, pointing out specific aspects of a display case that needs to be kept in mind, I guess, when putting it together. That definitely can make things more efficient.

Stephanie Lin (20:26):
Absolutely.

Amir Frank (20:27):
Cool. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about how to scan for this. So, with this use case, unlike with construction, measurement is, I'm guessing, of really not much concerned at all because the display window is what it is, you can't really change that at this point. But what is important is the visual aspect. So for visual clarity, something like the iPhone is a really, really good tool for this job. And, again, like with anything else, even if you're talking about only a few scans, we're not talking about scanning an entire space, it could be an end cap, it could be display case, or whatever in the store. So, you just want to make sure that you capture it from the different angles that would make sense for whoever's then is receiving that model and looking at it, if they would have that understanding of what it is that you're trying to tell them. So, we're not planning a massive path through this entire 2000, 3000 square foot store, but still a good idea to keep in mind where you're going to scan, or trying to figure that out.

Amir Frank (21:47):
Again, just consider collaborators that you're working with and how they're looking at it, perspectives of key elements and whatnots of the display. So, you want to capture those from a couple different angles, so it's obvious in what's going on there. And, I guess, that's about it. Yeah, that's it. So, iPhone, I think, is going to be a really, really good tool for this job. Sure, you could use any one of the 360 cameras, they're not going to have quite the clarity, iPhone just is a little bit more clear. And any kind of stitching issues that you may run into with the iPhone, those kind of things are relatively minor and for most of the time, and I think people who look at it the clarity outweighs little stitching issue in the mannequins arm. Which you would, just as a visitor and viewer of this model, you would understand that that's an artifact, is not something that's meant to be there. So, that's it, that's what I would recommend.

Stephanie Lin (23:04):
Absolutely. And really with the visual merchandising part, it's such an aesthetic nature. And again, it's really about maintaining your brand fidelity. And so using the smartphone capture together with the previous more accurate scan from the store design and construction teams, that sort of cadence of being able to pull those more accurate three dimensional assets to pair together with your future studies also as you're looking at maybe what your new seasonal display might look like. That's some of the most powerful use cases that I can see because you're using both sides of the strengths of getting that digital twin capture.

Amir Frank (23:48):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Okay. Now let's talk a little bit about the general retail operations. This is a really cool use case, I love this one.

Stephanie Lin (24:00):
Yeah, so general retail operations, I mean, it's kind of a very big umbrella, but essentially it's everything, all the different processes, all the different sub departments that go into making sure that your stores are operational, they're functional, they can handle all the product coming in, they can handle all the customers coming in, and you can document how much money you're making which is obviously a very important goal in the retail space.

Stephanie Lin (24:27):
One thing that those in these departments are responsible for is making sure that they're allocating the right product to the right store locations. So, a large part of this is the need for retailers, especially those with multiple regional groupings of stores, to understand what that local customer segmentation is. And by segmentation I mean what are their shopping preferences, what are their preferred shopping times, all those types of little metrics that can then be used to more analytically inform higher penetration rates for your products. And so oftentimes when you're looking at how to spread merchandise across your fleet of stores, that can be quite disjointed if you're looking at two dimensional plans or photos that are, again, very typically a little outdated. With the Matterport scan, you then begin to get the fuller picture of everything.

Stephanie Lin (25:26):
And tying that together with, we see the store, you can instantly remember walking through the store and thinking about where product is placed. I think, those are super important things to analyze as you're going through the space, and you can then pull up your sales data, right? For instance, if you're testing out a new fixture or testing out a new product, how many sales are you getting per week if you move it to the front of the store or if you create a section of interest in the middle of story. All these analytics can then be tied together with your actual visual model that Matterport is capturing.

Amir Frank (26:04):
Yeah, this is really awesome. This gets very, very tech heavy. We were talking just the other day and we were thinking about how it's impossible really to expect anybody working at the retail store to pay that much attention to somebody or customers who come in, maybe look at something, put a hand on something, take a closer look at it and then put it back and walk away. They're not going to take notes of everybody who comes in and look. This is something that, using the SDK and heat maps, you can actually put this out there on the net and see what people are interested in. And by moving it and rescanning it, you see, you are keeping track, you're taking notes of everything that they're looking at as they work their way and you can literally A/B test a couple of different ways of setting up your store and get a much better idea of what works best based on the heat map that you can generate with the SDK.

Amir Frank (27:10):
It looks like Stephanie may have lost internet again. Let's go real quick and talk about how you would scan for this. In this case, we're looking at, again, very visual measurements not as accurate, you want to keep in mind with this use case navigation experience for the end user. So you've got customers who are not professionals at the company that you work for, if it's like, let's say, I don't know, the Gap. You're not reconstructing an end Gap in San Francisco of one that was created in New York or vice versa, whatever.

Amir Frank (27:51):
These are end users, people who are coming in and actually going through and they want to buy the product. Always keep that in mind in this use case, as with every scan, plan your path, walk around a little bit, familiarize yourself, and we are considering the model visitors. So, with that said, scan density in this case is going to be a factor, you are going to want to maintain a high scan density. And I would say that before I was talking about how scan density improves a measurement accuracy. In this case, it just provides the opportunity for visitors to see different things from different angles, and maybe a little bit closer.

Amir Frank (28:37):
If there's one thing that I would love to see if somebody scans a museum, and some of these stores are kind of museums in a way, where the scan position is in front of the piece of art as opposed to just randomly every four or five feet disregarding what it is that the end visitor wants to see. Keep what it is that the visitor wants to see in mind and make sure that you place that camera in a position so that they can see those things maybe from a couple different angles. You can always hide scan positions if it gets to be too much. But you probably don't want to go back to the site and scan again. So just scan a little bit denser and that's it. So, start, again, at the corner, lowest floor as always and, assuming that size of the store could potentially be pretty big, maintaining the longest path of alignment scans without breaking that path and a lot of jumping around. You don't want to jump around too much, just makes for inconsistency. It doesn't affect so much the end user, assuming the model process's just fine, it just increases the chance of misalignment, things like that. So try not to jump around.

Amir Frank (29:57):
Just looking at the picture on the right here. I drew up these lines and these are the main pathways that I see when I look at this image of where people would walk. This is the heavy traffic areas in a store like this. So this is where I would focus my scans, I'd probably just go down one side, come back around, up another side and then come back around and back again. Keep in mind the display on the wall over here. These are things that are obviously going to draw a lot of attention and people are going to want to see that. So, when you scan, don't scan too close, seeking extremely specific about this very specific store. Everyone's going to be maybe a little bit different, but in this case because you have the shoes up higher and lower, you want to distance yourself a little bit so that they have a decent angle and perspective of both. They can always zoom in, you are capturing this with a relatively high resolution camera. If you're using a Pro2, great, very high resolution. So they can zoom in, so keep a little bit of distance so that they're not looking straight down at a shoe that's only two feet in front of them.

Amir Frank (31:19):
That's pretty much it, you can go a little bit in between here. I don't necessarily need a scan position here, not saying it would hurt to have one there, but it's probably not necessary because I can move from this path to this path very easily without a problem, there's nothing here that would disrupt that or be awkward for me to navigate through. And that's about it. I'll just use this as a good example of a display where one store would want to mimic these three mannequins and how they're dressed and what they're wearing and exactly how this is put around the waist here. I'm guessing that's what we were talking about with the visual merchandising. So, if you were scanning for that use case, you would want to scan all around this display case right here.

Stephanie Lin (32:11):
Absolutely. And being able to see what that key setup is, then is very important as you might move to smaller stores that can only fit maybe two mannequins. So, if you have that visual, then it's a little bit easier to adapt the design to fit your site context.

Amir Frank (32:26):
Right. And you would also have, with that being said, you also have a little measurement tool that you can see exactly how wide this is, and will it fit in my store or not, and do I need to reduce the size and modify a little bit just as you said, Stephanie.

Stephanie Lin (32:41):
Absolutely. And I want to take a pause here and point out just, I love this image because I was speaking about the 4K image quality earlier, and I take one look at this and I'm like, "Oh, I'm very jealous of that mannequin's quad development." And you can see so, that's the level of detail you can be pulling out of our scans.

Amir Frank (33:01):
Exactly. Yeah, you got to purchase the right mannequins too, you can't just get any mannequin, it's not going to work. Perfect. Okay. Awesome. Great use cases, and I want to get to Q&A, I know we've gotten a couple that have come in. So, just before we jump into Q&A, want to touch on how to get answers to your questions. If you go to matterport.com, there's a little resources tab, rollover that, click on it, and you find support. That leads you to our support page or support hub, as I had to call it, because from there not only do you get FAQ on the page, you also get links to the entire FAQ article which has hundreds and hundreds of articles that are written about how to scan and how to use the equipment and whatnot. You can also contact our support team, the number here 408-805-3347 is the number for US. That being said, if you do go to that support page and you scroll down to the bottom where the phone number is located, the right phone number for your location, for your geography, where you are in the world, the right phone number will be displayed. So, use that phone number if you're not in the US.

Amir Frank (34:19):
Email us from anywhere at support@matterport.com. And, as always, with anybody really, I mean, Matterport is not unique in this sense, make sure that your profile information is up to date. It's easy to update information or if users move on and new users come in, things change, make sure that the profile information, the email that's on file is up to date. When we reach out to let you know specific issues with with your account, it is to that email address. So, it's a really good idea that you make sure it's up to date for that reason.

Amir Frank (35:04):
All right. Stay connected to via Facebook. If you go to facebook.com/matterport you'll see our corporate Facebook page, which has all the updates about everything that's going on. And if you've recently captured a wicked awesome retail space or any space for that matter, but we're talking retail here, share it with us. You can nominate your space to be in the photo gallery in the Matterport digital twin gallery, I suppose. And if you go to go.matterport.com/nominate-your-space that's how you do that, just fill out a form and we'll check it out and that's it.

Amir Frank (35:43):
And I think that's everything. So, why don't we go ahead. I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen so we can go into Q&A. Let me pull this up. I noticed we did have one question that came in from Chris, that I love. This is a great question. As a Matterport owner, how do we begin to connect with the clients who need this retail service? Will Matterport be implementing any referral services to connect the two parties? So, I mean, as far as Matterport is concerned, I don't believe we have any plans on doing any kind of retail specific connection service. But, Stephanie, someone who comes from retail, how would a Matterport service partner reach out to you to say, "Hey, let me scan your store, I can help."

Stephanie Lin (36:36):
There's a couple of different avenues, Amir, one you could try the very localized route. So, if you have a good relationship with a local store owner, you could start with that. And then in the larger corporate sense also, I always recommend trying to find who's leading their store design and construction team. And the reason I focus on that, not just because I came from that space, is because ultimately any store budget, particularly even after the store has been open, that historical data, the budget and upcoming budget for a store is controlled by that department. And so, there is also a reason why the use cases for that slide was the longest as well. If you can get that cadence and sell those use cases that way, then it's easier to what we like to call Matterport, you learn and expand the number of touch points that you're reaching.

Amir Frank (37:33):
So, would you recommend going after stores that might be under construction, diving in and trying to see who it is that's during the construction and pitch them? Because I would assume that the retail store manager, whatever, wouldn't be pitching you as a service partner to the construction team, they would just expect the construction team to know what they're doing and do everything themselves.

Stephanie Lin (37:58):
So, when you're on the design and construction you actually get a lot of sore feedback. And that's part of the the beauty of the retail space, it's the continual feedback loop. So, the general managers of the store do have an immense amount of input because they're the ones who are making sure that, back to the general retail operations slide, they're the ones who are making sure the store is running optimally, right? So if you do happen to chat with a general manager of a store, they might have some issues about documenting something that might need improvement. I'm sure they're always looking for easier ways to communicate and share their message up the ladder as well.

Amir Frank (38:38):
Got it. That actually brings up a really, really good point that the Matterport model, because it can be used for so many different things, you can talk to the store manager, as you said, to try and get their construction company, even have them included in their service and pay for it because they're going to get benefit from it, making their work more efficient, but you also sell the manager themselves on as something that then they can also use to improve their processes.

Stephanie Lin (39:13):
Exactly, exactly. And then if you do happen to go across a space that has a construction going on, the construction companies will almost always have their information pasted on the outside of the hoarding. So, if you're super proactive you can always reach out to those, clearly that's a construction company that's already operating the retail space. They could also largely benefit because part of the role of every company during the construction phase is that they need to be creating weekly documentation as well to share the progress with the retail owners. And so, again, that's where a scan could be super, super helpful and useful.

Amir Frank (39:53):
Absolutely, absolutely. Weekly progress updates, I mean, stakeholders are not necessarily down the block, they could be states, hundreds of miles away and this is a great way of showing them exactly what's going on. Awesome. Okay. Do you recommend any good tripods for iPhone? I've tried a few different tripods with iPhone holder that can tilt and swiveling but the objects don't line up well between shots for full a scan. I've tested a couple tripods for iPhone. The last one that I've tested is pretty low and tripod to be honest, I definitely understand what you're talking about with the whole wobbling bit. So, it was, I want to say something like 30 or $40 on Amazon, it's a bit plasticy. It does come with a little hook on the bottom of the center post, that's designed to hang some weight, which basically makes it a little heavier and more stable. But what you'll find is that the wobbly part is really in the head system.

Amir Frank (41:04):
I've found that it's actually not that disruptive. It wasn't that big of a deal that it was a little bit wobbly in my case of the iPhone 12. I set it up on the little iPhone holder, I even have a little focusing rail that's between the two, so I can shift it over making that the lens of the iPhone centered with the center post of the tripod. That was another $30 investment. But if you don't want the wobbly head, you're going to have to go with the Prosumer level tripod, those are the ones to go with if you don't want wobbliness. That's unfortunate, but that's just how it goes. The $30, $40 tripods are going to be a little bit wobbly, they're just plastic bits that are put together and they're not as high quality. Okay. So, sorry, I don't have a specific model but that's my experience.

Amir Frank (42:09):
When you refer to end cap examples, are you talking 360 or 3D? I would say 3D. I would say scan all that stuff in 3D. I mean, the dollhouse itself may not be as important in this case because it is much lower resolution, but just the ability to navigate more intuitively from one position to another when it was scanned in 3D, I think, is a huge improvement. What do you think, Stephanie?

Stephanie Lin (42:35):
I completely agree, exactly. The key is to mimic how you might view end cap in a store space. So, the ability to navigate around that virtually versus physically on site is very important.

Amir Frank (42:48):
Yeah. And a tip for navigation, you want to pass this on to your clients, is using the keyboard. So, the keyboard you can do a lot of different things on there to move around, you don't have to click with your mouse to move to the next scan position. And especially when you're looking at an end cap, and the next position is to your left or to your right, you can press the A and the D key to shift over without turning your head moving over and then turning back. So, that's just something I would do if I was looking at an end cap, I guess.

Amir Frank (43:23):
Okay. Another question. Is zoom capability available and best practice for use if you want to zoom in on a shoe. If you capture with something high res like the Pro2, you get a 4K quality image. Those high resolution tiles only appear when you zoom in. It's not like a digital zoom with other photographs that the resolution you see is what you get. When you zoom in, the resolution actually improves so you're not really losing anything. That's one thing. If that's something that you think your client is going to want to do, or something that you're pitching your client to do, definitely consider the camera that you capture with. But yeah, I think, zooming in is a thing. It would also be, I mean, it depends on the use case that you're referring to but for the retail use case, it'd be pretty sweet if the retail store added matter tags that you can click on and you get maybe not just a close up image, but you can actually get the product itself in 3D that you can turn around. That's a whole different kind of 3D.

Stephanie Lin (44:38):
Absolutely. And that's actually a very popular use case right now that a lot of retailers are developing. Really taking the Matterport digital twin and incorporating that into the full immersive E-commerce experience.

Amir Frank (44:52):
Yeah, you can get a lot more. We just did a webinar a couple weeks ago with Treatise, and they were showing us their E-commerce solution and it was amazing, I mean, it was... So instead of going through what we know today as an E-commerce site that is radically disconnected from what we're used to in the store experience, you're actually walking around the virtual store, this digital twin, and you can click on a product and get all the information about it and see it up close and see different images from different angles. So, you get not only the immersive experience, but also the added benefit of getting all that information that you would from a typical E-commerce store.

Amir Frank (45:35):
All right, is there a standard camera height for retail? I don't think there is a standard camera hide, I mean, like with other visual use cases you want to stick to roughly person height between four and a half to five and a half feet. But that said, if the product is down below, I would say there's nothing against having a scan position that is lower in order to bring the person down. They would essentially, natively or naturally kneel down to look at the product anyway if they were at the store. So, having a couple different heights throughout I would say fine. Have you seen retail models that do different, different heights and do you think that's natural? Is that okay?

Stephanie Lin (46:26):
That's a really good question. I have to say for a lot of stores, it's not that big of a issue because as the store design team is designing the shelves and the visual merchandising team, they're figuring out where the bags go, a lot of the user analytics are still like, how far can you look down? How far can you reach? Or already preprogrammed into the way the store is laid out. Of course, if you're talking about an outlet store then that's a slightly different scenario. But in general, I would say full price retail it's typically already designed into the way the store is.

Amir Frank (47:08):
Right. And that's also something that you may want to consider is, I've heard, I'm sure this is right, the more expensive stuff is at eye level, at least with maybe grocery stores. So, that's something that as the client, as the person who contracts a service partner to go out and to come out and scan this, they may be in communication with the products, the manufacturers that hold and they can tell them, "Hey, we're going to have this model and keep scans at the height of your product and whatnot." And maybe there's value in there, I don't know.

Stephanie Lin (47:48):
Yeah, absolutely. You're right. I'm trying to think back to even the grocery store scans that I've seen, they've generally been very good at being able to capture the full spectrum. And, again, it goes back to, Amir, where you're talking about earlier, is making sure that your distance away from the wall is enough so that you can get that level of detail in the fuller quality scan.

Amir Frank (48:13):
Yeah. If you're already out there scanning and it is like that picture that we showed with the shoes from top to bottom, I know a lot of shoe stores do have that huge range, you may want to go across at a couple different heights and see what the client prefers. At that point, you have everything you need to play with. You can show them what it is like with all the scan positions turned on. You can have a model with every other, you can hide and do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to had you not scanned it at all at the different height. So, talk with customer see what they want, what they think. Yeah. Okay, let's see here.

Amir Frank (49:02):
I'll be a scanning 25,000 square foot and a 16,000 square foot furniture store. Any specific tips? Those are huge stores. So, definitely, Gary, you're going to want to, obviously as I mentioned with everything, walk around a little bit before you even start unpacking your gear. Familiarize yourself with the store, understand the traffic and how it flows through the store and make that your main navigation path.

Amir Frank (49:33):
From that path you're going to want to have a couple scan positions that go in and around furniture so anybody can go and see different pieces from different angles. But definitely focus on the path and keep your path of alignment as long and continuous as possible. Try to, I guess, that's not always possible, it's probably impossible to have a single path throughout the entire store, but keep that in mind. Jumping around it increases, especially with such a wide large store, when you break that path of alignment, if you pick up the camera and move to a new location that, even though it's been scanned before, it's no longer in line of sight with the previous scan position.

Amir Frank (50:21):
What capture is going to do is it starts by first trying to align with the last scan position. It can't see it in this case it's too far away, now what it's doing is it's looking at all of the scan positions on that floor and 16, 25,000 square feet if we're talking about a single floor, that's a lot of scan positions, greatly increasing the difficulty level of your capture device. If it's an iPad, if you're using an iPad or iPhone, whatever it is to process all this information and that's going to increase the chance of not aligning, and maybe even misaligning. So keep an eye on those scan positions, you don't want misalignments, misalignments cannot be corrected this time, you just got to, if you see a blue dot appear and it's not where you placed the tripod in relationship to the other blue dots on the iPad and the mini map, you got to tap on it and delete it. It's not going to fix itself going up to the processing engine, is not going to fix it. So you got to delete it and bring the camera back a little closer to other scan positions and start from there.

Amir Frank (51:26):
My recommendation is when you do break that path of aligned scans, instead of trying to continue from another path, is actually place the tripod on top of a scan position that was already captured. That's how you maximize the amount of overlapping scan data and really almost guarantee without me saying guarantee aligning without too much problems. That's my recommendation for that theory. We got a couple minutes left here, let's try and get through these. Okay. If you see any, Stephanie, that jump out at you feel free to go for it. I'm just going to read through these real quick.

Stephanie Lin (52:08):
I'm seeing one from Rory about links to online catalogs or specs and pricing. That's a really good point. So, one of the great things about the scan is the ability to use your matter tags. And we briefly touched on this actually in the earlier part of Q&A, which is the ability to start really influencing your E-commerce shopping experience as well. That's from the customer-facing side. From the internal-facing side, for general regional operations, tags can be used in a completely different way, in the sense that they can be used as a training tool also. Anytime you open a new store, there's typically a one to two week period where all the future staff comes, spends time at the store, gets to know the store and really get the floor and training session. And of course with COVID, we want to limit the time and amount of people that are in a space. But I see this also as beginning of a forward movement of how we start to begin to train more efficiently by linking these things like the specs and the pricing. That gives all new store associates or even more season store associates a venue to be doing some homework on their own time or when they're not physically in the store and maybe on the clock still.

Amir Frank (53:22):
That's good. We got a question here. How to best use Matterport with Street View displaying retail stores. When you're uploading your Matterport model to Google Street View, it's no longer really a Matterport model. All they get are the panoramas and they kind of make that into a Google Street View. And that's fine, but it's really up to Google to make that link and connection between the panels that are on the street and the panels that are in the store. To hopefully improve the chances of that happening, of giving that ability to move natively or naturally from the street to the store, try and have a couple scan positions, 3D sca... Well, it may not really matter if it's 3D or 360, if you position 360 properly. But the 3D scan positions, try and have them leading out the front door closer to the street where those scan positions might be. Check out the Google Street View in the area of the storefront and where those scan position is. Sometimes, there's one way over here and then there isn't one right infront of the store to have that path leading towards one of those, I guess. That helps but there's no guarantee, right? It's up to Google and their algorithms and whether these things connect or not.

Stephanie Lin (54:48):
And speaking of connections, there's also a question about how best to scan stores with multiple rooms, do you need one long path?

Amir Frank (54:56):
Yeah. So, with multiple rooms it's like anything else with multiple rooms, you are going to break the path of alignment, you don't have to scan into a room and then scan out of the room, that's just a waste of time. So, you start, and this gets back to planning that path of alignment when you get there, start maybe in the main big room possibly, maybe it's not, maybe it's actually in one of the smaller rooms if that's off to one of the corners. Start there, and then work your way out of that across the the big room and then into the the third small room, whatever. Otherwise, you can just start in the main room, go into one room, pick up the camera, come back out, and then place it on top of a scan position that you've already scanned, again, thereby maximizing that overlapping scan data improving alignment and increasing the speed of alignment and all that goodness and decreasing the risk of misalignment. Once you see that, definitely at that point make sure that it's properly aligned, and then just move on into the next room.

Amir Frank (56:15):
Let's see what else we got here. The Insta360 X2, is it good for this? It depends on the use case, it could be good for it. It's not as high resolution as something like the iPhone and Matterport Pro cameras. So, if you're talking about a visual use case, it may not be as great, especially when a lot of retail stores they rely on just indoor lighting, they don't have a lot of lighting coming from outdoors. And that's going to impair image quality a little bit. It just depends on the use case, it could be, It could be, just depends on what the client wants to do with it. If it's display case stuff, then maybe I would show them an example of what the quality of that 360 X2 looks like first.

Amir Frank (57:13):
With the tripod question, what difference would it make in stitching to use a good tripod or a monopod with an iPhone 12 Pro max? Okay. So, the iPhone 12 Pro Max has Lidar, that's great, that'll improve the measurement. But regardless, we're not talking about that, tripods. So the nice thing about using Lidar, and you do have that option with the 12 Pro Max, is that it's a little bit slower. The reason why that's nice is because it gives you a little bit of time to release the tripod so you're not holding it. Anytime you have a hand on a tripod, there's going to be a little bit of a shake. So, to improve that let go, let it do its little progress bar thing and take a picture. The better quality tripods are going to have a smoother head. The ability of both tripods to be level is pretty much the same, I don't see much of a difference there.

Amir Frank (58:22):
It's really just in the motion. You grab that arm that's sticking out the back, and as you move around, it's just very smooth and level and it doesn't wobble. So, I've found that my ability to keep the circle and the dot centered as I move around with a slightly higher end tripod is more easy. All right. So, we didn't quite get to all of them, I'm really sorry, we got a lot more questions in the next... but all really good questions. We'll see what we can do about answering these. But for now we are at the top of the hour. And I thank you very, very much, Stephanie, for joining us and teaching us all about these different use cases in retail.

Stephanie Lin (59:09):
Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure to speaking with everyone.

Amir Frank (59:14):
All right, great. And thank you all very much for joining us, for asking all these great questions and appreciate your attendance. Enjoy your rest of the day. Take care everybody. Bye-bye.


P.S. Matterport previously discussed this topic in November 2020: (video below)

Video: Matterport for Retail | Video courtesy of Matterport YouTube Channel | 6 November 2020