Matterport ShopTalk 36: Emergency Action Planning with Troy Lowry | Video courtesy of Matterport YouTube Channel | 18 May 2022

We all know how critical it is to be prepared for an emergency.

In this Shop Talk webinar, Amir [Frank] hosts Troy Lowry, Director of Special Operations, to learn how to maximize an emergency action plan by using a digital twin.

Knowing where the closest emergency kit, AED, or fire exit route is, prepares everyone for a safer environment.

Source: Matterport YouTube Channel

Transcript (video above)

[00:00:00]
Amir Frank: - I don't know if everybody on the call knows who you are, what you do for Matterport, and how it is that you do it so well? Let's start with there. Troy, you've been with Matterport for a long time now. I don't even know how long.

[00:00:17]
Troy Lowry: - This month is six years.

[00:00:19]
Amir Frank: - All right. You've been with Matterport for six years and now you are on the capture services team and you're like this Special Ops. Is it just larger spaces? Is it unique models or used cases or when is it that kept these services contacts you and says, Hey, Troy, we've got this special thing that we need you for?

[00:00:42]
Troy Lowry: - Like Amir said, I run the Special Ops Division of Capture Services program here at Matterport. Basically, what we do is we deal with any large or specific or highly detailed scan for our clients. To your question, Amir, generally, when spaces start to get over 150,000 square feet or larger, we'll access special operations to go ahead and evaluate the Capture.

Put together a capture plan, and use that Capture plan to try in the Capture tech. Also, to work through the understanding of exactly what needs to be captured with the client. That way, we make sure everyone's on the same page to efficiently capture the spaces. We not only do large spaces, 150,000 square feet up to one million square feet, I want to say the largest we've done is maybe one of 1.5 million square feet to date.

We also do smaller spaces that have high levels of detail. For instance, if you had a storefront or a business that you wanted to display something in particular, or maybe you wanted to capture a certain set of merchandise, we would make sure that we understood exactly what we wanted to capture, what the data was that was needed and put together a capture plan to make sure we capture that data.

When we're talking about facilities, I should give a little bit of background for the first five years I was in Matterport, I ran a real estate facilities sport and I actually put our product in use at Matterport with our offices. What you can do is if you have a pumping and mechanical room, it's the best way to start the understanding of how to use for facilities.

You can actually take a model of a pump room and you can go ahead and you can capture all of the screens or data that you need from a pump room or from any electrical equipment connected to that pump room on any of the gauges. You can actually create a live overlay where you can have the gauges or any of that information from a pump room connected to your model.

We use a third-party platform to do that. But you can actually have live updates or live visuals into that pump room into any mechanical equipment to understand what's happening and what's going on. We also used it to mark all of our outlets, to mark any of our lighting fixtures, any of our fire extinguishers.

Any safety equipment was one of our number one priorities to make sure it's marked and share with our employees until understand where everything is located in the building. But also for us, we ran an evacuation team. It was good for the training of our emergency response team to see that and understand an emergency where they can go to get any of these pieces of equipment they may need.

[00:03:22]
Amir Frank: - I definitely want to get back to the scanning million square feet that is super intriguing to me and I think to a lot of our listeners. As far as facility management, the one thing that you as a facility manager, the thing that gave you the most impact from Matterport, what would you say that one thing, one or two things that you said this is like a game changer in my industry?

[00:03:52]
Troy Lowry: - If I had to narrow down, I'd say the ability to easily communicate with contractors or people remotely to understand the space and make decisions. When you're talking about a company that maybe has global offices, a team that either works regionally or spread out globally, it's very easy to allow them to see and visit this space and for you to collaborate.

Make decisions on a space as a team without having to travel there. The ROI on not having to travel a team somewhere or fly out a team member to meet with the contractor because you can have a meeting with a contractor in the space virtually, and walk through Tag exactly what you want to get quoted from a contractor. That communication of the build-out and renovation of a space because in offices.

You'll have a change in everything. As you grow, you're changing the layout of the space. You're changing out and desking a number of things that are continuously changing and this is just a great way to communicate with your team globally, virtually, and be able to make decisions quicker and faster.

[00:04:58]
Amir Frank: - Got it. For any global office or not even global, just like national office chain where you're managing multiple locations and you're working with a team, contractors and things like that and they need to work on stuff, move walls, they need to fix an update, so that communication is just considerably made more clear when doing it inside of the virtual fair amount of Ford Model.

[00:05:25]
Troy Lowry: - Absolutely. It also gives the contractor the ability to not share the models with contractors so they can measure and they can actually put together their equipment list, what they need and they can take measurements and know exactly what they need to bring to the job to get it done, and they can save time without sending people out.

I've had contractors tell me that it saves them a lot of time without having to send somebody out to measure everything. When you're talking about a space and building out, you don't need necessarily exact measurements, but you need a ballpark. We do give you within 99 percent accuracy, but they're going to give it 10 percent overage of what they're going to bring and they find it extremely useful and time-saving to be able to use those models.

[00:06:07]
Amir Frank: - Yeah. Any contractor, you never bring the exact amount, you'll have a 15,000 square foot facility, I'm going to bring exactly 15,000 square feet of flooring. You always bring more than what you need because there's going to be. Awesome. Sorry that's a little bit of a tangent but I know you've got the experience, so I wanted to just ask that question, even though it's not exactly what this webinar is about.

Let's go ahead and get started by, well, I guess continue, we already got started, by sharing a model. This is something that you scanned. I'm just going to go ahead and share my screen here. I'm in the edit view. This model, this is a school. Let me show everybody the dollhouse views so you can see it's a full school. You've got the gym, you've got the auditorium.

You've got even the front courtyard area, you've got the pool in the back, massive structure. Do you remember by any chance, roughly how the size of this model?

[00:07:11]
Troy Lowry: - Roughly, I think both floors are roughly around 300 thousand square feet.

[00:07:16]
Amir Frank: - Okay. This is huge but still doesn't come anywhere near that million square feet of space. I'll just scan. As far as emergency and things like that, I go through here and you've got some tags. You notice one thing, I think there's one out here in the pool where it brings up and they're using this. [inaudible 00:07:47] They've got a little video there and I'm going to play through the whole thing, but they've got others with videos as well. I think that's more for like the promote use case and things like that where they can share that with their onboarding students or however you want to call it, they've got the tags in the gym. But also I think there are tags around exits,

[00:08:19]
Amir Frank: fire extinguishers, things like that, fire alarms. Let me see if I can search here. Anything that has to do with that.

[00:08:29]
Troy Lowry: To your point, a mirror with the search tool. Now with you put conventional naming where you have a naming convention where maybe fire extinguisher, West Hall, fire extinguisher. However you do it if you just searched fire extinguishers now you have the ability to bring up each one of those pieces of safety equipment, which is great because it really helps to understand and organize those tags.

When you're talking about a space like this, they're doing this, this was initially put together to bring students in the campus, after campus. But it's so simple to now make a copy once they have it in their account of this model and then put together a separate model that they can share with either local municipalities, where they will mark up all of the safety features in the building,t he exits, fire extinguishers, first aid kits, anything of that nature.

You can mark up and create a separate model that like I said, you can share with municipalities and we do have school districts that are using it in this use case in sharing municipalities. If there is an emergency on campus, they have access to these models and they're able to find the features and the things that they need in the space.

[00:09:44]
Amir Frank: Got it. Yeah, it looks like this, like I said, is more promoted. They've got a very well labeled and tagged. I think it's the other model that actually that has all the fire extinguishers and things like that. But yeah, like you said, sharing this model with local emergency lives as fire departments, things like that. I remember in high school that the fire alarms were pulled all the time.

But their ability to as they're making their way towards the facility, they can actually look up the model and see exactly where all the things are. I would imagine that I don't know from the emergency like the fire departments standpoint what they know about the outside of the facility. But that also would be beneficial. The closest fire hydrant, things like that.

I don't know if that's something that you would include in the model or if that's some data that they would have in other ways. But how they would access where the fire is, things like that.

[00:11:03]
Troy Lowry: That's a great point and one of the things that we've worked on for putting together capture plans for schools is the ability to give a outdoor vantage point. We have now put together a system of how to capture 360s that will pertain to that use case. We may take 360s from each corner of the roof top or 360s from the exterior of the building that will give visibility to all of those things.

That'll give them visibility to where the fire hydrants are to where any type of safety equipment. You can even do a 360 where you're going to have a meeting, an evacuation situation where group A is going to meet, you can actually tag. Generally those are in areas that are marked. If you do a 360 there.

You actually give the employees or your students the ability to get familiar visually with those spaces because I don't know how often they still do fire drills in school. I know way back when when I was in school, we did maybe one a year, maybe two. But we found that the ability to visually see things and visual recognition in an emergency really helps.

Taking those 360 photos and attaching them to the model so you can see all the safety features out there is one of the things that we find to be very important and very helpful.

[00:12:14]
Amir Frank: Yeah, that's one thing to tell somebody where to go and it's a whole another thing to show them exactly where to be in case of an emergency if they see it, they're like, there's no question I know what to do. I suppose like with anything else, it's just practicing that and having that visual of what you need to do before actually being in that emergency situation is only going to make you like training your reflexes.

In a way, I suppose you know what to do exactly without question if that case might arise. Let me share another model here, actually. This one here, so this is an office space and I can go in. You can see here too, we got tags everywhere. They're using this it looks like also for promote, it looks like they embedded a map of where the facility is located there so in this case you do have different colors.

I've see this, so this is a fire extinguisher and that one is in red where this is in blue and just go welcome video. They did color-code the different tags and I know we've also got platform partners that can go beyond that and actually create icon, special icons for the tags like fire extinguisher doesn't just have to be a circle. It can be an icon of a fire extinguisher.

But here too, if you go into search, I can say so you've got a list of all the fire alarms, fire extinguishers. That by the way, is you notice that when I do that, as soon as I do that search, everything that is not related to that is not in the search, just disappears. I'm only I'm isolating, what those and where those things are located. If I don't want to take it a step further and say extinguishers, fire exits, fire extinguishers.

They're in all the fire extinguishers. Very quickly search for those tags. In search, of course, not only is used for tags, but also for labels and notes. What else was there anything else? Mine is slipping, but it searches a lot of content that gets added, so whatever you add, any layer that you Add On top of the model itself. Whether it's an a note label or measurements. Measurements that can be found in the search.

[00:15:24]
Amir Frank: Facility like this I mean, it's pretty obvious, I suppose, with the whole search function like we just talked about. For people. What about other things I hear. Step away from emergency for a second, but back to facility management and at Matterport also, we've got these hotel desks where people who are not familiar with the facility never been there.

They're in from out of town. They need to find it and from what I've heard, the managers will get pinged quite a bit regarding, hey, where am I sitting, where's my desk, that thing. Have you found that customers are taking advantage of this go wayfinding abilities that platform partners have introduced to Matterport models?

[00:16:21]
Troy Lowry: Some of the ways that they're using those, just like you said, is allowing their employees to locate their desk, but also having them run an exercise where they actually take the path out of the door assigned to them. So they visually get to see the path in which they will evacuate the building. I'll see any cues or markers that they may have to direct people as they're evacuating.

That's definitely been one of the ways that they've used it. Once you have a facility built out like this and you tag it in and you have each desk tag it's just extremely helpful across a number of different departments on how you can use this model. But safety wise, they're definitely running people through like virtual fire drills.

[00:17:09]
Amir Frank: Here's a good example, you've got the desks all numbered A9,A8, guessing just kind of goes down the list here. You could use this a couple of different ways. We said, you could use it for finding your desk. You can easily, if you're assigned a ten, let's get out of here real quick. If I'm just somebody who is not as familiar with this facility, I could go into here and say,

Okay, where is a ten and there's the tag right there. I could say, where is that? Once I've located that, I can say okay, so that's there, here's the kitchen and so on and find the exits. Right, So I could search for exit is okay. There's an exit there, I can say that's my desk, that's the nearest exit. Then I would know where to go in case of emergency.

[00:18:15]
Troy Lowry: Some people even have this built out where they work it into their evacuation plan. They'll give somebody you're sitting in this area. This is going to be your door to evacuate the line that add up that information out and walk them through that process.

[00:18:30]
Amir Frank: Got it. That kind of thing has already done as a user and a new employee or one that's coming in from a town and you don't have to do that yourself, it's already part of the plan that facility management has put together for you.

[00:18:46]
Troy Lowry: Yeah. From what I understand, it's part of their on-boarding process, neighboring people and that they make and walk them through all of this.

[00:18:52]
Amir Frank: Got it. Soon as you're on-boarded, there's just kinda like walk through this. People watch videos when they get on-boarded. They can go through models. Better understand the facility. You can also search for kitchen. If you "CLICK" on it, it'll just take you right there or It'll just show you where that is.

[00:19:20]
Troy Lowry: A big for offices. If anyone has ever worked in a large office and a new one is standing in a conference room. Extremely helpful. Finding a conference room and understanding where you need to go into.

[00:19:34]
Amir Frank: That is not just useful for new people to the office, that's useful for people who have been in the same office for years, to be honest. I can never keep track of our offices already at the conference rooms and which is where, yes. Definitely being able to pop this up would be really useful. You've worked with a good number of facilities and office spaces that are using this specifically for emergencies.

Are they more just we need the Matterport model and we can do all sorts of things with it? Is there, what's our first bottom-line intent, this is why we're getting it and then they discover that they can do other things?

[00:20:19]
Troy Lowry: Recently, we've seen a big push with schools districts that are looking to get these captured for safety reasons. They really want to make sure that kids are protected, the property is protected. What we've seen them do is when they get their Matterport accounts, they actually go ahead, make local law enforcement to collaborate or somebody account.

As we train them on how to use the model, we also helped to train the law enforcement if they're interested, and this gives them when an emergency happens, easy access to a floor plan, the layout and experience, what's in the school. Depending on what the emergency is, we can set up a capture plan for these two to capture it in a way to show different vantage points from inside the building.

The law enforcement or safety in that area can combat whatever is happening, whether it be a fire, whether it be a break in, they can combat the emergency with as much information as possible. That seems to be very helpful. Even I don't think we've even mentioned my marketing hazmat space I'm building. It comes to fire and emergencies, understanding where the hazmat area is in a building and understanding what's in there.

What's combustible, what's flammable, and understanding what can happen if emergency reaches that section is extremely helpful to the schools. I'd say that we've definitely seen a big push for the schools that their first use cases safety. Then we help educate them on how we other use cases that its use for. I've seen businesses now using it.

Maybe their initial usage was to bring people back to the office and give them a tour of the space. But now being able to implement the safety features and walk employees through where things are. Like I said, walk them through the Exit of a building and emergency situation is extremely helpful and it gives people the ability to run these exercises without having the whole company running an exercise of a evacuation.

You now get to travel that path, get the visual association with leaving the building. From what studies show an emergency situation, People respond well in areas they are familiar with. If you're not familiar, you tend to get lost, you can panic and we don't want that to.

[00:22:26]
Amir Frank: Familiarizing yourself before the emergency happens, that way it's just a lot more natural and less stressful.

[00:22:34]
Troy Lowry: Exactly.

[00:22:35]
Amir Frank: Is there a different way that you scan when you go to Schools? Are the facilities you talk about the emergency use case. You want to optimize your scan for that purpose. What is it that you think about as you're scanning through the property? What is it that you need to make sure that you capture to make that a successful scan.

[00:22:59]
Troy Lowry: We tried to look at the totality or the any type of emergency that can happen in a school. We start just by Capture position when you're capturing school. If we're capturing it for safety, we want to make sure that when we come across a fire extinguisher or a fire alarm that we capture right in front of each one of those. They're cleanly visible, if someone is walking in the space..

You can tag something if you want to have information associated with them, same thing with any first aid boxes. When it comes to securing the perimeter of a property from inside, one of the things we do with any exterior windows is we take vantage points, captures that are up close to the windows as close as we can get from either corner of the room where the windows exist.

Also in the middle that way you have a vantage points out of what is there's an intruder or someone in the space, but they can see looking out the windows. That way, the law enforcement can figure out the best way to position their style. We do the same thing with rooftop 360 corner of each buildings to give vantage points of property and roof line in any mechanical that they could be hiding behind on the roof.

But also doing a vantage point of what they can see from the roof. It gives the law enforcement on the ground or the first responders on the ground the ability to safely access a roof and know what's up there by being able to see the equipment understand what their dangers are, what are threats when they tried to combat whatever's happening into school.

We tried to put implement things like that where we're giving you every view possible and giving you every opportunity to be set up to be successful to combat whatever's happening in school. God forbid anything does. But those are the some of the things we look at when we're putting a caption plan together for this use case.

[00:24:46]
Amir Frank: I think it's important to always remember anytime you go and do a scan job what the first use cases for that scan and scan accordingly. It's rare that you just go in and scan because you won't just flushing out a 3D Model. There's always a use case. There's a way to optimize for that use case.

[00:25:08]
Troy Lowry: Sometimes that means extra scanning.

[00:25:10]
Amir Frank: Yeah.

[00:25:10]
Troy Lowry: Because you still want to capture the space as you normally would because the other use cases that you want the client to use so you want to capture it so everything flows well and you can travel through the space as you normally would which you want to add the data or the detailed captures on top of how you normally captions. You still have the full functionality of the model.

Once you have these added data points where maybe you're capturing specific things.

[00:25:33]
Amir Frank: Yeah, you can always like you said, it's super easy to just make a copy a duplicate of the model and hide these scans over here because this is better suited for this use case and this other one is for this use case. But if you don't capture those scan positions the last thing you want to do is go back on site and have to add more scan positions to make it suit.

Another need to scan everything at once. It's important to note that as far as like pressing, I'm guessing some scan tax may be concerned about the total number of scan positions and reaching that threshold that limit. It's not so much about the number of scan positions as it is about the amount of stuff that you're scanning. Just because you've got more scan positions in the same facility is not going to make it not process.

It'll work out just fine. It just gives you more flexibility later in what you do with that model.

[00:26:35]
Troy Lowry: Exactly. When you do deal with spaces that are larger or maybe you have a school that is a couple of 100,000 square feet. Based on the number of scanned points you take the slack and fit into one model. You just need to find a good breaking point or a good point where maybe there's a way that the building is split into the Connect and look to focus on capturing that way.

If you're certain that it's not going to fit into one model we can get upwards of 1,500 scans into one model currently with the Pro2. With overtime comes experience and when you get to a certain square footage your size that you're more than likely I'm not going to be one model and you just need to look for a good breaking point. You want to set that up before age.

We want to make sure you know where that point is beforehand because what you don't want to do is scan through that and do maybe 150 scans past that midpoint. Then realize I can't fit this and now I don't have a good point to connect it. Deep linking those two together also makes a seamless transition that has been a really good solution from some of the larger schools that we've been working with.

[00:27:34]
Amir Frank: Yeah, that's actually a really good point and brings us back to scanning a million square feet. Obviously, a million square feet does not going to fit on one model. You're still talking about a tremendous amount of data and streaming that is not easy. You think it's a model, it's so small, it's not much different than streaming a full movie. It's a ton of information and full movies take awhile to stream.

How do you scan a million square feet? What do you do?

[00:28:09]
Troy Lowry: The first thing you have to do is look at what the makeup of the spaces and know what your capturing a facility that has a lot of walkways where you can assess. There's going to be lots of captures because you're going to have to work your way through. We're going to guess that we can fit, guesstimate anywhere between depending on the makeup of the space.

Generally we stick with anywhere between 100,000-250,000 square feet of what we just fit into one model. That can vary. When you're looking dealing with a space that's a million square feet you really want to work with a client to understand how the space is made up. If there are spaces that you can break out. If there are areas you can say look, you have to prepare the client.

We're not going to be able to deliver this in one model. Based on the size of your space we're going to break this up into 5-6 models. Based on that do you have on areas where there's a natural separation of areas in this space and warehouse or large office building in generally the clients have an idea of where you can break that up. You just work with them to understand that.

Then you have to break that down into five sections. And each one of those five sections, if you're looking at 100,000-250,000 square feet in one section you're going to have to break that down into multiple models and laughed to be stitched together. That's where the precision comes in. Understanding roughly we tried to break it into roughly 50,000 Square feet for a number of reasons.

One with offers our client the ability to use scandal them fairly easy for their spaces but also it's a manageable area that we know we can fit enough scam points that we won't have an issue with the Capture app and we won't have an issue with the model processes. But you need to make sure that you have overlapping scans in those areas.

You can stitch these models together and you read you're looking at a space. It's going to be, let's say, 200,000 square feet. You're going to break it into four sections of 50,000. You're going to want to make sure that you instruct your capture technician it if it's multiple or if it's just one where the overlapping points can be connected. Because that's what's going to allow you to have a really solid well aligned stitch model is being able to have.

Data that's similar from each model that you can submit a customer support and help station.

[00:30:27]
Amir Frank: You're scanning 52 are roughly 50,000 square feet in a single model. You're taking say about five of those, 4-5 of those, stitching them together into 200-250,000 square feet, then those obviously can't get stitched together. Alix brought up a really good point about stitching into one model. Then those four models that are each roughly 250,000 square feet are deep linked together.

You reach the end of one hallway and you want to turn into another hallway. There's a matter tag there that you click that link. That loads you into the right location of another model. Then you just seamlessly continue from there down the hallway.

[00:31:19]
Troy Lowry: That's the other great part about getting making sure even when you're going to cross over from area to area to have a common scheme. Because it's really good for the user if you're going to from one area. You have a 200,000 square foot deep link to another 200,000 Square foot. It's it's ideal to be able to transition and you'd be in the same spot if that makes sense.

When you transition to the deep link model the next portion of the building you're going to start from the exact same spot so everything's going to look familiar. You'd be in the same area. It's not like you're jumping to another section of that building. Once you open that model, it'll appear that you're in the exact same location and continue.

[00:31:59]
Amir Frank: Yeah and you can add a QuickStart parameter to make it even more seamless. I'm guessing.

[00:32:06]
Troy Lowry: Yeah.

[00:32:06]
Amir Frank: He doesn't even take you in through the dollhouse for anybody. We haven't talked about URL parameters in a while, so I should probably address that and also deep links for anybody who doesn't know what a deep link is. If you go through the model you can be in showcase just as a visitor or as you're working inside workshop in the model and editing it you press the letter U on your keyboard.

In the top-right corner a little link comes up. That is the deep link to exactly what you're looking at when you press the letter U. That's how you do that. You have one where you want to be when you begin walking through this new model. Because you know where you are in the first model, model A. You go into model B, you situate yourself, you press the letter U, you grab that link you go back into model A.

Where that matter tag is and you paste that into model A so that when it's clicked in model A you start exactly where you need to and model B. Then back again from model B the same thing to model A. Hopefully that makes sense. We should have a video on that. If we don't, I should definitely do one. That is cool actually because it allows you to basically have a limitless number of square feet.

You can have these massive insane, you can go and scan the Tesla factory in Austin, which is insanely huge, and just break it up in such a way that you can seamlessly click from one model to the next. You're not going to be able to zoom out and get one massive doll house, but as you're walking through, you can get the sections. As you said, that does allow them then to go and create BIM assets for each section.

Because that too, there's a limit to how big of a model you can have and get the BIM models from. To address Alix's question regarding stitching into a single model. When stitching, basically we are manually manipulating an asset, a file called a manifest that has the list of all the scan positions. We're saying, take the scan positions from Model A and take the scan positions to Model B and create this new manifest file called Manifest C.

That has everything combined and it all knows how it works. That's incredibly simplified. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but basically we make a single file and then that goes through the same processing that all models have to go through. It's not like we can take a 250,000 square foot model and another 250,000 square foot model and combine them into one because that is just going to be too much information.

For the processing engine to work through. While it's very helpful to be able to do that and have the stitching team work on those models for you if you weren't able to or like Troy is saying, you proactively made it so that you do it in a certain way for this purpose, that's great, but it's not like we can go and just continue stitching more and more models together to get this monster model.

All of it has to go through the same processing pipeline. That's pretty much the bottom line there. Before we go ahead, we took it a little too far and I haven't been addressing the questions. I do apologize. Let's go ahead and dress some of these questions because we do have some coming in. Definitely appreciate all of you submitting these questions.

Here we go. In a situation during a shoot where the Matterport camera malfunctions, fails, is there a way to pick up where the shoot left off by using your phone or does it have to be done using the same Matterport camera and therefore starting all over again in the future? Yes. Basically, you can. You can actually use as many different types of cameras and capture devices as you want in the same model.

Great use case is starting inside with a Pro2 because it doesn't do as well outdoors. It depends on the time of day, but if it isn't the right time of day, you work yourself outdoors and you can move to your access with an iPhone, with LiDAR, ideally, because LiDAR on iPhone does work outdoors. Then just continue and work your way.

You can have multiple camera and capture devices in the same model. If you do for whatever reason ran out of battery or the camera, God forbid, drops or fails for any reason, you can definitely continue with a backup, a second Pro2 if you have that. Your iPhone is obviously going to be a slight difference in image quality and in measurement accuracy, things like that, but you can do it.

Do you have experience with that, Troy, doing that personally? Has anything like that ever happened to you?

[00:37:30]
Troy Lowry: I've never had it where I've had to change because the Pro2 malfunctioned, but I have used a number of different cameras on the same project before for sure.

[00:37:39]
Amir Frank: I've seen one of your projects where you did indoor, outdoor with the BLK outdoors, broad daylight, sun was shining, and indoor was all Pro2.

[00:37:48]
Troy Lowry: Even that model that we showed at the school. Part of that was done with the BLK outdoors and then Pro2 indoors. It's definitely doable. The only thing that I would warn against this, make sure you understand what the use case is. If you're scanning for BIM, you definitely don't want to use our 360 cameras to do any data collection there.

You'd want to stick to the Pro2 or the Axis to make sure you get the measurement data and the point cloud from those captures.

[00:38:19]
Amir Frank: Very good points. Thank you for mentioning that because the use case is always Number 1 importance and you don't want to swap to a camera that doesn't support the use case. Okay. Tom asks, how do we request those overlay services? Do you have an example of electrical rooms that may have display overlays on them? I don't know about display overlays. I think he's talking about IoT data that comes in.

[00:38:44]
Troy Lowry: I don't have any unfortunately available right now, but we can find out who the third party is and refer you to that. It's a third-party partner that does that.

[00:38:55]
Amir Frank: Actually, I've seen some examples through PHORIA and CAPTUR3D. CAPTUR3D, I can put that in the chat, but it's spelled CAPTUR3D, but instead of ED, it's the number 3D. CAPTURE, R3D. I don't know if Treedis does that as well, but I've definitely seen an example. Actually, I don't know if I can find it quickly, but if you reach out to me, Tom, separately, I'll get you that example. We have it on our YouTube channel.

I can show you. It's pretty cool. What third-party app is used for live updates? I think this is the same thing where you mean live updates connected to IoT devices that can give you a real-time feed. Checkout, like I said, PHORIA, P-H-O-R-I-A, them and CAPTUR3D is the same company. Go to PHORIA or CAPTUR3D, like I said, 3D, and check that out. They can definitely do that. What is the best platform to hold a collaborative meeting?

Have you done meetings? I've seen some of these. I know Treedis does it very well. Who else?

[00:40:14]
Troy Lowry: Experience has been with Treedis. I think they do it really well.

[00:40:19]
Amir Frank: I think for collaborative meeting, they do a great job. I know there are other platforms like Voiceable who I don t think that's their main use case for meetings. It's more a retail thing, but they might also be able to do it. Checkout Voiceable as well as Treedis., what is the benefit to having a fire safety plan built into a model.

Even if it has a copy separate from your marketing model, wouldn't be simpler for the average person to understand from the floor plan? Do you find it benefit or do our customers for CAPTUR3D who are using this for fire safety and emergency to have an actual 3D model versus a 2D floor plan?

[00:41:07]
Troy Lowry: The feedback that we've gotten, their ability to be in a space and understand the totality of everything in the space, not just from the floor plan, but being able to walk through and see maybe where they'll run into complications has been very useful. They're using it both, the 3D model and the floor plan. Initially, I understand the question that it makes sense that you're able to see more of the floor plan.

But being able to get into the space, understand where doors are, what they're going to have to get through to get to a certain space, what could be closed, what could be locked, those are all very big concerns that the 3D model really helps walk them through that.

[00:41:44]
Amir Frank: I don't know if you're talking about just getting a floor plan from a Matterport tour or just having blueprints from the city, I guess, which I assume the fire department would have access to. I don't know, but buildings change. You know this just as well. Any facility manager can tell you buildings do change and floor plans get outdated very quickly.

I can definitely see where there isn't a wall or vice versa, the floor plan, and now they've made one room into two conference rooms, or whatever the case might be. Again, I'm not sure just where the floor plans are coming from, but it's very likely that city plans are outdated because buildings do get updated.

[00:42:30]
Troy Lowry: We come across that a lot. We're doing lately a lot of work for people that do want to do it for the floor plans or the blueprints because there is nothing registered with the city and everything is outdated. As easy as they've made it two by faux walls or walls you can put in and out on your own, space can change very rapidly and you don't have to go through a permitting process to do a lot of that.

This is just a very helpful way to understand the space.

[00:42:55]
Amir Frank: - Yeah. For sure. Having it updated anytime a change is made, it's very easy to just to go. Even if it's just, you don't have to re scan the entire facility. You just have to add that location to the model data that you've already captured. There are ways of doing that, so you can get the whole model updated without having to re scan the entire space.

Are you able to scan a multi floor building as one active space? For instance, 50 units condo building. I don't know if you've done any apartment or condo style buildings, but can you scan that as one?

[00:43:32]
Troy Lowry: - Yes. I wish I had it ready, but I think you've seen it. We did a thirteen story building in the downtown San Jose. That was a construction site and it was a good size building and we did all 13 floors in one month. You can very easily do multi floors. Doing a multi floor is just like doing one floor. You just have to go up a set of stairs to create a new floor when you get to the second floor.

But depending on the size, as long as it doesn't exceed 1,500 scan points, you should be able to fit that into one model with no problem.

[00:44:02]
Amir Frank: - Can you have multiple people doing scans with different cameras? iPhone Pro 2, 360, at the same time to create a single model. That's a really good question. I'll say this, Kyle. Yes and no. You can't have everybody feeding into one model but, try correct me if I'm wrong, using your scenario where you're breaking up a very large model into multiple sections.

You could say to one Tech, okay, you're going to work on this section and this is how far I need you to scan. Another tech can be scanning another part of that and then have those possibly stitched together later on.

[00:44:44]
Troy Lowry: - Absolutely. It takes quite a bit more organization to do, but we've had as many as five Techs working in one building at the same time with the idea that we're going to stitch the models that they capture together at a later date. To your point, yes, we can capture separate sections, we can stitch together, but to have multiple cameras feeding back to one iPad is what we cant do yet. Or to one model.

[00:45:06]
Amir Frank: - Everybody's working with their own iPad or iPhone or, it doesn't have to be iOS anymore, I keep forgetting. Android. Anything you've got, you can run the Capture App, but one camera, one OS device, mobile device, Android or iOS. Then you can just put them together later on. That could work. I just started using Matterport with our company's Leica BLK camera.

After a scan is uploaded to Matterport, how can I see what resolution? Low, medium, high or HDR, the 0 2 3 4 5, the different settings that you have when using the BLK. Setting was used on the scan. I don't think there's a way of doing that right now.

[00:45:52]
Troy Lowry: - Not that I know of. Generally, you check those in the Capture App when you connect a camera.

[00:45:59]
Amir Frank: - The Capture App's feedback and options that you get to select as you're doing the Capture itself. There is nothing later on that is going to tell you what was used. If that is a concern and you want that, I suppose you can just make a note during the scanning process and add it to a tag or note in the model later on.

[00:46:27]
Amir Frank: Hopefully that answers your question, Gabriel. Last question. Are there any third party apps to take the floor plan data from my Pro 2 and turn it into a physical fire safety plan that would, for example, be on a wall at a business. I see what he's getting at here. That'd be very cool. Or is this usage case, would I submit the exploited floor plan to my local fire authorities and they take it from there?

Have you done anything like that where you've worked with a company that you can say, Here's the floor plan and they actually go and build out the fire safety procedure. Is that a thing?

[00:47:12]
Troy Lowry: - I have not to that extent yet. Generally when they do share with the local municipalities, they just share actually the models, they share the link so they have access to the floor plan, to the 3D model, to everything that the client is captured or pay to have captured. When you've worked with school districts, they go ahead and turn over the entire models.

They give access to the entire model so they have access to the floor plans, to everything that they've purchased through that app or through their app, through their account. Like I said, they've literally made them collaborators on the account so they have access to everything that the school has purchased or the client has purchased on for that space.

They have the totality of everything, not just a floor plan. I have yet to see where they just work with a floor plan to develop that, but I don't see why you could even screenshot a floor plan of a Matterport model. If you were to search out just in fire extinguisher tags, you would have the tag actually located on the floor plan and you could literally post that with instruction or verbage showing where exits are, showing where everything is on that floor plan.

[00:48:21]
Amir Frank: - I would assume if it is a school or facility they have somebody that they work with to create that signage to put on the wall and that company, whoever is creating that signage, I'm sure they're familiar with making those types of signs. They could collaborate or they could request the assets that they would need. In order to do that, you can certainly always share the model with them.

The search feature is not only accessible as an editor or a collaborator of the model, but anybody that you share the model with can search, can search the labels, can search the Matter tags and anything. That's really important to note. I guess if you are just sharing that and a company that creates that signage for companies, I'm sure those companies exist.

Can just do whatever they need to do as a visitor to the model and then find everything they need to find that way to do what they need. Of course, you're working with them, they're collaborating with you on getting these assets for the school, for the facility, for whatever. If they need something, they'll just ask for it and you can provide it from the assets that you can get from through Matterport.

Whether it's open or just screenshot. That brings us to a close. Thank you, Troy very, very much for sharing and being with us here today. Thank you very much for all the attendees who asked all these great questions.

[00:49:47]
Troy Lowry: - Absolutely. It's been fun.

[00:49:48]
Amir Frank: - Great. Looking forward to having you back, talk more about scanning large spaces. I know that's a big deal.

[00:49:53]
Troy Lowry: - Absolutely.

[00:49:55]
Amir Frank: - Take care. Thank you very much everybody. Have a great rest of the day.