WGAN-TV Transcript: SuperViz SDK for Matterport and Other 3D Models

WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host 31.21K Website Atlanta, Georgia Linked In Facebook Twitter YouTube TikTok Instragram Matterport Service Partner Google Street View Trusted Photographer Zillow Certified Photographer We Get Around Network Member	31.21K DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user	plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 0
	WGAN-TV \| Leverage the SuperViz SDK for Matterport and 3D Models to Super-Charge Collaboration \| Guests: SuperViz Co-Founder and CEO Russ Rive and SuperViz Vice President of Engineering Tommy Lindestrøm \| Episode: 180 \| Thursday, 9 March 2023 \| @marcelo Transcript [00:00:02] Dan Smigrod: Hi all. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, March 9th, 2023, and you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. We have an awesome show for you today: Leverage the SuperViz SDK for Matterport and 3D Models to Super-Charge Collaboration. We have two awesome subject matter experts for this topic. SuperViz Co-Founder and CEO Russ Rive. Hi Russ, thanks for being on the show again. [00:00:35] Russ Rive: Hey Dan. Great to be back. [00:00:37] Dan Smigrod: And SuperViz Vice President of Engineering Tommy Lindestrøm. Tommy, good to see you. [00:00:45] Tommy Lindestrøm: Good to see you. Thank you for inviting me. [00:00:47] Dan Smigrod: You bet. Thank you for being our subject matter expert today on the SuperViz SDK. I thought for the benefit of our audience, we would just say that the first half of the show... let's assume that the WGAN-TV audience members are decision makers and product managers interested in how to add value to Matterport and other 3D Models. We're going to speak in everyday language that CEOs and product managers can understand. Then for the second half a deeper dive for the benefit of Chief Technology Officers, coders, programmers that have been asked to evaluate how much tech resources will be needed to add these SuperViz features to Matterport tours and other 3D Models. We'll speak geek. We'll speak tech. I thought before we jump into the SuperViz SDK topic, Russ, how about just a big picture overview of SuperViz? [00:01:55] Russ Rive: Yeah. The idea of SuperViz is to make it really easy, just using a web browser to meet inside of remote digital twins. Whether they're reality captures, whether they're 3D models, but turn those typically single-player experiences into multiplayer collaborative meetings, whether you're guiding, presenting or selling something. How do we make that really easy for you to do and make it as easy as just sending a meeting link as you would normally, whether it's a Google Meet or a Zoom, you just click it, opens up the whole 3D space, synchronizes with everyone, everyone gets inside. Has a full video conference experience, but at the same time has an individual point of view avatar walk around -- see where you're pointing -- experience. Recreate the feeling of being somewhere together, but through a browser. That somewhere could be anything from a reality to a projected reality of what people would like to build. How do we make that really easy for people to do, is a general vision. [00:02:50] Dan Smigrod: Awesome. That's whether the space exists -- even before it's built -- to view it, perhaps in a BIM model. [00:03:00] Russ Rive: Yeah, the whole process really. [00:03:01] Dan Smigrod: All the way through the whole life cycle of a building, perhaps even weekly construction documentation in every phase of that build-out. [00:03:14] Russ Rive: Yeah. That's a good point. We have customers that use it through all those phases. From the initial phases where it's mostly just internal meetings of architects and stakeholders. Meeting inside of really simple BIM models, walking around the space, commenting on it as if they're walking around inside of it. Then as they start rendering it out and start making it photorealistic to really get a feel with textures, they start using the tool then to start presenting, maybe even pre-selling some of these spaces or they're going to be building; really get the feeling of it. Then once they start getting into the building phase of it, but this is during the construction, they're doing reality captures of the progress of the construction and having remote people be able to meet and walk the construction site, whether you calling an construction engineer or stakeholders, they can do remote construction site management and on-site meetings remotely. Then of course, once it's ready then they do reality capture, just to capture what it actually looks like in the sales process, where they can actually show it in the portfolio of what it actually came to. This idea of meeting remotely during this idea of building out spaces, goes from the whole process all the way from the early design to right at the end. You're right. [00:04:20] Dan Smigrod: We did two deep dive WGAN-TV shows. I'm going to refer our viewers to: 1) Meet, Present and Collaborate Inside Matterport Tours via SuperViz. 2) AEC Team Meet Inside Your BIM Models powered by SuperViz. Both of those shows, you can easily find them at: www.WGAN.INFO/SuperVizOnWGAN Those were deep-dive demos of the front-end and of the back-end of SuperViz. And I think for today's purpose that will enable you to move faster with the understanding that you're speaking to either Matterport Service Providers that intimately understanding SuperViz, but trying to take it to the next step, or the tech teams that are trying to do the evaluation to understand, well, how easy is it to implement the SuperViz SDK. I'd like to go over with you, Russ, on the SuperViz SDK to make sure that we hit at least six things: 1) SuperViz SDK for Immersive Meetings; 2) 3D Viewer plugins; 3) real-time data properties; 4) Avatars; 5) broadcast; and 6) dashboard; and really tease out what do those mean and then what do they look like perhaps through some examples. Do you want to jump in the SuperViz SDK? [00:05:51] Russ Rive: The SDK is a really exciting product that we've released recently. The two episodes you're mentioning where people can meet easily inside of BIM models or SketchFab or existing Matterport tours, that's a product we call SuperViz Instant Meetings. That basically means anyone can sign-up for an account, drop in their files, drop in their Matterport tours links, the SketchFab links. Then we'll host everything and take care of it and you can just start generating your meetings and meeting inside of it. We made it really easy, easy integration, turned it into a SuperViz turnkey product. Now what we started hearing from the market is people were saying, "well that's really cool, but I would like SuperViz to work in this tool or that tool." Or, "we use Matterport, but we also use MPSkin to do all the extra things that it does." "I'd like to be able to present and work inside of the MPSkin project." We started hearing that quite a bit and a light bulb went off and said, "well, how about we then create a Software Development Kit: a SDK that allows any tool out there, whether it's a company using the Matterport SDK, creating their own tool on top of the Matterport SDK, whether it's someone working with the models or any three-dimensional space. Let's take this technology that we've built internally to create the SuperViz Instant Meetings, and now offer the core technology, so any company out there can take advantage of that through a web service (browser). If you have any application that you think of that does viewing of 3D models, viewing of digital twins, viewing of reality scans. But it's really a single-player experience where you send a link and people go into it, which is more like a typical Matterport project or say just entering Forge to see Autodesk projects. Now with SuperViz SDK, just a couple of lines of code, you can bring all those functions that you would see in the SuperViz Instant Meeting product that we had before, which includes video conferencing, presenting functions like follow me, gather people, where we help to show people where to go, Avatars, laser pointers. You can even present what we call broadcast mode, so you can go up to 230 people in a meeting, where you have up to 16 people with Avatars and webcams, but another 230 spectators, audience members following around. Where you can also activate the Follow Me feature, "the gather"... the "jump to"... All these tools are natively supported inside of the SuperViz SDK. This is really exciting. Now we're able to enable anyone that has these platforms to take this next step in collaboration to their platform. They don't have to invest all that time and energy and funds to try and build something like this because it's really taken us a while and it's a lot of investment to do. Someone can now turn that on literally within a couple of hours to have a proof of concept, maybe two or three weeks to actually have something in front of their customers and then be up and running with the SuperViz experience inside their product as a feature. [00:08:39] Dan Smigrod: Awesome. Do you want to take us for a deeper dive demo and maybe we start with SuperViz Immersive Meetings and what that looks like. [00:08:46] Russ Rive: Yeah. Well, I'll share my screen here. I'll drop us in from our website. [00:08:50] Dan Smigrod: While Russ is sharing his screen, I'll point out that you can go to the main website: www.SuperViz.com and for the SDK: www.SuperViz.com/sdk [00:09:06] Russ Rive: All right, has my screen come up there? Great. I've just come to [www.SuperViz.com], so that's what you would see. As you come to [www.SuperViz.com], you'll see very quickly it subdivides into these two options. The SuperViz Instant Meeting is what we talked about in the other episodes. If you're just an end-user of Matterport, the models you can go in here, create a subscription and go in and start meetings. What we're talking about today is what we recently launched, which is the SuperViz SDK. Now the SuperViz SDK, like I mentioned, largely brings this functionality to any tool that you have. You can go through [www.SuperViz.com/sdk] take a look at our documentation, which Tommy we'll get into in a bit and make it really easy to do. Here are the features we quickly talked about, the SuperViz Immersive Meetings, the plug-ins. Now with the plug-ins, we have to think of it as we have the base SuperViz SDK that takes care of this whole concept of videoconferencing, and synchronizing positions in 3D space. The plug-ins just make it really easy for the most popular use cases. We have a Matterport plug-in, which means out of the box that already works with the Matterport SDK, if that you're using. We have a three.js plug-in. If you want to go ahead and work with anything that is using three.js and we got many other plug-ins coming down the line. We have the Forge plug-in that's about to be released as well. Overtime we will be adding other different plug-ins and sometimes we just have to add examples as opposed to plug-ins because it's a custom development. We have examples being built out right now with the Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming and Google Street View. How could you turn that experience into a multi-person experience? Another interesting thing we have is what we call the real-time data properties. Now if you think of SuperViz, what we're doing is we have the synchronization layer running in a meeting, which is similar to say in this meeting it synchronizes Windows and shares screens and mics and so on. But in SuperViz we take it to another level because we're synchronizing coordinates of everyone inside the space. We're synchronizing what they're looking at. We're synchronizing projects that are changing. What we've done is we've exposed that synchronization engine to the developer where they can use that now to synchronize any property throughout the meeting. If you have a custom application and say you want to synchronize... Say you have an application for doing interior design, you want to change the color of a carpet. You could use our synchronization engine. If the host goes and changes the carpet color, you just tell our engine and it automatically syncs with everyone in the meeting. Just keeps everyone in sync. That becomes really powerful so people can sync pretty much any property amongst anyone inside the meeting, we've exposed that. Avatars, we've integrated with Ready Player Me for the defaults, but you can also add any Avatars that you'd like inside of this, we really make it open. The dashboard is really cool because that's where you go. As a developer, you can see all the meetings happening on your platform, which customers are having, how many minutes, limit people, know how to bill them. Because what happens if you think of what we're doing here is we're turning SuperViz instead of an individual subscription for people to run meetings, we're turning in as a web service for another company integrating their tool. At that point, we're charging for participation minutes per person in a meeting. So how the customers end up charging their customers is up to them. The dashboard is really useful for that because that's where they can see exactly who's using how many minutes and so on. It's the back-end view into this engine of how people are using your application. I've talked about these things. Let me go ahead and show an example. For example of what this looks like. Once you've logged into your developer, Tommy will get into this. I'm not going to get into the technical part of it. But basically you sign up for an SDK developer account and then it gives access to GitHub and that basic code that you can download and start running these examples. If you know what you are doing, you can get started in a couple of minutes. Download an example. We've done a couple of examples here in this library of examples. We're going to keep expanding. But it's a nice way for people to just really quickly just see how it works. I'm going to go ahead and start an example here. I'm going to put in my name. You can see that it's just basically a demo of that. I'm going to copy the meeting. It's already generated a meeting link for me. You have the code to this whole example if you want to yourself, I'm going to send this in the background here to Tommy. He'll come in and join me there. Let me know if you've got that link there Tommy if you got the link. I'm going to go in and start this meeting. [00:13:19] Russ Rive: It looks very much like a video conference. Keep in mind that this is an implementation of a UI. When you integrate this into your product, it looks whatever you'd like it to look like. I'm going to mute my mic so we don't have two microphones running at the same time here. Then you can see here we have the default Avatars. Again, this is just the default that we put in here. You can use whatever Avatars you like in your SDK. It looks very similar to the SuperViz Instant Meeting experience, except keep in mind that all this is totally customizable where these buttons are, how the layout looks, all these elements you have access to the code. In this case, I'm doing an example of a digital twin reality scan using Matterport. We've loaded that up here. You can see Tommy's coming here. It looks very much like a video conference environment. Everything you'd expect from that as a host, I can change the screen. I can have him follow me. I can say, say gather all as I go around the place, I say gather, Tommy will come over to where I am. I can add the follow me function, all that stuff you saw in SuperViz Instant Meeting. In this case, we've got an example here. We can change meetings. I change projects. When you have the code, you can right away just put your own projects in there and start changing between them. But it's just to show you how quick and easy it is to get up and running. In this case, whereas previously this would be just an example of SuperViz, now it's all open source, so you get this in GitHub. You can see this example running. You can see how it is, you can tweak it, you can start adding your logos. You can change the UI. You can move things around. But it just shows you how quick and easy it is. You can have this loading up on your own environment with your own application in a matter of -- really, under an hour -- if you know what you're doing using our documentation. You can see where we are now; we turn a Matterport tour into a multi-person Avatar video conference meeting. One of our customers that has actually had this in production already that I'd like to highlight is MPSkin. Their whole platform is now supporting SuperViz features. They've gone and used the SuperViz SDK and got it up and running. They were part of the beta period. They actually launched it to their customers before the final release because it was so stable and so popular within their platform. All the MPSkin features will be then on top of all the stuff that is actually having here in Matterport with SuperViz integrated. It's really exciting to see people bring this. This could have been a 3D Model, a BIM file, a SketchFab, [Revit], 3DaaS. You can use it basically for anything. If you want to create a video conferencing system with spatial data on top of your app, we will take all the heavy lifting for you, all the stuff that you would have to figure out how to do. You can then get up and running very quickly. But yeah, I mean, it's quite simple, so there's not much more to show here. I'm going to stop sharing. But you can see how it's very similar to the SuperViz Instant Meeting experience, except now you can do whatever you'd like and then add it to your program. [00:16:14] Dan Smigrod: Cool. Before we go into a deeper dive with Tommy, was there anything else that you wanted to cover in an overview of the SuperViz SDK? [00:16:24] Russ Rive: With a SuperViz SDK, we want to make it really a no-brainer. If you are considering adding multi-user collaboration with video conferencing to your application, which is becoming more and more important these days, if you look at most of the applications that are going that way. You have Sigma. You have MyROW. You have all these applications, Notion, everything is becoming multi-person, real-time interactions. Really if it's not on your roadmap, it's something you really should be thinking about. How do you bring multi-person collaboration to your platform? In this case, we want to make it super-simple. If you start doing the math of "should I hire six engineers and get them up and running for a year, maintain all this code" It just doesn't make any sense where you could be up and running in a matter of days with a proof of concept, in a matter of two or three weeks into your production environment. Really for free from our point of view, because we offer the starter package, we offer anyone -- that wants to use the SuperViz SDK -- 1,000 free minutes per month. Every month; that's 1,000 free minutes. If you are in your development phase, you're busy testing it, you're showing it in a couple of pilots, you're not going to hit your 1,000 minutes a month and a zero cost for you. After that, it's really affordable. It's $99 per month for 5,000 minutes, and then the enterprise gets 50,000 minutes. It gets to the point where it's just really affordable without you having to do any team or development investment. [00:17:42] Dan Smigrod: Just to clarify, if you're ready to get started, you'd go to: www.SuperViz.com/sdk You'd set up a free SuperViz SDK account that has the first 1,000 minutes free -- each month -- in order to build it out. All the pricing is on [www.SuperViz.com/sdk] so if you want to just hit the pricing tab. We've been talking a lot about Matterport. But just to clarify, the SuperViz solution that we just looked at, SuperViz integration within Matterport, within a third party Cloud software such as MPSkin -- an overlay for Matterport tours -- we've been looking at Matterport, everything that you just showed us works equally as well in any 3D model, any BIM model, Revit, any CAD file. [00:18:35] Russ Rive: Absolutely. Even something that's just two-dimensional. Even if you just want to be syncing properties. It's a really powerful sync engine in the background. Even if you're doing something in two-dimensions and you want to add collaboration, say it's a layout software that you want to do, as a floor plan designer, even in two dimensions, it's a really powerful SDK to create collaboration and synchronized properties between meetings. [00:19:07] Dan Smigrod: Maybe you could speak to SuperViz versus maybe Zoom. I'm using Zoom and I'm using Matterport or I'm using Zoom and CAD files. That's how I'm doing my meetings now. Why should I switch? What are the advantages of integrating the SuperViz, meet-present-collaborate experience within the 3D model versus sharing via Zoom or some other platform? [00:19:46] Russ Rive: There's a pretty fundamental difference. Zoom is not really aware of the content. Zoom is a pure video layer between people and on top of a shared screen. There's no integration into the actual content that's happening behind it. Say, I'm sharing my screen in Zoom, it's just purely doing another video stream as it was a webcam. It's really oblivious to what the application is and so what SuperViz is... It's really about bringing collaboration into the application. It's about adding collaboration to an application. It's not about just doing video conferencing. If you want to present a place, if you want to give individual points of views and walk into a space, you can't recreate walking through an apartment that you're trying to sell in Zoom -- together, what you do is it becomes a very passive experience. The person's doing a screen share. Screen share by nature can be pretty choppy and low resolution because you're streaming that in real-time. Our point of view is that you want to take everyone to the apartment and then just enable everyone to walk around. Everyone has their own point of view. Everybody can point to things individually. Everybody is running the application individually in each of their platforms. It's a fundamental difference. We bring the collaboration inside the platform and it's really important what the application is, what is the software running? That's where the integration happens. Whereas Zoom, or any video conferencing, is just a pure webcam layer on and they don't really care what the content is behind. There is no concept of, say, synchronizing properties, synchronizing projects, loading things remotely. It's a very different way of looking at the world. If you create an application that has multi-person interaction with each person running a version of the app at the same time, whether it's to visualize or update. Zoom isn't really a solution. It's not designed for that. Whereas we really designed to bring multiple people into an application together with a sense of presence. [00:21:43] Dan Smigrod: My sense also is, SuperViz is super-smooth versus perhaps a Zoom is super-latent and all the sudden everything starts to feel kind of kludgy about trying to share. I don't know why that is, but I just have this sense that trying to share Matterport space using Zoom is simply not the right tool for it. [00:22:09] Russ Rive: If you think about what's happening right, when you're sharing a screen with a Matterport tour, especially getting a tour of a screen share, that screen is moving a lot, so it's a lot of pixels and it's streaming. SuperViz is reloading the model individually for everybody. Everybody is rendering the perfect image locally on their computer and we're just sending coordinate data. Little streams of variables going back and forth. The data to do that is so much smaller and it's very accurate. There's no choppiness in the data. If I move to another spot, then I'm just saying, "Russ moved to the spot." But the actual individual rendering is picture-perfect because everyone is running their own visualizer. [00:22:44] Dan Smigrod: That's part of what the magic of the SuperViz experience: SuperViz is actually transmitting very little data, which means everyone has their own view of a Matterport space. The only thing that's being pushed to everyone is the nuance of maybe the avatar looked left or right or pointed up or down, which is very, presumably, very little data. Therefore, it doesn't have this overhead of slowing down and dragging that experience. [00:23:17] Russ Rive: Exactly very similar to say, these very modern video games that look so realistic. But yet you are playing with 30 people in the game at the same time. The reason why that looks good is because everybody is rendering their own video game. You're not streaming a video game. What you're streaming, it's just tiny little numbers back and forth between the people that synchronizes it. It's very much thinking of video conferencing like an immersive video game, not just video streams. [00:23:42] Dan Smigrod: I'm going to ask you the same question again; before we go to Tommy. From a marketing standpoint, from "this is why I should add the SuperViz SDK experience to Matterport, in particular, or to other 3D models in general." Is there anything else to add before we talk with Tommy? [00:24:03] Russ Rive: SuperViz experience is a feature that's low-cost, quick to implement that adds a lot of value to your platform. Whether that value is differentiation; whether it's retention; whether its revenue opportunities (so you can charge more for a premium service); where you want to incent people to upgrade to a better package (which includes this); it's a really good way to increase customer satisfaction, create super-fans and increase value. And how you want to use that value is up to you. [00:24:29] Dan Smigrod: I think during our deep-dive in the Matterport experience, we talked about how maybe Matterport is a tool, but Matterport + SuperViz is actually a solution. When you get to that solution, all of a sudden, you really do have a way to 1) have fewer people travel, which means you're starting to save a lot of money, you're saving a lot of time, 2) you're enabling things that weren't possible before when people were traveling. Because traveling means you need to 3) plan in advance and you may need to do something today. Being able to meet, present and collaborate with that presence within a 3D environment means you might be able to: 1) save time, 2) save money, 3) reduce headaches, pain. 4) I think one of those words that we used a lot during those two other shows was rework because when things get out of control particularly in construction, the later you catch the problem, the exponentially more the cost of fixing that problem becomes. [00:25:42] Russ Rive: Exactly. In SuperViz, you have contexts: you are pointing at something as if you were there. It's like, "this wall needs to change and there's a record of someone actually saying it and pointing at something." Even the guest is also looking around. It's not just a survey, a very passive stream of information. [00:26:01] Dan Smigrod: Awesome. Tommy, I'm a Chief Technology Officer, I'm a CTO. (I just got promoted ;-) to some app that is an overlay of Matterport. I've been asked by my CEO to evaluate how easy it is to implement the SuperViz SDK: the SuperViz experience within Matterport models, in particular within any CAD model, 3D model in general. Speak to me tech-to-tech. What is it that I'm going to ask you that I need to know in order to implement the SuperViz SDK as a tech person? [00:26:49] Tommy Lindestrøm: First thing is, of course, that it is web-based, so everything needs to run in a browser of course. Essentially, the SuperViz SDK is an overlay on any content inside of a browser. You can initialize the SuperViz SDK and it is an overlay ... It's an iFrame for the camera feed and then connects to the content that you have on it. [00:27:15] Dan Smigrod: Do my users need to download anything? Do they need to install anything? [00:27:21] Tommy Lindestrøm: There is no download at all. When we started this project, we had a few goals or a few things that we really wanted to achieve with the SuperViz SDK. The first thing was that it should be easy and quick to implement. Very much out of the box -- with as few lines of code as possible -- I would say. Stating that, of course, it's important that SuperViz create a SDK that has the flexibility that companies need to be able to work in any web application and also being able to function within the UI/UX experience for these tools that already exist. [00:28:10] Dan Smigrod: Is this JavaScript? Is it something else? [00:28:14] Tommy Lindestrøm: Yes. Actually, any JavaScript, any front-end technology would work with the SuperViz SDK. It's not limited to any specific language or anything. You can do it in React, in JavaScript Pure Functions, whatever you want to do actually. There's no limitation on that. [00:28:38] Tommy Lindestrøm: The idea is really to be able to get it up and running very fast with very few lines of code, very little limitations and really start from there. [www.SuperViz.com/sdk] [00:28:52] Dan Smigrod: Let's focus on Matterport first. How easy is it to get started with Matterport? [00:29:04] Tommy Lindestrøm: The SuperViz SDK consists of three main components. So we have 1) a meeting overlay; 2) then we use plugins; and we use the 3) real-time data engine that Russ mentioned earlier. [00:29:17] Russ Rive: Why don't you show the documentation, Tommy? There's some images, as well. [00:29:22] Tommy Lindestrøm: I'll bring it up. [00:29:26] Dan Smigrod: As Tommy is bringing up his screen, if you go to: www.SuperViz.com/sdk [00:29:35] Dan Smigrod: There is a tab for resources that's going to take you to: docs.SuperViz.com I think that's where Tom is headed right now. [00:29:48] Tommy Lindestrøm: [docs.SuperViz.com] [00:29:49] Russ Rive: Yes. [00:29:52] Tommy Lindestrøm: Can you see my screen? [00:29:55] Dan Smigrod: Yes. [00:29:55] Tommy Lindestrøm: Great. [00:29:57] Dan Smigrod: Just again to clarify for our viewers, Tommy is at: docs.SuperViz.com [00:30:06] Tommy Lindestrøm: Yeah. It's: docs.SuperViz.com This is our documentation, and again, the purpose is really to be very clear in our communication on how to implement this and show how easy it is. So here, you can see right away when you come in, we showed the architecture of how this works. So you have your application. You add the meeting overlay. You have access to a real-time data engine and then you can use plug-ins, if needed. The plug-ins are, again, something that we launched for Matterport, the three.js, Autodesk, is coming soon, and further down the line we'll have other technologies that we've seen are being used in this space. [00:30:53] Dan Smigrod: Excuse me, Tommy just to clarify where it says Autodesk, that will be an Autodesk Forge plug-in. [00:31:01] Tommy Lindestrøm: [Autodesk Platform Services (Formerly Forge)] [00:31:07] Tommy Lindestrøm: [Autodesk Platform Services (Formerly Forge)] but that is actually the viewer. That is their development kit that they use. [00:31:14] Dan Smigrod: The key thing about that [Autodesk Platform Services (Formerly Forge)] is that I want to say, Russ from our previous show that there were at least 60 different formats that Autodesk supports, so whether you're working in SketchFab, or Revit, or FBX, or IFC, or whatever it is, it's likely supported by [Autodesk Platform Services (Formerly Forge)]. [00:31:41] Russ Rive: The Autodesk Platform Services -- The nice thing about it is they've solved how to load, like you said, 60 types of different file extensions plus 3D models. [00:31:51] Dan Smigrod: Tommy, today is Thursday, March 9, 2023. What month in 2023 are we talking about for that Autodesk plug-in to be working? [00:32:02] Tommy Lindestrøm: We're looking at a timeline of about six weeks from now that we will launch the Autodesk plug-in: the Autodesk Platform Services. [00:32:12] Dan Smigrod: So [June 30, 2023] for sure, that's going to be working. Russ, do you want to say something about that? [00:32:20] Russ Rive: The idea of plug-ins in general, if you think of plug-ins it's similar to examples, because these plug-ins aren't something that someone else couldn't build. The idea is that from the plug-ins to the right, that area; you can do anything you want with the platform. The core tech is that middle bar: the SuperViz SDK. We're creating these plug-ins just because -- anyone could have built these. It's almost as if we're doing examples and we want to make it faster and easier for people that happen to be using the Autodesk Platform Services or Matterport or three.js, and so it's a part of the SuperViz SDK which just accelerates the development. It's not that you couldn't use it for any of these that's missing there -- not that you have to wait for a plug-in because anybody can make a plug-in, the core tech is really the SuperViz SDK. [00:33:06] Dan Smigrod: That said, I would imagine the addition of Autodesk Platform Services + Matterport + three.js, the JavaScript, would probably cover 95% of all the use-cases today. [00:33:24] Russ Rive: Yeah. The initial ones. I will say the early adopters. We are starting to see interest from people that are doing things like Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming. Even people that are doing two-dimensional tools that they've written from scratch which three.js is great for because it already has some integration with that. So we're excited to really see where people take this. These plug-ins are related to the SuperViz Instant Meetings that we have; the market seems to be gravitating towards. But if you think of the SuperViz SDK, it really is much more of a joker card. There's so much that can be done with it. They're really excited to see where people take it. You could for example, use a SuperViz SDK to create a video game, you could do anything you'd want for that. Because if we take care of the whole hassle of having the sync engine; having a meeting overlay; having all that stuff is just taken care of in a package. [00:34:15] Dan Smigrod: Yes. I would say though for our audience, WGAN-TV and We Get Around Network Forum (www.WGANFourm.com), primarily interested in Matterport integration, and then second I would probably say Revit and BIM model integrated, maybe SketchFab. [00:34:37] Russ Rive: That is where we've been seeing the early interests, you're right. [00:34:39] Dan Smigrod: Yeah. Tommy, back to you. [00:34:44] Tommy Lindestrøm: The idea is through our previous work with Autodesk Platform Services, previously called Forge, to create that plug-in and the complexity of injecting objects into their API, etc, we'd been through that and that's why also the plug-ins are very powerful because then they don't need to do the same thing for Matterport, whoever will implement this. So the idea of these plug-ins is that we move forward as quickly as possible, so they can get this up and running. [00:35:24] Tommy Lindestrøm: [docs.SuperViz.com] we have the full documentation so essentially this can get a little bit technical here. [00:35:33] Dan Smigrod: Which is a perfectly fine reminder I'm wearing my CTO hat and I'm keeping up with you, so go for it. [00:35:41] Tommy Lindestrøm: So as I mentioned in the beginning, one of our goals with this was really to create something that you could implement with as few lines of code as possible, really to get it up and running. Of course there is stuff around it, but the main engine for the SuperViz SDK is [a few lines] of code. So it's very really quick to get up and running really fast, you can even go to our GitHub. You can download one of our examples, you could see it. You add in your developer token and you'll really be able to have it running inside of your own application really fast, so that was the idea. [00:36:31] Tommy Lindestrøm: Really trying to be able to get up and running as fast as possible, but also really create flexibility in the SuperViz SDK. So we keep adding parameters, functionality, etc to this, to our versions. We try to launch new versions every other week with updates. It could be a new method, it could be listeners, it could be features to the camera overlay, whatever, but really continuously updating the source code and so people can go in here and follow this. Furthermore, of course we have an API connected, and that is really where you can go in and you can get data out of our database. So you can go in and get meeting data, meeting stats, etc. So if you have a dashboard on your end, you don't have to use our dashboard. I'm going to show you soon you can create your own. You can figure out how many minutes a group of customers that you have, how many minutes they spend so you can bill them, etc. So we have an API that's connected to that as well. - Our key concepts of things to get started are really important. I think this is a fairly new space for many people. We're really trying to specify anything that we work with that we speak about every day inside of SuperViz. Maybe not everyone really understands what the plugin is, etc. We are really trying to specify any of these subjects well in our documentation. [00:38:23] Dan Smigrod: - I heard you say that the code is hosted on GitHub. Is that correct? [00:38:28] Tommy Lindestrøm: - Yes. Well, everything is on GitHub of course. We use GitHub not only for the SuperViz SDK, other than that, we use it for our examples. You can also go in and check it out. How we implemented SuperViz in different scenarios. We have a long list of ideas or inspiration for companies, what they can do. Next week we're going to send out an example with walking Avatars inside of IC models. It's like a playground for us, but it's a good opportunity for us to really share how you can use the SuperViz SDK, that's kind of thing. [00:39:13] Dan Smigrod: - You're on GitHub. Does that mean you're using the ticketing system there as well, if I have some tech questions, I want to speak to my counterpart, I can submit a ticket through GitHub? [00:39:25] Tommy Lindestrøm: - Exactly. Really from the beginning of when we started out with this project, we really wanted to be close to the companies who are going to develop this. We had, as Russ mentioned, a pre-release phase where we invited a bunch of companies to help us out, not only to give feedback, but also to give feature requests, etc. This is really how we're planning to move forward with this. We use GitHub, their ticket management system. They call it Issue Management, but it's really where they can raise questions and they can give feature requests and feedback, etc. Because that's really what brings our product forward. [00:40:12] Dan Smigrod: - Excuse me, if I'm used to using GitHub for feature requests, that whole process that's implemented for SuperViz SDK as well so I don't really have to send off an email to somebody, no, just post. Here's a wishlist. I'd like to be in Unreal Engine doing whatever it is that I want to do on Unreal. [00:40:32] Russ Rive: - I want to point out, we take support to the next level. If you are an enterprise account, we also have a shared Slack channel where you have direct access to the SuperViz developers. It's not just tickets and emails, but you're actually in a real-time chat if you have any questions. We want customers to feel like our development team is part of their development team. We create a shared Slack channel for real-time communication. We really are serious about making it easy to communicate. [00:40:59] Tommy Lindestrøm: - I'm trying to be as transparent as possible. We even share our tech roadmap, etc. Everyone can really follow what's going on. That's the idea that we believe that we get the best product. We're really working closely together with these companies who want to implement this. [00:41:17] Dan Smigrod: - Essentially, you can see on the SuperViz GitHub board that if Unreal has been proposed as an idea that it's been moved to implementation that you can actually see it's on the technology roadmap for SuperViz. It's not a mystery, it's all posted. You can see what features are coming, what features have been requested, whether those features have been approved for implementation. [00:41:43] Tommy Lindestrøm: - Exactly. That's how we created; what we are working on in Q1203 is really based on feedback from pre-release that we're hopefully going to release soon and frequently, but that's the idea, really to be as transparent as possible. [00:42:07] Dan Smigrod: - Tommy, what other questions should I be asking you about how easy it is to implement the SuperViz SDK? Is there anything in particular about the SuperViz API that you want to talk about from a technical standpoint? Is there anything else in terms of SuperViz SDK? [00:42:28] Tommy Lindestrøm: - I think maybe I would like to show maybe just how the dashboard works. If I can share my screen again. [00:42:36] Dan Smigrod: - Yes, that'd be great. Again, while Tommy is setting up, you can go to: www.SuperViz.com/sdk The documents we were looking at were at: docs.SuperViz.com [00:42:49] Tommy Lindestrøm: - Exactly. When you create a SuperViz SDK account, you come in here and you set up your account and you want to get started where we link you to the docs, to our GitHub, etc. That's really trying to guide you to get as much information you need as quickly as possible. When you have it up and running on your machine or locally, you'd actually be able to see if you had a meeting. We have stats coming in here, this is our test stats dashboard and that's what we have here where you can go in and see, "oh, we had this amount of minutes yesterday." We use groups, as I said before, to segment your users as a company. That is quite important. We have five minutes and you can then go into details in our Meeting tab here and get more information about these meetings. You can filter them by month, etc. But the developers, of course we use a developer token. That means that, which is a secret, that is our identification of you and who the company is, we expose that inside of the dashboard here. We use whitelists. They need to whitelist their domain. We have that functionality and we just started to implement Webhooks, so that just got launched. [00:44:25] Tommy Lindestrøm: This is like a regular dashboard that you know from other similar technologies where you go in. Usually it is the developers that would go in and take a look at these things and then maybe they would use the SuperViz API to then create their own dashboard on their end. [00:44:43] Dan Smigrod: - Is there anything else that you want to show us? [00:44:46] Tommy Lindestrøm: - No, I think that's it. [00:44:49] Dan Smigrod: - Okay. I did mention that I'm a Chief Technology Officer. (I promoted myself ;-) Which means I like to code and I like to develop. Give me the pitch from your perspective as Vice President of Engineering of SuperViz, why shouldn't I just go build this myself so that I don't have to be on a paid plan? [00:45:14] Russ Rive: - Show them the scar tissue, Tommy. ;-) [00:45:16] Tommy Lindestrøm: - Well, even as Russ mentioned, [00:45:26] Tommy Lindestrøm: These things take time. It requires a full development team. If you just take videoconferencing as one tiny part of our SDK or a part of the SDK I would say, that's not something you just go ahead and do. There's so many things you need to consider regarding connection, regarding meeting settings, devices, doesn't work on Safari, this works on Safari, all these things. People really get surprised how long this takes. [00:46:06] Dan Smigrod: - I'm sorry, you still haven't convinced me. Why shouldn't I just develop this functionality myself? [00:46:11] Tommy Lindestrøm: - I still haven't convinced you though. [00:46:12] Dan Smigrod: - We are a large company. We have a ton of developers. Why don't we just go develop the functionality of SuperViz ourselves, rather than relying on the SuperViz SDK and API? [00:46:30] Russ Rive: - Well, I could respond by saying that the SuperViz SDK will be up and running in a week and you'll never do it cheaper. Unless you are the scale of a massive company, like the 0.001% will. Maybe that was worth it for them to do it. But for everyone else it's not going to be worth it. Even if you're running a million meeting minutes per month, which means you're big, that still doesn't pay for an engineering team to do this. It just doesn't make sense. It's like building your own power station because you want electricity at home. Doesn't make sense. [00:47:04] Dan Smigrod: - I was thinking of doing that. ;-) [00:47:06] Tommy Lindestrøm: - Well, and the thing about it is that and this is very much from our experience working in this space for the last few years is, as I said, one part is the videoconference. Then you have 3D. That's a whole different type of developer you need at that point. They need to speak to each other the whole 3D part, like Matterport SDK, Autodesk Forge API, etc. How do you inject Avatars? How do you move them around? All these things. Again, speaking to each other, the whole logic behind it is spinning up a sync engine, etc. As Russ said, that wouldn't really be worth it. These things are really what you get off the shelf really, really easy and for a fair price. [00:47:59] Dan Smigrod: - Well, the real-time engine doesn't seem like it would be all that hard to build. [00:48:06] Tommy Lindestrøm: You can say, if you build it as a single instance, no. The thing is that what we take care of is the whole thing together working as a whole. That means that already when you're in the meeting, we already know who is in the meeting. They only speak to other people in the meeting. The whole logic that you have that you will have to create yourself, it's out of the box. Because you simply just really subscribe to our engine and you create listeners, and that's what you do. You just listen to events, you get them, you parse them, you do whatever you want or you send these messages. That's been taken care of inside the meeting; out of the box. [00:48:47] Dan Smigrod: Before we go back to Russ, did you want to show us your scars? Russ had talked about how you had some scars. ;-) [00:48:53] Tommy Lindestrøm: I think I have one here and then I lost some hair as well. [00:49:02] Dan Smigrod: Really as the Chief Technology Officer, if I wanted to go build this out from scratch, this could take me years, it would take me tons of team time, and then I have to maintain it as different platforms change. [00:49:20] Russ Rive: It's an opportunity cost. You're deciding to work on something that's been commoditized instead of building a unique feature investing your time in building a really big differentiator. You gotta make these decisions. Strategically, it doesn't make sense. [00:49:36] Tommy Lindestrøm: The idea is really with the SuperViz SDK, is that they will build on an already existing platform most of the time. This is what the companies are already focusing on. You have again, let's say, MPSkin, that is already implemented. They already have that platform. That's what their team is focused on. That is really the core of what they spend their time on. This whole layer of doing that, that just adds to the complexity. That's really what we're trying to solve here. [00:50:14] Dan Smigrod: Awesome. Russ, going back to you, I think I have two final questions, maybe three. First, I'm still deciding whether to add these core features of SuperViz even to our platform. They want to give me one more pitch about why it's super important to add SuperViz Immersive Meetings and real-time data properties to a Matterport tour, in particular, a 3D tour (digital twin) in general? [00:50:53] Russ Rive: Basically, it's about collaboration. Do you want people having individual experiences inside of your application, or do you want to have the network effect of having collaboration and communication happening inside your tool? Do you want people to be leaving your tool every time they want to talk to each other, or would you like them to be doing it right inside of it? Do you want to keep their attention? It just makes sense. Again, this is not going to be obvious for everyone, someone might have something that's just like they do a PDF exporter for 3D models. Who needs to collaborate in that? Not like everyone needs to do it. But for the majority of people, the tendency, if you look around, the applications are becoming multi-user, real-time, collaborative. You've seen what's happened with Figma and Adobe now wants to buy them and pay that huge amount for it. What's the big difference? It's a real-time collaboration. You look at tools like MyROW. It's all real-time collaboration. What's the difference with Notion? It's all real-time collaboration. People are coming to expect this idea, people online in Slack the whole time because they need to be collaborating all the time. This idea that everybody is remote and just constantly collaborating is here to stay and it's going to be expected from applications going forward. If you have anything where people are making asynchronous decisions, you could optimize that by turning it into synchronized decision and presentation. People should really be thinking about it. Maybe it's not something they want to do tomorrow but if you're a Product Manager and you have a tool that people use for selling, for presenting, for designing, you should be thinking about how you can get your users to collaborate. [00:52:28] Dan Smigrod: Why the SuperViz SDK for adding those features? [00:52:34] Russ Rive: If you have a program that has three-dimensional spatial coordinates, whether it's reality captures... We are the best out there. Without selling ourselves so much, we've done a really good job, not because this is our first product. Remember, we've been doing this for a couple of years as the SuperViz Instant Meeting and we've taken all this tech that we've been building up over the past two or three years and just brought that to the SuperViz SDK and made it available to the rest of the world. You'd be leapfrogging all this development time. First of all, I don't know of any other company out there that has the full feature array that we have for you to be able to add it. If you just want to add a video conferencing layer, fine, you have options out there. Not too simple, but you'd probably do it. But if you want to add the synchronization and collaboration layer natively in side your application, inside a three-dimensional space and the plugins, you should really consider taking a close look at SuperViz SDK because we build it to be the best option out there at the best value for doing something like this. [00:53:42] Dan Smigrod: Is there a question, Tommy, that I haven't asked you that I should ask? [00:53:51] Tommy Lindestrøm: No, not as I can come up with. [00:53:54] Dan Smigrod: Russ, is there a question that I haven't asked you that I should ask? [00:54:00] Russ Rive: No. I think it's been pretty clear. If you have a question or if anybody has a question, we're really easy to get a hold of. If you go to the SuperViz site and you contact us, you can ask Tommy or myself, and we'll be happy to answer any questions. [00:54:16] Dan Smigrod: I noticed on www.SuperViz.com/sdk there is an opportunity to set up a meeting. If you're at the point to say, "Okay. But I still have questions." You can go book a meeting www.SuperViz.com/sdk and that would be a logical next step would be one of two things. Either go ahead and set up a SuperViz SDK account, get your free 1,000 minutes monthly, dive in, and or set up a meeting, a one-on-one to specifically talk SuperViz SDK with [Russ, Tommy] or member of your team such as Marcelo Franco, who's doing a lot of SuperViz SDK calls. [00:55:09] Russ Rive: That's correct. Absolutely. [00:55:12] Dan Smigrod: I think what I would like to do is have one last thought from you, Russ, take us back up to the big picture of the SuperViz vision about this virtually meeting, presenting, collaborating, teleportation. [00:55:38] Dan Smigrod: There's this big picture vision that helps put somebody over the top to say, "this is essential to build these features into your platform." [00:55:49] Russ Rive: The genesis of SuperViz has always been this idea that we're projecting ourselves virtually through all content in this idea of everyone being remotely, the idea that we should also be able to get a sensation of being somewhere together without physically going there. How can we create a sensation? You mentioned that teleportation machine that runs in a browser. So the idea that we can have multiple realities and reality captures of 3D models that we should go in and out of as if we're meeting remotely virtually in these spaces, as if it were a browser tab on the Internet so you can be in many places at the same time. How can I quickly teleport to a construction site in New York and then walk into an apartment in Italy that I'm going to be renting over the weekend and how can I do that with everyone else? This idea of being able to flow easily back-and-forth between remote spaces and design spaces, and really make it feel like you're there. How do we reduce the friction? This idea of making it really easy to move around virtually anywhere and make it feel like you're actually there together with people. There's just so many ways that's going to be used we see in the future whether it's education, teaching people, training, selling, presenting. To be able to really quickly, click a button and be somewhere with someone that just seems like something that humanity is definitely moving towards. [00:57:14] Dan Smigrod: Awesome. Russ, Tommy, thanks for being on the show today. [00:57:18] Russ Rive: Great. Always fun. [00:57:19] Tommy Lindestrøm: Thank you. [00:57:20] Dan Smigrod: We've been visiting with SuperViz Co-Founder and CEO Russ Rive, and SuperViz Vice President of Engineering Tommy Lindestrøm, and I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. You've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
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WGAN-TV Transcript: SuperViz SDK for Matterport and Other 3D Models18405