Emily Olman Video: Matterport Timeline 2014-2022 | Video courtesy of Hopscotch Interactive | @Hopscotch Interactive | 14 January 2022

Transcript

Emily Olman: -As you can see, Matterport has actually been around a very long time, but they started out as a virtual tour company, meaning that they launched their original Pro1 camera in 2014 and slowly rolled out features like you couldn't even go to multiple floors until sometime in early 2015.

But the thing that really got me excited about it was that in late 2015 when Oculus paired up with Samsung and they release the Gear VR, that meant that any Matterport space could be ported into VR and can be viewable. It was really an all-in-one camera viewing virtual reality system and that got me so excited because I saw all of the potential for that and what it could do for marketing and for real estate marketing.

Just generally speaking, for transporting people to new places and experiences. Matterport existed as a virtual tour company for a long time. Putting together partnerships with companies like Leica so that they could overcome challenges such as scanning large open spaces or large spaces.

The BLK is a much more accurate and robust scanning device. It also costs a lot more, more like, I think, $18,000 or $19,000. Then Matterport did a really interesting thing.

They opened up their SDK, which meant that they were willing to have other people develop software on their platform and therefore have third party companies start to think up solutions that they may not be able to actually develop in house.

All spaces were eventually enabled for virtual reality and now you see the goggles on every single space. But in the past, you know, we used to spend, for example, like $500 to get a space converted into VR.

Now that's just something that is possible on every single tour. The big thing that changed was that in early 2020, in January 2020, Matterport rebranded itself with a new logo and a new spin on what they do, which is that they said that they were now a digital twin company. Digital twin is mega-jargon. It gets thrown around a lot.

One of the things that a digital twin is, it is a way for people to collaborate about the information in a space. You'll see that, for example, in 2021, Matterport launched this Notes Collaboration which allows people who are on a team or working together. They can use annotations to mark up scenes and share information notes back and forth.

It also means that that 3D point cloud or that point cloud data can be exported and used in a construction or to visualize building systems and IoT.

When Matterport has said that it is going from being a virtual tour company to a digital twin company, one of the things that's really interesting is that, that might mean that Matterport is a bit of overkill for a residential real estate property, and I would actually agree that many times that it is, because the power behind the system can do so much more.

But we barely scratch the surface with most of our clients that we're offering this to and that we're making this content for.