WGAN-TV: | Matterport Timeline: 2014-2022 | Milestones, Insight and Commentary | Hopscotch Interactive Founder Emily Olman (@Hopscotch) | Episode: 132 | Thursday, 27 January 2022

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

WGAN Forum Podcast (Audio Only Version)

Transcript: Matterport Timeline: 2014-2022 | Milestones/Insight/Commentary

Hi All,

[Transcript below]

Wondering about the history of Matterport through the lens of a Matterport Service Provider since
the "early days"?

On Thursday, 27 January 2022 at 5 pm EST (GMT + 5), my guest will be Hopscotch Interactive Founder Emily Olman (@Hopscotch):

✓ WGAN-TV Live at 5 | Matterport Timeline: 2014-2022 | Milestones, Insight and Commentary

In the video (above), you can get a taste of the milestones. I will ask Emily for more insight and commentary about the "history" of Matterport from the perspective of a Matterport Service Provider.

What questions should I ask Emily on WGAN-TV Live at 5?

Best,

Dan

Transcript (Video Above)

[00:00:02]
Dan Smigrod: Hi, all. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, January 27th, 2022, and you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. We have an awesome show for you today. Matterport Timeline: 2014 to the Present. Milestones, Insights and Commentary. My guest today – Hey, Emily. Good to see you. Thanks for being on the show again.

[00:00:31]
Emily Olman: Thanks, Dan. Hi, good to be here.

[00:00:34]
Dan Smigrod: Emily Olman, Founder of Hopscotch Interactive, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Emily, I reached out to you because you did this awesome video: Matterport Timeline; a short video that you publish to the Hopscotch Interactive YouTube Channel, and I thought it would be great to have you on the show to talk about more on the insights and commentary as opposed to what happened on which date.

Before we jump into that topic, how about telling us about Hopscotch Interactive?

[00:01:06]
Emily Olman: Absolutely. Dan, thank you so much for having me here. I am so glad to be on your show today. It's been awhile, and I'm also excited that you were interested in learning more about this timeline because I put it together many years ago.

This has actually just been refreshed lately, but I created this in, I want to say maybe 2019 or 2018. It's been awhile. But Hopscotch Interactive, since you asked, is a boutique real estate marketing agency, which I started in 2015 for the promotion of extraordinary spaces.

I wanted to do that in 3D and VR. I have expanded the agency over the years. We have done, in addition to Matterport, we do real estate photography, we do videography, drone: we do all those real estate services. We also have been trying to be a thought leader as well in virtual reality and augmented reality: it's a very big passion of mine.

I consult for commercial real estate and residential real estate for different marketing departments, and so it's really my passion and also to see what's on the cutting edge of technology and how I can better serve my clients with the frontier of all this exciting stuff.

[00:02:31]
Dan Smigrod: Awesome. How did you first learn about Matterport? When did you buy a Matterport camera?

[00:02:38]
Emily Olman: I first learned about Matterport in – I want to say late 2014. A friend of mine was starting a new company. He was recruiting me to come back from Europe. I was living in Germany for several years, and he had this idea to start a new company, and Matterport was something that he was very interested in using. It was a property management 2.0 company. Matterport was very exciting because of all of the interesting things that it could do in terms of data collection and video and 360. We were interested in it from a property management standpoint, actually, and for landlords.

I was at that company, I tested not just Matterport, but so many different technologies, 360 cameras. I just loved the Matterport.

When I parted ways with the company in late 2015, we'd already purchased one as a team, and we'd done many scans and we'd been out in the field using it for months. My mother-in-law was selling a property, and I wanted to use a Matterport. I did that and I bought it from my friend, and then we used it.

The Realtor was like, "sure, if you want to use that, you can." She wasn't going to stop me. Then basically from that, Hopscotch Interactive was born because the Realtor was getting call-after-call about "how did you do this?"

She said to me, "Do you do this as a service?" I said, "Well, yeah. Sure." That was when I returned the camera to my friend and I bought my own, and I really launched Hopscotch from this very bootstrapped and very much, let's see what happens, business idea.

[00:04:32]
Dan Smigrod: Awesome. Let's go back – That was 2015 when Hopscotch Interactive was born. When you bought your Matterport camera for Hopscotch Interactive, Matterport began before that. When was it really that we knew that Matterport started with the camera that we think of today?

[00:04:54]
Emily Olman: The camera we think of today – I'd say that it launched in 2014. That was the Matterport Pro1 3D Camera. The Pro2 3D Camera is the next-generation of that camera.

However, the form factor has not changed significantly between the Pro1 and the Pro2, however, the software as a service and the Matterport ecosystem, which is what they have always been talking about, is the thing that became more and more in focus as the years went on.

[00:05:35]
Dan Smigrod: We'll talk about that more later. Let's go back in time. What was significant about 2014-2015 about Matterport?

[00:05:45]
Emily Olman: Well, for me and I think for many people, it coincided with this total explosion in Virtual Reality and the interest in VR.

Oculus was purchased by Facebook, as you recall. When Oculus was purchased by Facebook, that meant that a lot of funding went into the VR industry, and it was a great time to be a Founder back then, and there was a lot of interest in this. This was just the very beginning days of Matterport starting to get a little bit of a brand.

For me, what really captured my imagination was being able to use this camera to then create virtual reality content all-in-one. A virtual tour, virtual reality content, and that was something that then you could show to people. You could take it around in your purse. You could have a Gear VR, which was a Samsung product, and we could convert spaces into virtual reality and share those with other people. I demoed Matterport from late 2015 to early 2016. I would go to VR Meetups, I would demo it, I would share it with people, and I was just super-excited about it.

[00:07:15]
Dan Smigrod: [gesture $$$$$] Money for VR at that time?

[00:07:18]
Emily Olman: It costs a lot of money. I don't know if people know that, but it costs us $500 per model to convert a space into VR. I didn't get a lot of people that wanted to pay that much money for it.

[00:07:40]
Dan Smigrod: That's on top of whatever Hopscotch Interactive charged. You had at least the fixed cost of $500 – at least $500 per Matterport model converted to virtual reality?

[00:07:53]
Emily Olman: Yes, but I will tell you that it was one of my very first VR projects, and this may shock some people, but scanning plus VR was $10,000.

I think that that number was very exciting to me because I felt like I was offering something nobody else offered and I wasn't just giving somebody the same old virtual tour. We could charge a premium and that was great. But again, there's not a lot of people who have just $10,000 laying around for VR when it's not fully rolled out. So much more, I could say about that but.

[00:08:31]
Dan Smigrod: How much more does Matterport charge today for virtual reality?

[00:08:36]
Emily Olman: Virtual reality is basically free at this point. You just have to have an Oculus Quest: a VR viewing device in order to view. I believe you can still get access to the VR Matterport Showcase app.

I was looking at the app. It's still on my phone so I could download the VR Matterport Showcase app and I could look at models in stereoscopic view with a Google Cardboard. But the best experience is with a Quest and Oculus Quest 2; Oculus Rift. Those are the devices that are the best for viewing now.

[00:09:17]
Dan Smigrod: Looking at your timeline, actually, Matterport didn't officially offer Google Cardboard support until 2017. The virtual reality began as early as 2015.

[00:09:30]
Emily Olman: Yes.

[00:09:31]
Dan Smigrod: I believe at this point, Matterport actually sunset Google Cardboard and today – it's just Oculus Quest or Oculus Go devices supported.

[00:09:44]
Emily Olman: Yeah, and the Go, they stopped producing the Oculus Go, which I had one, but I sold it at least two years ago.

[00:09:55]
Dan Smigrod: Today, if you want to do virtual reality, you need Matterport Oculus Quest.

[00:09:59]
Emily Olman: Yeah.

[00:10:00]
Dan Smigrod: I noticed on your timeline, it says multi-floor features in 2014. Why was that a milestone that you could have multiple floors?

[00:10:12]
Emily Olman: I'm trying to remember, in fact, why that was so significant, but I think that it had to do with the navigation in the Matterport Showcase. Do you recall exactly?

[00:10:24]
Dan Smigrod: I'll add a little because I bought my Matterport Pro1 3D Camera in July of 2014 and at that time if you wanted to shoot a second floor, you could. It's just that the scan points were on the same level on the iPad mini-map.

You couldn't differentiate between one floor and the other on your iPad mini-map. You had to mentally keep track of, "Oh! You got the first floor. Now these are the scans going up the stairs. Now you're on the second floor and your mini-map looks a mess. It felt like 2014 to 2015 – for me – was a ginormous Matterport public beta.

[00:11:08]
Emily Olman: Yeah.

[00:11:09]
Dan Smigrod: As exciting at the time, we just rolled with it and accepted. I do remember trying to shoot a super-large space among the first spaces that I tackled; I called Matterport when I was having trouble on-site. They took my call on a weekend and, Oh! We just hadn't thought about doing 50,000 square foot spaces, but we'll figure out how to make that happen for you."

[00:11:36]
Emily Olman: Absolutely, Dan, and what was brilliant about the early days was that it was definitely an open beta. In fact, when the Matterport model would load the previous screen prior to it, it would be a Unity logo. I don't know if you recall that the Unity logo would flash?

[00:11:55]
Dan Smigrod: Vaguely. Yeah.

[00:11:56]
Emily Olman: Yeah. The Unity logo would flash – so they didn't even pay for the Unity license to white-labeled when they first had the Matterport Capture app on iOS, and so having done iOS development with my other company, we didn't pay for it either. I just remembered how funny that was. Thinking about that later going, "Oh my gosh! They hadn't even paid for that yet."

[00:12:19]
Dan Smigrod: It's probably funny because ... I actually bought the Matterport Pro1 3D Camera just after Matterport got funding of $30 million.

I figured, I can build an ecosystem around this with the Forum and I have confidence in spending $4,500 on a camera from a company that's just starting out, I figured they got deep pockets at least to get going.

In fact, we probably eventually dwell too much on 2014, 2015, even 2016, because you and I can reminisce forever about all the things that were happening early on and there's actually so much exciting stuff that's happened since then and even now.

But I do see on your timeline 2016 or 2015 Matterport MatterTags debut, Matterport Statistics starts in 2016. What was significant about Matterport offering outdoor 360s in August of 2016?

[00:13:31]
Emily Olman: That one was a big deal because prior to that, scanning outdoors, as you know, was a hack and it still is to this day if you're not using Matterport Cortex.

It really depends on how much ultraviolet light is interfering with the infrared and the camera. We were not able to suppress the infrared whatsoever and therefore we would either have to shoot an exterior scan in the morning hours in the shade – if we were lucky or after the sun had gone down.

[00:14:02]
Dan Smigrod: Let me translate a little bit for our viewers that may be totally new to Matterport in trying to understand what we've just said there is that today Matterport enables you to do 360 Scans and 360 Views.

The 360 Scans are what we think of as Matterport in 3D models. 360 Views are outdoor [360s] that don't have data attached to the 360, but enable us to shoot a 360 view outdoors. Prior to that, scanning outdoors was really an art, not a science of having to understand that you could scan as long as the camera couldn't see the sun, sunset, sunrise, but before the sun could see the camera.

[00:14:51]
Emily Olman: Oh, yeah. I showed up once at a cemetery like 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning to scan an outdoor area before the sun came up and I was going as long as I could until the sun came up and then there was just a point where nothing would align anymore and then it was done and that was what we did.

We just hacked it and we would tell clients we would think it would work, but we couldn't guarantee it, and so having a 360 Views built-in to the system for exteriors, because interior [360 Scans were] fine really, you just scan more or scan to that location.

But it was a game-changer for the product. It was actually a useful tour. It was great before, but it wasn't as much of a useful tour if you're missing the entire exterior of the property.

[00:15:49]
Dan Smigrod: I don't recall if it was in 2016 or 2015, Matterport introduced Matterport Highlight Reel, which was another feature that seemed to be important as a way to jump from living room to kitchen to bedroom, as opposed to walking through the space if you really wanted to get some place quickly.

[00:16:05]
Emily Olman: Yeah, hard to imagine that that didn't exist at some point, but it didn't. It's crazy if you start now and you think it's just this incredibly robust software and Matterport Workshop for you to do these tour creations. That wasn't always the case.

[00:16:24]
Dan Smigrod: In the later part of 2016, Matterport introduced point clouds: access the point clouds. What is that? Why does that matter?

[00:16:34]
Emily Olman: Dan, you have just thrown me a softball. ;-) Point clouds. ;-) Point cloud data – and at that time – we should also say, there was no paywall associated with the point cloud data.

When the scanner is used to create a model, to create a tour, it's basically what we call a time-of-flight sensor. The time-of-flight sensor is sending out many, many points of light. Those are coming back and being read by the sensor in the camera.

That distance is measured, it creates the geometry of the tour and geometry of the model. That data, the point cloud, this simplified colored point cloud, if you will, is available to people who have access to the files as an .XYZ file.

The .XYZ file is a point cloud, meaning it is basically the foundational building blocks of the mesh of vertices that are then further simplified to create the Matterport dollhouse and what we see. But it's really the underlying DNA of a scan. If you want to put it into those terms.

[00:17:56]
Dan Smigrod: I notice I'm looking up at your Matterport Timeline Chart. You have two sections: One is Matterport Virtual Tour Company and the other is Matterport Digital Twin Company. It seems like the .XYZ file might've been the beginning of actually unlocking the data that moved into Matterport positioning itself as a digital twin company.

[00:18:21]
Emily Olman: I think it was always there to be honest, I think that the moment that I put on this timeline, so – Matterport Virtual Tour Company to Digital Twin Company, that is more about the PR team saying, "Hey! Matterport marketing is saying, "we need to start using digital twin."

Maybe now if you ask somebody at their marketing team, they would want to say, "Oh! We're a Metaverse company." They might want to change that based on whatever is going to help them with their company and the brand, but yes, I think that all along the value and the underlying value of the scans was not only just the visual elements, but it was a spatial elements.

[00:19:10]
Dan Smigrod: I want to say that when Matterport unlocked the point clouds, I don't even know if it was called Matterport MatterPak. I guess it wasn't even called a MatterPak at that time, so at some point in the future Matterport productized the point cloud calls it a MatterPak, and then starts charging for it.

[00:19:34]
Emily Olman: Yeah. Exactly. There were a couple of years where it was free for you to get your own data and they didn't have – it wasn't called a MatterPak. Then they tried to say, "Okay. Well, you're going to get in the MatterPak, well, we're going to take away the free one" which is all I needed. I only needed the [Matterport Object File] .OBJ, which is the Object File, which can be then imported into Unity, was more relevant to me because I was more interested in using that for virtual reality.

But for architects and for design and for digital twins, or people who want to have a digital twin of a property to use it for other analysis or for IoT, having the point cloud can be valuable and perhaps more valuable. But, the point is that, it was they did put a paywall up and then if all you needed was the .OBJ, well, too bad, you have to buy .OBJ; you have to buy an .XYZ and ceiling plan. I've never used the ceiling plan.

[00:20:40]
Dan Smigrod: MatterPak may not be the appropriate product or service for you, but who wants to buy a MatterPak and what do you do with it?

[00:20:53]
Emily Olman: Basically, you can use the MatterPak, you can use the different files, like I mentioned, to import that into design software. It's really useful for somebody who needs to put it into Autodesk software. If they want to use it in anything for architecture. For them, it's a huge time-saving because they're able to basically shortcut the part of their workflow where they have to go out and do hand measurements, at least for initial planning.

[00:21:32]
Dan Smigrod: If you're an architect and you've been commissioned to redesign a space, instead of maybe going out and taking a 1,000 pictures and 1,000 measurements to then reconstruct somebody else's designed from many years ago, you could actually engage a Matterport Service Provider; scan the space, ordered the MatterPak, convert the file either to SketchUp (.SKP) or Revit (.RVT), or Autodesk AutoCAD, whatever it was preferred software and then actually begin designing the space rather than reconstructing someone else's previous space.

[00:22:06]
Emily Olman: Yeah, it's a shortcut for architects and for anyone who needs to have the MatterPak. What I liked about Matterport – Now things seem, you can doctor the spaces a little bit more in a way, but those were time-stamped in a way because they could not be changed after they were processed unless you add it to them and re-upload them.

It was really a moment in time where you could say, "Look! This is what it looked like when we started the job. Now we have the reference. We could see what it all looked like. We have infinite reference images and we have the data." It's a huge time-saving for anybody who is an architect or doesn't want to revisit a job every time. They just want to know where an outlet is in a room.

[00:22:54]
Dan Smigrod: Let's move to 2017. I see you're in your chart. CoreVR iOS. Daydream. WebVR. Matterport Scenes app. Why don't we start with those two. What were they and why were they significant?

[00:23:17]
Emily Olman: I have an old Android phone, the ZenFone AR in one of my drawers so I could show it to you. Basically, let's start with the Matterport Scenes app. Something that we all have now on our devices. We've got our lenses here with LiDAR built-in to our iPhones or CoreVR.

You have this CoreAR in Android apps or Android phones and so you're able to basically scan and therefore create that point cloud from your phone. Which is very cool. I can use this now to even make Matterport scans. My iPhone is a scanning device.

[00:24:07]
Dan Smigrod: But I think of that is 2020 as opposed to 2017

[00:24:10]
Emily Olman: It's not. SLAM technology: which is what this was based on – This was based on Google Tango and so there were a few consumer Google Tango devices which were for SLAM.

Simultaneous Location And Mapping (SLAM) which meant that the sensors on these two phones, the phone that I got, the ZenFoneAR, and maybe there was a Lenovo phone.

[00:24:44]
Dan Smigrod: Yeah. I forget that Google was actually considered maybe a competitor of data collection using this Google Tango, which I believe came out around even before, maybe the Matterport Pro1 3D Camera in 2014.

[00:25:03]
Emily Olman: There were very big devices like bigger dev kits, I think. I didn't have one, but a lot of folks that I know in San Francisco had them at their agencies. They were developing things for those, so that they could use them for augmented reality.

Matterport Scenes was so cool because it was this early version of what we now have in such a more robust forum with ARKit and ARCore running augmented reality and the LIDAR scanning happening in our phones.

[00:25:36]
Dan Smigrod: Let's pause there because this actually comes up a few years from now. Let's put a pin in the Core VR in the Matterport Scenes because actually there's new technology that Matterport has come out with; and we'll talk about that.

I still want to say in 2017, Matterport comes out with the Matterport Pro2 3D Camera. What's different: the Matterport Pro2 versus the Pro1?

[00:26:03]
Emily Olman: Hold on. Let's go there in a second. But we didn't finish talking about the Daydream and WebVR and CoreVR iOS. The thing I want to say about that before we jump ahead is that Daydream was an all-in-one wearable headset.

It was untethered. It was not one that needed to be plugged in. What that meant is that over the web, you could experience virtual reality content and experience Matterport spaces in an immersive environment without tethering meaning connection to a PC. I wanted to just make sure that we say that at that point, obviously Daydream got sunset and it didn't move forward, but that in particular, did not make it.

[00:26:46]
Dan Smigrod: I'm confused because someplace in my "technology library" – my "junk room" my wife might say, is a Samsung GearVR and I could experience a Matterport tour and that was wireless.

[00:27:03]
Emily Olman: Yes, that's true. But the difference being, I want to say that I don't remember, actually, Dan, it's a good point, but I think that it might have been only through the browser potentially and not that you had to also have the app. I would have to look back at that.

[00:27:28]
Dan Smigrod: I want to say at the time, you really had to pay Matterport $500 or more and have the model converted to VR. It was not browser-based. It was, I'm going to use some terms that I didn't even understand, side-loaded to my device that let me view a stereoscopic view of Matterport.

[00:27:56]
Emily Olman: More on Google Cardboard. But that was the thing that was cool. Then they changed it. They stopped doing this whole VR. They launched CoreVR, and I think that's when they stopped. They said no more $500.

Now it's free for everybody. Every space will have a little goggle icon and you can just navigate from that goggle icon to either your Google Cardboard or if you have a Google Daydream, you can do it in Daydream.

[00:28:21]
Dan Smigrod: Yes. Probably a good decision in terms of reaching the masses though, the version of virtual reality actually changed, because in the early version of Matterport virtual reality, I want to say you really felt like you were totally immersed.

[00:28:38]
Emily Olman: Well, those were hand-blended. That's why it costs $500, is because they were hand-blending the tour to make it feel immersive, like you were really moving.

They switched to the free version hoping to have more people use it as the pano-to-pano where you look and you see a blue dot and then you navigate to the blue dot and it's gaze activated VR. The gaze and holding your head in a particular location activates the virtual reality.

[00:29:08]
Dan Smigrod: I suspect that was a better decision because it reached more people. For some, even my wife, I think in the early days where I tried to have her look in virtual reality. She did it once and said, "I can't do this." It just makes her nuts. Where perhaps you and I would say, "this is the most exciting thing I could ever imagine."

[00:29:31]
Emily Olman: I put it on the head of a quadriplegic and with just his eyeballs and looking around and moving his head, he was able to go and move around the house, move upstairs. When he was asked by the conference organizer what was the best thing you saw, he said it was that Matterport VR experience. I had really cool connections with people over creating that content. Then I felt it was enabling accessibility. Ironically, VR is sometimes seen as something that's inaccessible, but this was actually bringing accessibility to people. It was a good decision.

[00:30:08]
Dan Smigrod: Do you think Matterport VR would be accessible even in its different flavor today?

[00:30:16]
Emily Olman: With the Oculus Quest. Yes. That's a good question. I would say I don't really know the answer to that.

[00:30:24]
Dan Smigrod: It's interesting because if you said, well, we're going to do it for the masses and we're going to make it so it doesn't cost anything. But I wonder what happened that Google Cardboard didn't get supported because that would have been the least expensive VR device to help people get on the on-ramp for virtual reality.

[00:30:42]
Emily Olman: Absolutely. Like I was saying, I still have the Matterport VR app in my phone and it's all messed up, it hasn't been updated in a million years. This is definitely wonky and it probably is obsolete at this point, but it only gets better. That's the stuff we get to talk about in the now and in the future.

[00:31:03]
Dan Smigrod: We'll do that. I do want to touch on the Matterport Pro2 3D Camera introduced in the latter part of 2017 based on your timeline. How does the Matterport Pro2 3D Camera compare to the Matterport Pro1 3D Camera?

[00:31:19]
Emily Olman: The biggest difference for me was the fidelity. Everything else more or less stayed the same, but the image quality increased significantly such that they were saying that it was 4K imagery, arguably, with their panoramas, which I think was great.

The fidelity had been so low that it didn't hold up to even some of the better 360 cameras that were coming out at the time. All in one device, probably the Ricoh Theta, I would say at that time maybe the Ricoh Theta S. I don't think that the Ricoh Theta V was out yet. But they were getting there, they were kind of the same. Then when the Matterport Pro2 3D Camera came out. It was a big leap in fidelity.

[00:32:12]
Dan Smigrod: What about in terms of speed: Pro2 being faster than the Pro1?

[00:32:17]
Emily Olman: No, not initially. I should have put Matterport Fast Capture on here. Do you remember when Fast Capture was updated?

[00:32:25]
Dan Smigrod: No. But I want to say that that was a firmware update that ran the camera. That it could spin faster and therefore – it doesn't sound like a big deal that you could save 5, or 10, or 15 seconds. But it turns out if you're doing 200 scans in a day, it's a big deal.

[00:32:41]
Emily Olman: Yeah. It's mega. It's a huge difference! I remember doing speed tests where it was like 45 seconds. Well, it would depend: it's part camera.

The camera can spin fast, but how fast is your processing device working? I always had this iPad minis in the beginning, because they had the most storage and that was always the biggest thing. It was the least amount of money for the biggest amount, same amount of storage, but the processors might not have been as powerful and so they would take a little longer to align scans.

Matterport Fast Capture was a big deal. The other thing that's very notable about the Pro2 was the GPS. It was interesting because up until GPS was put into the camera, the only way Matterport would know, as far as I know, that there was any connection between your property that you scanned and the location of that property was based on whether you entered an address so for privacy, for any reason and the 400,000 Matterport models that had been captured up until that point, it was not millions.

It was about 400,000 models.

The 400,000 models that had been captured until that point were not necessarily connected to any geo-location. When the GPS was put into the camera, we were also not given the option to suppress that. I was critical of it for various reasons, one of which I think was privacy.

[00:34:11]
Dan Smigrod: I think for us who were early fans of Matterport, they did some things, unfortunately, they were opting us in automatically.

Instead of giving us a chance to opt-in, we were automatically opt-in to stuff. Either we might assume for common sense purposes – from privacy, security, and user choice – that's a whole another WGAN-TV Live at 5 show.

[00:34:36]
Emily Olman: That's a whole different show. But I think that that change was justified by them saying that for placing 360s outside and that it would assist in alignment. I don't know if that's actually accurate, but that's what we were told.

[00:34:56]
Dan Smigrod: At the same time, you can move 360 Views manually either on your iPad mini-map or in Matterport Workshop.

But in 2018, shortly after the Pro2 comes out, according to the Hopscotch Interactive Matterport Timeline, Matterport pairs with the Leica BLK360. What is a Leica BLK360 and why did it matter that you could use a BLK360 to create a Matterport model?

[00:35:29]
Emily Olman: Leica BLK360 is, I would say, a sister-brother device. It's a device that Leica manufactures. It is a LiDAR scanner, I believe, and LiDAR camera.

The thing is that it is a long range one. It's highly accurate over long distances. It's used most effectively in large areas where you need to capture a lot of space.

For example, they did a demo at the Lawrence Livermore science lab at Berkeley, really close to us. They captured this huge dome. I think that's one of the ones that they first debuted showing us, "Look! We can capture all the way to the ceiling!" Because remember, the ceiling we often times get left out.

[00:36:24]
Dan Smigrod: With a Matterport Pro2, I would say, maybe do two-and-a-half – three stories. Inside a gymnasium, you'd probably lose the ceiling.

In a gym the ceiling would be too high to capture scan data with a Pro2. Using Leica BLK360, you can actually get to scan the data points of the ceiling.

[00:36:43]
Emily Olman: Ceiling; or you could scan outside. You're not going to have the same interference as you have with the infrared camera. It's useful as a companion to the Matterport because you run it with the Matterport Capture app.

You can run it with the Matterport Capture software, and it's switching between a Matterport Pro2 or switching between another device.

[00:37:09]
Dan Smigrod: I heard: 1) be able to scan outdoors with scan data; 2) be able to do high ceilings or greater distance or cover larger areas. I would probably add 3) accuracy of the scan data versus the Matterport Pro2.

Then of course, the trade-off is probably $19,000 for a Leica BLK360 and it takes longer to actually do BLK360 scans. You're not really going to just substitute that to do a house because it would take far longer than it would to do a Pro2, and is probably overkill. I'm going to ask you the question about overkill/residential/Matterport data.

I'm going to get there because I know you mentioned that in your Hopscotch Interactive YouTube Channel video. I noticed on your timeline in 2018, a Matterport Pro2 Lite Camera. What was that? Why did that matter, if at all?

[00:38:13]
Emily Olman: Two things with that one. One was that it had a shorter battery life and so they brought down the price to about $2,400, and that they were hoping would help people that needed to use it, just like an occasional Realtor might pick one up and have one around.

I also believe that with the Pro2 Lite, you could do a pay-as-you-go model on the hosting and the processing. I didn't have one, but I know people who had them. I was not a big fan of it.

[00:38:45]
Dan Smigrod: We won't spend too much time on it. We, as Matterport Service Providers, we're planning to scan all day, we need a Matterport Pro2 3D Camera that can scan for 8-10 hours on a charge without a problem.

The Pro2 Lite, as you said, really designed for maybe a real estate agent just doing one property, one battery in the camera instead of two.

That was plenty at the time. It was a play by Matterport to try and have a lower price point to have something for real estate agents.

Just fast forward today, if you have a Matterport Pro2 3D Lite, you're now on new pricing and it's the same as a Matterport Pro2 3D Camera. If you want to get a second battery put in, We Get Around Network Forum (www.WGANForum.com) Member, MatterFix (www.MatterFix.io) can put a second battery in it and it's now became a Matterport Pro2 3D Camera.

[00:39:41]
Emily Olman: It's cool that MatterFix can do that. Those guys seem to be really able to do some technical wizardry with their hardware updates and fixes.

[00:39:52]
Dan Smigrod: 2018 is also the introduction of Google Street View, Matterport to Google Street View. What was that? Why did that matter or does it matter?

[00:40:04]
Emily Olman: Yeah. It was cool because it basically was enabling us to publish right from Matterport Workshop: from a Matterport scan into Google Street View. It was again the same thing where they started out offering it as a Beta free for us, and then later they put a paywall up, I think $14.99 for a scan.

Matterport uploads to Google Street View are also very messy, the constellation; meaning the navigation, which is why they purchased Virtual Walkthrough. I think that's one of the reasons they purchased Virtual Walkthrough around this time, the technical team that had really solved for a very elegant constellation, which is the navigation points, the way points for Google Street View or those types of panoramic tours.

But yeah, Google Street View was something that we could then do as service providers. It was another thing for us to offer to our clients. I don't find a huge amount of overlap between my clients and Google Street View clients.

[00:41:06]
Dan Smigrod: If you're doing residential, it doesn't matter at all. If you're doing commercial spaces and the client wants to be on Google Maps, then without any special expertise, a Matterport Service Provider can scan with a Matterport Pro2 3D Camera and in Matterport Workshop publish to Google Street View.

But I think as you said, sometimes the walking experience is not always perfect, and so you can actually use a tool like Panoskin Pro to export all the 360s from Google Street View, import them into Panoskin Pro to tweak that constellation – that walking around experience – and then publish it back to Google Maps.

Discussing Google Street View might be off the path; I want to try and get you out of here. I know you got a scan coming up, so we are going to move on.

[00:42:06]
Emily Olman: Yeah, exactly. I don't even have it on my website anymore, Dan. Every Matterport Service Provider can do it, but it's not a core piece of my business.

[00:42:21]
Dan Smigrod: January 2018, Matterport announces its SDK is open. What is an SDK? Why does that matter? What does that enable?

[00:42:31]
Emily Olman: Yeah. Let's see. There's couple of different definitions for that. It's a Software Developer Kit or it's basically depending on who's telling you what they think it is.

It means that they're opening up their software, opening up the Matterport software for third-party developers to develop on their platform.

[00:42:59]
Dan Smigrod: Why does that matter?

[00:43:01]
Emily Olman: It matters because Matterport had a lot of feature requests and they see themselves as a company that was building this tool, but not necessarily as developers of all of the infinite things people might want to do with the space.

So by opening that up to a developer ecosystem, it meant, Dan, that anybody could then come to Matterport – In the beginning, you had to sign up to be a qualified software developer.

That meant that not everybody could get into it right away and they were really only doing it with qualified developers. But yeah, it's just so that anybody can build on top of the platform and use the Matterport data as their base for creating other experiences.

[00:43:49]
Dan Smigrod: That was 2018. I wouldn't say that was a public private beta use of the Matterport API/SDK Kits.

I think if we just fast-forward to [2022] I want to say, in 2021, Matterport actually re-introduced the API/SDKs and the Matterport Partner Program.

I'm going to say there's at least a 100, if not a 150, Matterport Partners that are creating solutions based on the Matterport API and the various SDKs. Some of the solutions which are actually public.

[00:44:32]
Emily Olman: Yeah, exactly. This is the stuff where I think We Get Around Network (www.WGANForum.com) is a great Forum for this stuff because how are you going to keep track of all the people that are developing of all of the different things and you have such a repository of both historical information and then also these different developers are in touch with you and then they're sharing what they're doing.

Even on YouTube, if I can, when I have time, I like to share the things people are doing because I think it's super-exciting. Matterport re-announced it. They made it a bigger focal point and that's very smart. They needed to do that.

[00:45:14]
Dan Smigrod: Maybe we'll just do an analogy and move forward. I have my iPhone. You held up your iPhone, it's like the Apple App Store.

The iPhone is great, but it's incredibly great because of all the different things you can do with it: because of the developers that are building out tools and solutions using the iOS platform. I imagine that Matterport would hope that the same happens. Matterport Cortex comes out in 2019. What is Matterport Cortex and why does that matter?

[00:45:47]
Emily Olman: Matterport Cortex is this very cool computational, artificial intelligence, photogrammetry. I know those are very jargony words, but Matterport Cortex is this ability for you to take a 360 pano, and then to reposition that on the map, and then to convert that into a 3D scan. Cortex will basically map to the geometry of the space.

It works most of the time to do that, not all the time. And so it helped us overcome things like sunlight and scanning outside or even being able to scan with a camera that has no built-in geometry or a time-of-flight sensor whatsoever, such as a Ricoh Theta V or an Insta360.

[00:46:43]
Dan Smigrod: Let's talk about that because in 2019, Matterport announces partnerships with the Ricoh Theta. Actually, I wanted to say the Ricoh Theta S, the Ricoh Theta SC2, maybe the Ricoh V.

[00:46:59]
Emily Olman: Yeah. Those are the ones. I don't know about Ricoh Theta S or SC2, Ricoh Theta V for sure and Ricoh Theta Z1.

[00:47:06]
Dan Smigrod: Which then subsequently came out. I do not believe the Z1 was out at the time that they did the announcement. In a similar fashion, Matterport announces a partnership and integration with Insta360. Today I would say it's the Insta360 ONE X2, the Insta 360 ONE R.

[00:47:34]
Emily Olman: The R. That's right.

[00:47:36]
Dan Smigrod: But when it was first announced, I want to say it was with an Insta360 ONE.

[00:47:41]
Emily Olman: Those are cameras that you could buy for not $3,500, but for maybe $350. Then you could make the spaces.

This is where I think we also have a philosophical divergence between what is a professional space and what's the true value of this space if the underlying data is a little messy and it's a little bit less clean. Is it still valuable to us in the same way? And is the Pro2 now overkill?

[00:48:17]
Dan Smigrod: The introduction of the Insta360 and the Ricoh Theta paired with Matterport and now having the underlying Cortex.

That sounds like, well, that was interesting because it enabled a 360 camera to do what a Matterport Pro2 does. But at a price point from $350, as you mentioned two, maybe it's $1,000 instead of $3,500. I think the philosophical question is probably yet another WGAN-TV Live at 5 show.

[00:48:50]
Emily Olman: I think that's a good topic though because let me tell you it came up this week.

[00:48:55]
Dan Smigrod: How did it come up?

[00:48:57]
Emily Olman: It came up because there was a property where two teams needed to be at the same time, and one was a video team and one was a photo team. The video team was like, "No! Just do it with the Ricoh Theta Z1."

I was like, "No! But I really want to do it with the Pro2." We all know that you can do this, and I even did a video on YouTube called Matterport versus Matterport. Can you tell the difference? It's this question of how do you scale? How do you get faster if you have to do five Matterport shoots in a day, it's a lot faster and Realtors may not care.

Whereas if you need the data for accurate floor plans, it's going to be worth spending the extra time to potentially use Matterport Pro2 or a different floor plan solution. But certainly there are arguments for both.

[00:49:46]
Dan Smigrod: Interesting in the We Get Around Network Forum, www.WGANForum.com, today Thursday, January 27th, 2022 – A new member just posted this exact question. No. Actually an older Member that has a Matterport Pro2 3D camera, "I'm looking at on Insta 360 ONE X2. What's the difference and how do I make a decision?" I guess part of it is: 1) price for hardware; and 2) speed; and 3) maybe is quality.

[00:50:21]
Emily Olman: And I think also, error. I think that using a device like the Pro2, which actually has that data and isn't going just on the photo is going to have a better scan alignment. I just trust it more personally.

[00:50:39]
Dan Smigrod: Let's talk about quality in two ways. One is in terms of 360 imagery and the other is in terms of 3D data. How does the image quality compare with maybe an Insta360 ONE X2 or you're using a Ricoh Theta Z1, how does this compare to the Pro2? I think you've already answered the question. You would rather use a Pro2 for quality, but your team was asking you to use the Ricoh Theta Z1 because you could actually do the tour faster.

[00:51:13]
Emily Olman: A different crew is asking me to do that and they were saying, did I know about it? ;-) And I said, of course I knew about it, but then I wasn't really a big fan of it. However, the video that I did, where I did the test and I tried it. Everybody can see the difference. Everybody could see the difference between the one scan with the Pro2 if they know what's up –

[00:51:37]
Dan Smigrod: Except the real estate agent so you know what to look for. Most real estate agents, unless you told him, and said, "This is the difference between this and this, you probably wouldn't know." You would know. I would know. The WGAN Forum community would know. In terms of the data, were you doing a space where the data mattered?

[00:51:55]
Emily Olman: To me, yeah. To build floor plans.

[00:51:57]
Dan Smigrod: Floor plans. So you actually wanted to have accurate data where you would say the Matterport Pro2 would beat the accuracy of the 360 cameras in terms of accuracy to create floor plans without having to maybe do laser measurements on top of everything else. If you're using a Ricoh Theta Z1 in order to calibrate the floor plan to the correct size.

[00:52:24]
Emily Olman: Yeah, exactly.

[00:52:26]
Dan Smigrod: That's the 2019-2020 Cortex on the iPhone, I'm looking at TruePlan for Xactimate. What is a TruePlan for Xactimate?

[00:52:45]
Emily Olman: TruePlan for Xactimate it's something you can buy through Matterport, I was in the Beta program for that too, however, I never got anybody to purchase one.

So I think it's really for crews that are construction companies or renovation teams or architects who have an in-house need to have a Level Of Detail (LOD) be higher and so it was basically doing an enhanced floor plan that includes more information and is also a lot more expensive.

[00:53:20]
Dan Smigrod: I would say since my wife and I have been lucky enough to be through three floods in our house – on different occasions – and insurance adjusters come out, that's what they do, they work with Xactimate in order to do the claim documentation for flood, fire, etc. and that's what needs to be submitted to an insurance company and they work in Xactimate and so maybe you can use a Matterport to have the Xactimate created for you, that's actually a whole another WGAN-TV Live at 5 show.

We've done at least two shows on this topic on WGAN-TV Live at 5 and so if you're interested, just Google either "Matterport TruePlan" or "Xactimate and Matterport" either in the We Get Around Network Forum (www.WGANForum.com) or just Google it and you should probably still come up with "WGAN-TV, Xactimate, TruePlan insurance claim documentation."

In the 2001 time frame, a lot of interesting things happened in terms of Matterport Android Capture App only – on iPhone Capture App only – with an Android device, do you want to just take that whole topic as one?

[00:54:36]
Emily Olman: Yeah. I could just cover it briefly because I don't think it's that much to explain, it's just that we had been really in the iOS ecosystem, we had to pair with an iOS device, whether that was an iPad or an iPhone and with the Pro2 scanning those models can get pretty big and pretty large the larger the scan gets so having a high capacity, high processing, best of the line, iPad is going to cost you a lot more money and having an equivalent Android device is not.

So I think it was opening up us to be able to scan and we could do it, we could scan on our phones, we could use an Android device or an iOS device, and it's something that I think was already possible when they move to Android Capture was because of the Android operating system that meant that backup and moving of models was already a lot easier because I was still on iOS and I had struggled forever on backup and transfer of models.

My team doesn't all live in the same city but sometimes we want to finish a job for somebody else and so we have had to this day, we've had challenges with that if we didn't have the ability to transfer models. So this whole thing of Android, I think opened up the world to Matterport in a different way and it also made life easier for us to just share our data with other people if we needed to.

[00:56:13]
Dan Smigrod: I'm going to maybe summarize some timeline elements and I'm going to ask you to comment again on significance. You can now use an iPhone and iOS only device to do Matterport Capture, it doesn't have to be paired with a Matterport Pro2 or 360 camera – you can just – handheld using my phone or using Android phone – does that matter?

[00:56:46]
Emily Olman: I have not tested Android. I don't use Android personally so I don't know the answer to that, but I believe you can do that with both.

[00:56:55]
Dan Smigrod: You can and so I'll just give you my short piece on it is to say, just because you can, doesn't mean that you have a commercial solution.

[00:57:06]
Emily Olman: Yeah.

[00:57:06]
Dan Smigrod: [coughs] It's kind of beyond your timeline because your timeline is really features with Matterport – not things like how many people sign up for a Matterport Cloud account and I think the interesting thing is the Cloud accounts for Matterport have skyrocketed, but it's because they are free accounts and you can use a handheld iPhone only or handheld Android only to capture a space. But after you do one scan, this is not really a solution for business, you really need to go buy a camera. Just kind of view handheld as a novelty.

I'll put a footnote on that as I'll say, "I'll change my mind tomorrow when Matterport comes out with a commercial grade rotator that pairs with a smartphone to create 360s" and now I think that kind of leads into the LiDAR that's built into our iOS devices now.

[00:58:07]
Emily Olman: That's right. I think that companies that are close, Dan, we'd be the Pivo for example, if Pivo – you know what I'm talking about?

[00:58:16]
Dan Smigrod: Pivo for Real Estate, in the We Get Around Network Forum if you just Google "Pivo Real Estate" just three words, you'll pop up a video that Emily, his produced on this topic, I think at least one and there's a lot of content in the, We Get Around Network Forum (www.WGANForum.com) on the Pivo Real Estate platform that uses a Pivo Pod Black specifically – that's the brand – Pivo Pod Black.

[00:58:45]
Emily Olman: Yeah.

[00:58:45]
Dan Smigrod: Or creating virtual tours.

[00:58:47]
Emily Olman: Yeah, exactly, that's this [piece of gear]. This [gear] is rotated.

[00:58:53]
Dan Smigrod: Surprisingly, Matterport does not have a rotator to create scans for Matterport.

[00:59:00]
Emily Olman: You would think it's so cool and it needs to be calibrated and it's not calibrated even for Zillow, but it's close and it's a much better more useful solution then holding it with your hand and shake it.

[00:59:15]
Dan Smigrod: Yes. All right. Matterport came out recently with Matterport Notes for collaboration. What is that? Why does that matter?

[00:59:23]
Emily Olman: Notes and collaboration. My take on why this is important is that when we talk about Matterport as a digital twin company, we look at the things that it's heading into now.

It is using the model for more than just its virtual tour use-case and it's saying actually, "No. There's a perennial use-case for this model because we can use it to communicate with our team. And we can mark up spaces.

And we can share and we can annotate. And it can be useful as a communication device, our communication I guess a location that we can join in together." It always was with Matterport MatterTags.

But this is more, this is more robust and this is where I think Matterport it's doing a few things in-house but once you see the explosion of API, SDK Partners with Matterport doing very cool things, you'll see stuff way beyond what we can even imagine with Matterport Notes.

[01:00:28]
Dan Smigrod: My second to last question. In your video about the Matterport Timeline that you created, you talked about overkill for residential. Can you tell us about that? What does that mean?

[01:00:41]
Emily Olman: What I'm meant with that was that sometimes the Matterport as a virtual tour solution is not necessary with, for example, Pro2 camera because it's so much data and it's so rich with all the things that it can do, but we only use 10 percent of it in the virtual tour and the rest of it's lost and thrown out and actually very disinterested for the Realtor and so that's why I think that other virtual tours, that just if a client just needs a virtual tour, they don't need to be asking for Matterport, but yet they do.

But people are saying, "but I don't like the Dollhouse. It makes me dizzy."

There's all this stuff and that's why I would say Matterport had become very much the standard over the pandemic and over the last several years but I think that the dollhouse and the 3D data that we get is ultimately more valuable for Matterport than it really is for the Realtor or for the seller unless they're going to use it for Notes or to go to Home Depot and to show their house to somebody and you have to really think of what are the use-cases for the underlying data and is that a value to me?

Am I paying for something more than I need to if I'm getting a 3D scan when I don't really need all of that?

[01:02:16]
Dan Smigrod: Last question. Is there something that we didn't talk about the Matterport timeline today that we should really talk about?

[01:02:23]
Emily Olman: Well, we talked about Matterport Capture. I'm sorry, we talked about being able to download spaces briefly. I think that's huge that came out just in January that we have this ability to do that.

Yeah, I think that what we didn't talk about Dan are are where is it going to go from here? I think that the timeline is evolving and I am excited to see what ends up on the timeline next. Matterport Digital Twin Company.

Matterport Metaverse Company? I want to know what those next moves will be. And I think we'll probably have to connect again on another talk at another time but those are the things that I would be curious about to see what flag gets planted on this timeline next.

[01:03:15]
Dan Smigrod: That's awesome. We should do that because I think what's more interesting is to take the timeline from today forward and imagine what it either could be or should be and why and I suspect that we both probably have a lot of opinions on that topic.

Emily, I know we could talk forever on this timeline and doing a deep-dive, I'm so grateful. I know you're running out to actually do a scan today; so thank you for being on the show again.

[01:03:44]
Emily Olman: Thank you, Dan and thank you and if anybody wants to reach out, they should connect with me at my website or connect with me on that We Get Around Network Forum.

[01:03:54]
Dan Smigrod: On your website is www.HopscotchInteractive.com. in the We Get Around Network Forum: @Hopscotch

We've been visiting with Emily Olman.

Emily is the Founder of Hopscotch Interactive based in the greater San Francisco bay area. Super-happy to have Emily on the show taking us through the Matterport Timeline that she's created.

For Emily in the San Francisco bay area, I'm Dan Smigrod Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum and you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.