Video: Shop Talk 47: How @Hopscotch Interactive Emily Olman Scans Commercial Real Estate with Matterport | Video courtesy of Matterport YouTube Channel | 8 April 2023

Transcript

[00:00:02]
Amir Frank: Emily. Hi, thank you very much for joining us today. Let's first start by giving our attendees an idea of when you started with Matterport and what you're doing with Hopscotch Interactive.

[00:00:21]
Emily Olman: Well, thank you so much Amir. It's so nice to be here and to get this imitation to chat with you on shop talk today. So for those of you who are not familiar with me and with my company, hopscotch. I started using Matterport in early 2015, and I started the company in the fall of 2015 after I was using it at a startup with some friends.

We were doing some property management 2.0 at the time. And I really just loved the system. This was the Matterport pro 1, and 2015 is long time ago. And we talked about what the future could bring with the Matterport camera. I would say that there was hardly an ecosystem to speak of at that time.

And it was really just a bunch of people who were excited and enthusiastic about what the camera could do. As mostly for me at the time, like a virtual tour system, and hopscotch interactive was founded to bring extraordinary spaces to the world. So I started as a more or less a property marketing company, solo entrepreneur at the beginning.

And I'm located in the San Francisco Bay area. And since 2015, I've grown my team to seven people plus a number of contractors, and we serve as commercial real estate, residential real estate, also the AEC industry to some extent. And for me anyway, just morphed into me diving deeper and deeper into a virtual reality and understanding everything that 3D enabled.

[00:02:10]
Amir Frank: Awesome. Thank you very much for correcting me. I apologize. I said international interactive.

[00:02:17]
Emily Olman: It's all good.

[00:02:18]
Amir Frank: I apologize. I don't know why international.

[00:02:22]
Emily Olman: It's international to I'm totally fine with that.

[00:02:27]
Amir Frank: Brilliant. So you've been doing this for awhile. Just want to make it very clear that, you know what you're talking about when it comes to using Matterport, you've probably scanned many different types of places, not just all residential real estate. You've been doing commercial real estate as well. Big open spaces like the one behind you, as well as very tight.

[00:03:00]
Emily Olman: Absolutely. I've scanned so many different properties. Even early in the day, I always like to tell a story that one of my first scans was a cemetery before we could even really scan outdoors. And so you're getting up at 05:30 in the morning to get somewhere to be able to scan before the sunlight hit.

And so I've scanned large open spaces, I've scanned residential properties. It's any property that you can think of, I've probably scanned and I've scanned them in every condition. I think that's the other thing is that it could be a property that is completely shell condition like the one behind me or it could be like a beautiful multi-million dollar mansion that is also being scanned.

It has everything to do with the client and the purpose of the content, and really less to do with necessarily saying, well, we only scan this property.

[00:04:08]
Amir Frank: So you mentioned one of your first scans was a cemetery. What was the use case there? Were they doing scanning the cemetery out there like it's scanning the building I guess I can maybe understand getting cemeteries?

[00:04:22]
Emily Olman: All I have to think about it. We think about this as early 2016, and you had panoramas but you wouldn't have something that was like an all inclusive type of a tour, and a lot of people that are doing end-of-life planning are not able to travel to a cemetery. Maybe they're remote or maybe they just can't go.

And so that was really the idea was enabling some immersive tour for somebody. I actually thought it was a great service. I think that anytime you can provide somebody with more information about where they are, actually those scans were converted into virtual reality as well.

And that was before we had the core VR with Matterport, which allowed us to basically just automatically have a space be viewable in virtual reality. And it was panel to panel and gaze activated. But it was really for the Gear VR that those were created. I think that to me, what does your client need and what are you going to be able to do to help them in their work.

And make their jobs easier? And so we weren't thinking at that time about creating digital twins. It was really as a sales tool. And then that was one example, and then from there, I've just seen countless other examples of commercial real estate, industrial, other types of properties where accomplishing the same thing, it was a different property.

[00:06:07]
Amir Frank: It's interesting, the use case is really the same. It's actually a really good idea now that the way you say it, it allows somebody who can visit, in this case, maybe visit a loved one or something like that to remotely and virtually visit that location. So that's exactly what mostly Matterport is useful.

I mean, use it for marketing or for managing and managing is really just collaboration and remotely accessing locations that you can't otherwise.

[00:06:39]
Emily Olman: It's good for all of those things. I love the idea in the beginning I was really thinking about extraordinary spaces and being able to take these incredible tours in VR, was really the thing that I was most excited about. Because I had lived overseas personally, I'd lived in Europe for a long time, and I love being in VR.

I love doing virtual tours or going into Google Earth and VR, things like that. So for me to be able to create that content myself using end-to-end system. Matterport was really the first system where more or less at the time, I think the price is about $4,500. So it certainly was beyond the reach of a consumer to purchase that for themselves.

But really for a small business or for a prosumers, an enthusiast, they can invest in that system and then they could be making immersive tours without having to know how to stitch together a panorama. So I always loved that Matterport really made that part very easy. In the beginning you would think, well this is going to be very steep learning curve.

But in fact, I think what it is is that it's easy, it's like that game go or it's like these are chess or checkers. It's like a minute to learn a lifetime to master. I think that's really how I feel about the Matterport system because it is constantly evolving.

[00:08:21]
Amir Frank: Absolutely. So before we get too technical, I know I wanted to talk to you and I can nerd out about all the technical bits of Matterport. I want to just get an idea of how you went about just building your business. You have a thriving Matterport business. You're out there scanning.

You started with residential real estate, and now you're doing a lot more commercial real estate. How does one make that transition?

[00:08:58]
Emily Olman: Well, I think it really depends on the person. For me, I had no contacts in real estate other than the few that I had made in the first month at the startup that I was at. The first few scans. Fortunately, I had a friend who had an Airbnb and so I scanned his Airbnb and I called up a dad at my kid's school.

I knew he was a realtor and I just asked him if he was interested in that. And that was when I really got my first understanding of people at that time, they were not going to buy this as a standalone service. And he was like that sounds cool, but I really need photos. And so I had a camera, and I took photographs.

And when I look back, I love to show them to my team, especially when I hire somebody new. I always show them my first photoshoot because it was atrocious, and my Matterport was amazing, but my photo shoot was terrible. I think it was starting to get different scans that I could show it in my portfolio.

And then back in the day I want to say some of my earliest commercial clients, Matterport used to have a referral program. I don t think that it's very active anymore because of capture services or maybe your photo capture services. But back in the day, based on your geography, there would be certain leads that would come and we had a portal for getting Matterport.

Those would go out to a lot of different photographers at the same time and I saw that there was a request for a large commercial brokerage in the Oakland area and I've worked in sales in previous jobs, and so I've always done a very good job of crafting and creating custom proposals.

I worked really hard on making a very customized proposal that I thought would be attractive to B2B client and then we negotiated the rates. At the time, I didn't know if the Matterport camera could even handle 20,000 square feet, which was a full-floor office because I hadn't done anything that large yet, but I got the job.

I tried it and then from there, once you can successfully prove that you can do something, people will hire you again and I think for anybody in this business and I would tell any small business owner or any person who's working and trying to drum up business, you really have to think about the relationship of the client, like the lifetime value of that customer.

I think about all my clients that way. I don't think about them as a one-off. I think about, is this going to be somebody who will come back to us again and again, every time they need something or can I also sell other things to them that they may not have thought about yet. In that way, my approach is very consultative.

I actually develop a pretty great relationship with most of my clients and I would say that, that has led to a lot of our success and it's just being able to be more of, almost like a team member with a lot of our clients. They look to us as that expertise and that's how I've built it. But you have to make some calls and you have to do marketing and to build up a portfolio.

[00:12:47]
Amir Frank: Yeah. What would you say, I've heard this from others. I would totally do this myself to build up a portfolio of anybody who's just getting started, offer this service for free.

[00:12:59]
Emily Olman: Yeah. Of course.

[00:13:00]
Amir Frank: It's not a bad thing.

[00:13:01]
Emily Olman: It's practice for you in the beginning. Like I mentioned before, that minute to learn a lifetime to master, I think it's so true. The thing that I think differentiates somebody who has more experience from somebody who doesn't is, everybody can press the button, do the scan, move the camera.

it's what you need to understand about the way the camera works to get you out of trouble if you have errors. It's if you have errors in the field, that's really for me, the expertise. It comes down to understanding what's happening with the technology inside of the camera, and so how do you back yourself out of a problem?

Then also imagining what it's going to look like on the back-end in post-production is the other part of it that different people have different styles. But I would say that's really the thing that more experienced Matterport users all have in common.

[00:14:07]
Amir Frank: Yeah. I would totally agree, getting yourself out of trouble, understanding why a misalignment may have happened, knowing to spot the misalignment, and knowing how to fix that problem. But also I would say that thinking about the use case, how is your client going to use this model? Therefore, based on that, where do I need to place my scan positions?

[00:14:35]
Emily Olman: Yeah, absolutely. All of those things. It was even more so when we were using Matterport for VR, as one of the main use cases than the navigation of what would be a good experience for somebody so that they don't end up being thrown across the room and then standing.

Staring at the corner, like popping into a headset and then being just staring straight at a wall. That's a bad user experience. I think that absolutely what is the use case? Those are the things to think about. You have to kinda keep a lot all in your mind all at once when you're creating the content and I don't know that everybody needs it.

If you're just going out to do a survey and you just need the dimensions, you might not be as precise about the location because you just need to get through the place with this few scans as possible and so you're optimizing for something else. Again, I think that the use case, like you just said, is really important.

[00:15:41]
Amir Frank: Yeah, optimizing for the use case. You mentioned that when you are creating this when you're the real estate agent that you had call the parents at their school. They said that though Matterport is great, but I also need photos, so you created this bundle. It's, I think it's really important to note that putting together a package.

Certainly if you're doing any marketing material, if that's the use case for your customer, or if you're doing CRE for promote and residential real estate for promote purposes then understanding the Matterport isn't everything you need. They also want photos. They may also want the floor plan and putting that all together in one easy push buttons solution for them.

[00:16:33]
Emily Olman: Yeah. There are people that use the photos from the Matterport and we have also in many instances, and I see that there's a lot of real estate photographers and even folks from engineering. There's somebody from Poland in the chat. Yaakov and Rina and Tony, all these people.

I'm excited that they're all here. Barbara, Ramesh, all of you guys, thank you for being here and I want to make sure that I'm telling you things that you want to know. But yes, you can use the photographs. With the Pro1. I think it's improved. I think alignment has improved. Stitching has improved.

But comparing something that I would shoot with my DSLR with a Matterport camera, it would work for, I would say multifamily, I would say for lower-end properties, but I still would not be able to use Matterport photo for super high-end stuff, with the exception of we forgot something and we need to go back.

We can pull that image and that has saved us from having to return to the property more times than I can count. It does have value. It's just that the control that you have when you're shooting raw media is just so much better. For most of our clients, the higher-end photography is what they're looking for.

[00:17:59]
Amir Frank: For higher-end clients, you're not going to skimp on just doing a Matterport and then grabbing the images from there, you're going to say, look, we're going to provide you with full-on DSLR images, HDR and you're going to get the best of the best of both worlds. You get not only a 3D model, but you also get really nice high-end crisp images.

[00:18:25]
Emily Olman: I think the real estate photographers that are watching today will appreciate this. I think it really has to do with the emotion that you can create with photography and so being able to control the aperture, being able to control focal length and lighting, and even just the placement.

If I have my camera moving through a space like on a dolly, in the space behind me was shot on a dolly. I'm moving the camera through. All my shots will be wide-angle. Yes, I can bump in on Matterport in the workshop, but it's missing that emotion in the imagery. That's something you can really control when you're a real estate photographer or any photographer.

But if you only just need to show the representation like what is in this space as documentation, it 's great for that. I would say again, you can't replace it for high-end real estate photography, but you can certainly use it for a lot of different use cases.

[00:19:33]
Amir Frank: Yeah. I can definitely appreciate that. I think you're right. I think there's definitely a lot more control when you have a manual DSLR and you can control things like Aperture, white balance, all that stuff. Matterport is fully automated and it's a point shoot, you're just pressing the button and it's doing everything for you. I would 100% agree for documentation.

It's brilliant. If you want to show what's really there and you do lose a little bit of that emotion.

[00:20:07]
Emily Olman: Yeah. I remember doing side-by-side photography on a test with Matterport cameras, back when I was not a great photographer, which was a few years ago, I would say I really fell into the camp of being super new to photography, especially for architecture and real estate and I didn't really understand as much as I needed to about vertical lines and about

blending and all these things and so Matterport, in many cases, I would say in the beginning was better than my photography. Maybe my composition might have been better from camera, but Matterport was always somehow magically perfectly white balanced. That was definitely something where surprisingly, as your skill gets better with something.

Matterport may be not enough. But in some cases, Matterport may be perfectly fine because your photography level is not there yet either. It has to do with the person and where they're going to put their energy. What are they going to try and get better at? Which pencil are they going to sharpen?

[00:21:16]
Amir Frank: Yeah. You didn't come into this as a photographer bringing Matterport, you started with Matterport, then brought photography into your offering.

[00:21:26]
Emily Olman: Yes.

[00:21:27]
Amir Frank: Fantastic. Speaking of lines, this is just something that I just happened to notice real quick. So I want to just mention it for anybody who is maybe just getting started having your Matterport camera at four-and-a-half feet will definitely help those vertical lines. Assuming that you've run into it.

I see that people will have the camera a little higher. We'll have it at what we used to actually recommend five-and-a-half feet, center lens of average person height. I think that's actually not the right way to go. I'm not sure why it took us so long to figure that out.

[00:22:06]
Emily Olman: I think it's just the ceiling. I think it's the proximity from the camera. It's the ceiling height that makes the difference. If you're in a large like this space behind me is a commercial office space, five-and-a-half feet. I'm four and a half. Basically, I was really lucky I could just put the top of the camera at eye level.

I pretty much had the perfect height and that's 65. I think that's 65, a mare 65 for everybody else. But anyway, basically the height of the camera for me in a large space with the ceiling being much higher, 4,5 feet was totally fine. If I'm in a residential space and the ceiling is lower, with 8-foot ceiling.

Then having the camera lower helps because it is what you said, it's the verticals, but it's also the feeling of, am I a giant? If the ceiling is too high, then you will have that experience of being whoa, I feel like I'm high and I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective.

[00:23:13]
Amir Frank: Like you're going to put your head on door jambs.

[00:23:15]
Emily Olman: It's the scale. I think you have to remember it's just the scale of the space that you're in. This is funny as we're talking, I'm remembering and this might be interesting for some people who are new to Matterport. When I first started, I realized that my spatial awareness and the way that I walked into spaces.

I was doing a lot of scanning at that time and I would walk into a space and I would imagine scanning it. It really did give me a lot more spatially aware of thinking as I did this more and more. That goes back to the beginning, I think, to like 2015, 2016. Those things will become second nature as you do more of the scanning.

[00:23:59]
Amir Frank: Absolutely, and that exactly goes to your point of experience at first, I think you look at the minimap on your mobile device or whatever and you just try to flash it out and you're not really so concerned with where the position of the camera is at and you don't really think about navigation.

You're not especially aware of what's going to come of this and how do I want my visitors to move through the space. That's just a skill that you develop over time, I guess.

[00:24:29]
Emily Olman: Yeah, it is. I mean, you have to have some navigation plan about how you're going to go through different areas of a property. But I would say even in the example behind me, it would be tempting to only have the camera go as far as it needs to. Say the camera only went to here because you didn't need to go all the way to the window.


To make the geometry of the space. But what is the leasing agent trying to sell? The views of downtown San Francisco and the views of the waterfront or something else. So you need to constantly be thinking about what is the purpose, why is my client paying me to do this? Maybe for the folks who are doing it for engineering or surveying, they don't care about the views.

They don't care about what's out the window. But for somebody else, that's just as important as having the tour itself and maybe even the most important.

[00:25:39]
Amir Frank: Yeah, that makes sense. I wanted to talk a little bit about Digital Twins.

[00:25:44]
Emily Olman: Okay.

[00:25:48]
Amir Frank: Matterport, we market ourselves, we are a Digital Twin platform, and that has positives and negatives. The problem is with somebody in commercial real estate looking to promote space or certainly residential real estate, we get this all the time, they don't know what a Digital Twin is. How do you deal with that?

Do you not even use that term when you're marketing to your customers? Do you use it and define it? How are you defining it?

[00:26:25]
Emily Olman: Thank you so much for bringing it up Amir. If people aren't aware of my YouTube channel, I have a YouTube channel where I talk about a lot of these topics. I talk about the multiverse, I talk about Virtual Reality, Digital Twins, and a lot about Matterport as well.

[00:26:49]
Emily Olman: There is a timeline that I have been developing over a few years that shows the Matterport history of when it launched when it was in development, I think 2013 all the way to when the company used to call itself really as a virtual tour company. That was its branding and then it switched.

I think it was in 2021 or maybe it was 2022. I'll have to look back. But basically, Matterport switched its branding to become a Digital Twin company. Digital Twin is a term that when I first heard it prior to Matterport adopting it, I was like, what's a Digital Twin? That sounds weird I have no idea what that is.

It felt like a lot of jargon to me. Because it was not well-defined and easily understood, could lead to people using it or misusing it and not really understanding what it is because it is multiple things. The best definition of it that I have is that a Digital Twin can be a, it can be the Digital Twin could be a person like an avatar.

It could be a process like showing a wind turbine or having something that we create digitally, in a computer-generated environment, a digital environment or it could be a place. It could be something that has been mapped specially and we have created a 3D map or a Digital Twin of a location.

So it's a person, a process, or a place. I'm going to put that in the chat. If people are wondering what that is, they can see that those are the things that I would say can be digitally twinned. In the case of Matterport, what that means is that our 3D model, the underlying geometry that you are creating, which is a 3D mesh, it's a point cloud.

For people who aren't familiar with what that is, that's the scanning part of it, not the photography part. It's really the scanning in the 3D model. Once we have that 3D model, which is digital, we can use that to understand our property better to augment it by adding additional information to that model itself and so that's really the Digital Twin.

A digital replica that can be used for many things such as understanding processes, such as a collaboration tool. It can be used for all these different things.

[00:29:49]
Amir Frank: Agreed.

[00:29:54]
Amir Frank: One of the problems, I think if not the main problem, is the fact that every industry defines it in its own way. Then you've got agencies like Gartner and Forrester Research that looked at all of this, they do their work and then give their definition of what a digital twin is.

Some industries define a digital twin as having that relationship, that bidirectional flow of data and communication between the physical twin and the digital twin. Essentially, a digital twin is a digital replica of the physical space. You've got the twin, you have two, the physical and the digital.

With Matterport, it's not necessarily that. You can get that from the Matterport digital twin. There are SDK partners that embed IoT data and what not into the model itself, and boom you've got a full-on digital twin that has that level of communication. But yeah, I see it is more than just the virtual walkthrough, which is where we used to be.

Because you have that 3D layer of data and information that you can do so much more with. It's not just this panel to panel. You have a lot of power that hasn't fully been. I mean, right now there are some platform partners that take advantage of it like SimLab. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:31:28]
Emily Olman: SimLab is a great example. If people don't know SimLab, they can check them out. Brilliant company, and I think, treatise is working on that as well. Captured treatise, SimLab, these are some of the leaders. There's a new one, I think, that you guys are going to have on Shoptalk in a couple of weeks in May.

[00:31:51]
Amir Frank: ViewAR is also one that's really popular.

[00:31:54]
Emily Olman: ViewAR, those are some of my favorite people. They're based in Vienna. ViewAR is incredible, and they're brilliant, led by Marcus Meissner, and those guys have been doing this forever.

[00:32:12]
Emily Olman: Once you have the digital twin, once you have this 3D map, if you will, let's use ViewAR as example. I'm pretty familiar with that and I've used it, I've experimented with it. Doing things like having a digital assistant navigate you through a space that has been mapped with a Matterport model.

Then can be viewed in augmented reality, taking you through a space as a virtual tour guide. Those are the things that become possible. Back when I was first learning about Matterport in 2015, 2016, we knew that that day would come. We thought it would maybe take about 18 months or a couple of years.

It took many more years for the SDK to open up for SDK partners and for other people to be building an ecosystem on top of Matterport. But yes, those are the exciting developments that make me understand why Matterport went the direction of we are a digital twin company, look at all the cool things that we enable.

[00:33:16]
Amir Frank: Yeah, you can get a virtual tour or you can do a whole bunch of other stuff that is very solution-focused for exactly what you need to pick and choose. There's like 170 platform partners now.

[00:33:32]
Emily Olman: Yeah, I would say, for example, there's somebody in the chat. I don't know if they're still watching, but Emile Indra, who works in hotels and showrooms. Another wonderful example is Allseated. I don't know if Emile is familiar with Allseated, but I'll just keep listing the names of companies that pop up as I'm thinking about this.

Allseated is wonderful because, and I've scanned for them many locations in San Francisco. They will do the Matterport scan of a hotel, we'll go in and we'll do all the ballrooms or all the conference rooms. Then with Allseated, you can do virtual conference planning. You can give a virtual tour of the venue.

=======================
AllSeated is now Prismm
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You can use it for configuring the different layouts for different meetings setups and things like that. It really helps in a situation where people have difficulty visualizing. That is where there's this next level of now that's available to you. Because before, or if I just go into workshop right now, I can put Mattertags in and I can do a few cool things.

But really the next level use cases are the ones that have been developed by the partners. Because they've done so many cool things. Yeah, check out. I will see it in the email.

[00:35:08]
Amir Frank: Your industry rights, CRE, as well as TNA travel and hospitality, huge one is [inaudible 00:35:15]. I don't know if you're familiar with them?

[00:35:18]
Emily Olman: That's the one I think I was thinking of also. Yeah.

[00:35:21]
Amir Frank: They do lead gen, and yeah, we're going to have them on a webinar. If anybody is interested in getting more leads, further space, then that's a good one to use.

[00:35:31]
Emily Olman: Yeah, those are the greatest. Anybody who can take this and turn it into a marketplace for their industry is going to, I think, be in a really good position to be a disruptor. That's why when people make their websites, if you're a Matterport photographer or you're doing primarily real estate, I would say it's a really good time to diversify.

The real estate industry is volatile and can be seasonal. I think that it's so important for you and your business to have multiple offerings to different clients and different client bases, and to look at, "Hey, can I get business in hospitality? Can I get business in AEC?" The more you know about what the platform can do.

You can understand how to communicate those applications and use cases to decision makers in that industry.

[00:36:27]
Amir Frank: Yeah, I completely agree. If you can find this platform partners that provide the really focused and sharpened solution and it's offering that I think to your customer bases.

[00:36:44]
Emily Olman: Yeah.

[00:36:45]
Amir Frank: Next level.

[00:36:46]
Emily Olman: Totally.

[00:36:48]
Amir Frank: All right. We've got a couple of questions that have come in. I definitely encourage everybody to go ahead if you've got a question, throw it in there. Don't feel like you have to wait until I say, okay, it's time for Q&A.

[00:37:02]
Emily Olman: Yeah, I would love it if people jumped in. We've got about 20 min left. I really want to hear from people. I think that if you're joining this call, there's a wealth of information that Amir has done such a great job of interviewing different people and providing information.

But I really want to hear what people are thinking about and the things that are burning questions for them right now.

[00:37:29]
Amir Frank: Yeah. -One question. This is an easy one for you. What's your YouTube channel? How does people find you on YouTube.

[00:37:35]
Emily Olman: -It's HopscotchInteractive. If they go to YouTube and they type in Hopscotch Interactive, they'll see that I do pretty regular videos on Matterport and I think that one of the reasons we wanted to chat was because I was talking about one of the most popular videos recently was Matterport Pro 3 versus Pro 2 and what sold me?

Why? Kevin and I decided that, so Kevin is a media producer at Hopscotch Interactive and why did we come to the conclusion that the Pro 3 was a big, important investment for us.

[00:38:19]
Emily Olman: Thank you Charmaine for adding that to the chat. But we did a video where we were documenting our experience, which was that the space behind me again, I have this one pulled up because we ran into issues where the Pro 2 could not overcome the space. It was just my text so Kevin was having trouble aligning.

He was having trouble in this space and it was taking a really long time and I knew that the Pro 3 just based on what the Pro 3's lidar capabilities were, I knew that it would overcome this lot faster or it would overcome those issues and we'd be less frustrating. We were fortunate to get a Pro 2 right away.

I didn't have it at the time, but we brought in another photographer who had a Pro 2 and that was incredible because then we were able to do the space. and what we didn't realize was just the incredible time-saving.

[00:39:25]
Amir Frank: -You mean the Pro 3?

[00:39:26]
Emily Olman: -Sorry, Pro 3, Thank you. We brought into the Pro 3 and we didn't realize the incredible time saving and then it was in that moment that we realized for not all of our scans because I have five Pro 2'S and I have five Z1's and so for me, investing in Pro 3 's for the whole fleet didn't make sense.

But in order to have at least one Pro 3 in our inventory so that we could use it when we needed it was like a total game changer and we knew that we could just for many of our clients, we can upload to their accounts, so we weren't going to run into any long-term hosting issues. If we had the Pro 3, but we could upload to client accounts.

[00:40:13]
Amir Frank: -Yeah, that's actually a really good point. This has been a thing. I come from a photography background and selling digital cameras for many years. Every time a new DSLR would come out, people would feel like they're the one that they had is just no good anymore and that's just not true.

It still does the same job it used to just because something new comes out does not mean that what you have doesn't work anymore. You can still use it. It's perfectly good for what it does. Yeah, I think getting the Pro 3 just to add to your fleet of cameras and use on the jobs that need that is definitely the right way to go, but no one should feel like now that Pro 3 is out.

I have to replace my Pro 2 because everybody's going to want Pro 3. The Pro 2 is still a very good work crossover camera.

[00:41:12]
Emily Olman: -Definitely, I think Emir this question from Mark Franklin, who is an amazing Reality Capture specialist. He has a question, I think this is more for Matterport because this is something for you because this is something that we were both wondering about. If the platform would ever go beyond like the BLK.

What are the chances of him being able to integrate like a Pharaoh or a Trimble.

[00:41:42]
Amir Frank: -I would personally absolutely love for that to happen. We are, I think working towards being as camera agnostic, input agnostic as possible. We know with 360 cameras and phones and things like that. Before that the BLK, I would like to go even further. I would love to see that happen.

I have not heard of that being a thing that we're working towards so unfortunately, it's probably not going to happen in the near term. But definitely I think it would be a great idea. The other thing is, we have to think about how that's going to get used. We do have a lot of webinar content with some of our subject matter experts.

Stephanie Lynn, Chris Atkinson who will come from that space in AAC and the question is, how critical is it to use Pharaoh for all these projects? Sometimes 100 percent. Yes. Matterport is not absolutely not a replacement of those just like it's not a replacement for photography. It's, in-between there. Does your project require that level of accuracy?

Sometimes, yes. We've got customers like Arab massive AC space company. They use both. They'll use the Matterport to get things going a lot faster than what professional expert level draftsman can do with the pharaoh than 3,4 weeks into the project.

They've got everything they need from the Pharaoh at that point and they can tweak some measurements in the Revit model, so they actually do use both.

[00:43:30]
Emily Olman: -I think that's great. I think that's an amazing way to look at it. You're seeing both from the timing of get started faster in the documentation process in the project by using a Matterport and deploying that because it's faster, less expensive and it's less accurate. But are you saying then if you need that level of detail on that accuracy from the pharaoh.

Like I'm imagining like a one in I don't know, like something that's an inch or something that's like super complicated. Imagine it and industrial warehouse or a manufacturing plant where you need the Pharaoh and you need your point cloud to be really highly detailed so that you can pinpoint the different objects.

Then you're saying go back in with the Pharaoh or go back in with those devices.

[00:44:23]
Amir Frank: -They would, I probably won't be able to find it super fast to provide the link. But if anyone's interested, reach out to me on LinkedIn, we have information about this. We actually interviewed, we had Air Up on a webinar and Michael from Air Up explained exactly what they do.

But yes, that is essentially the bottom line, is they'll start the project with Matterport just to get that as-built as fast as possible, as efficiently as possible and then they can already start working on it from there. Getting meetings out of the way, decisions being made based on that as-built and then when they need to just make that millimeter inch level of accuracy.

Tweaks to some of the measurement points. They'll use the Feral for that.

[00:45:16]
Emily Olman: -This is a good point. So two of our largest clients, one is commercial real estate, the other is a construction and remodeling, and they're more for the residential side of the business so on that side of things, we do a Matterport scan for I would say at least half their projects.

[00:45:43]
Emily Olman: Again, it's basically for the efficiency on the design process. That way the first thing that happens is that we will go in and do a scan or we'll have some documentation of the as-built which is such a good point Amir because the time that it takes for designers to be able to go in and get that level of detail they have to maybe get even somebody who's come in.

And they aren't available for a few weeks and so you can schedule somebody a lot faster and you always want to go in and measure everything more precisely at a certain point, but certainly to get things going quickly and then also I think as a reference and this goes for listing agents, this goes for AAC applications.

Nobody can remember the details of how many plugs are there or how many outlets are there in a room. Nobody will remember those details so having 360 documentation helps us go back to the space, refresh our memories, look at it together and so as a collaboration tool and even just as that documentation and a timestamp of what it looked like.

On this date and that's one of the things I love about Matterport is that it really always to me seemed like a digital timestamp. This is what it looked like on this day and we can go back to it and say, here's what's changed, here's what's moved or identify the objects in the space, which is something that Matterport is working on that I'm very excited about.

[00:47:16]
Amir Frank: Yeah, absolutely. I post it in the chat. That is actually just a short clip from the main webinar, but it'll give you an example of how our app is using it.

[00:47:31]
Emily Olman: Awesome.

[00:47:32]
Amir Frank: Exactly. Matterport is a really good way as far as collaboration is concerned. It's right now, the fastest way of creating your digital twin. A lot of companies that you'll hear about if you do research about digital twins, you hear Siemens, you hear Nvidia. They have these massive digital twins like Willow, Digital Twins of cities.

But nobody is talking about how that's getting created. If the city mostly it's just people spending a lot of time in front of the application like Revit or whatever 3D tool they're using to do it manually. But Matterport is still the fastest way right now to get an as-built from a physical space like a building or a structure and whether you need that Pharaoh level of accuracy is up to you.

I've talked a lot with people in that industry who deal with AAC, who deal with architects that require the as-built, who don't want to create the as-built themselves. They want to architect, they want to re-imagine the space. If you can provide that for them and say, hey, I'll get you the as-built because Matterport provides that as a service.

You can get your beam assets directly from your Matterport model. I think that's a huge win. From the people that I've spoken to, a lot of them aren't even using that. We had just a month or two ago we had somebody on that wasn't even using Pro3 and doing great work with architecture and building assets.

[00:49:11]
Emily Olman: Absolutely. The Pro3 is really beneficial when you need to go outdoors and when you want to move quickly through a large open space. That would be for me the biggest difference. The Pro2, otherwise is totally sufficient in a house and I would say the only thing is that whether or not you want.

To more easily capture things like the landscaping or the exterior or the perimeter or you want to connect your scan more beautifully. You can say beautifully. More beautifully to things like get detached ADU or another building like a garage that's detached from the property, then it comes in handy and is really helpful and you can really do the entire scan of the lot.

But otherwise, the Pro2 could certainly tackle plenty of use cases for AAC easily.

[00:50:21]
Amir Frank: Yeah. We've got some questions and I definitely want to get to us. I told you, you and I can nerd out about this stuff.

[00:50:30]
Emily Olman: I know it's great. I love it. We will have to do it again.

[00:50:36]
Amir Frank: Don asked, what type of equipment do you now use for scanning and then we talked about that and do you run into any situations where you use an iPhone instead of a pro camera?

[00:50:47]
Emily Olman: An iPhone instead of a pro camera for scanning? No, I don't. I will admit to everyone on the call that I have a Matterport axis that I have never used. It's still in the box. I bought it when it came out because I wanted to try it. Maybe I'll do a YouTube video about it because I know there's some people that use the Matterport access and use the iPhone.

Actually, it's not true. I did try it before the axis came out. The axis system, which if maybe people don't know, basically it's a device for your phone to help you create scans instead of position the camera along this center axis so that you can easily keep things aligned. When we first were able to use iPhones and I tried it handheld but for me it was I couldn't go backwards.

That was the problem. I couldn't go slower and I didn't want to go backwards in terms of the quality so I've never used it professionally. I only used it to test and the results for me where I couldn't do it. But I know that people are creating really great nodal heads for that and I think that the axis and there may be others that come out too. I feel like sure why not?

[00:52:11]
Amir Frank: If you're going to compare it, I would compare it to something like the Z1 and I think as far as image quality, you'll be pleasantly surprised considering phone majority have with you don't have to invest in $1,000 device, but you do lose on the speed of the Z1. The benefit of those 360 cameras, they are just wicked fast. That's cool.

[00:52:35]
Amir Frank: How do you cope with scenarios which are different to scan such as long corridors? That's a challenging one for sure. Once I haven't been able to close the loop. In my space capture app does not give good tools to correct it manually, and there is no desktop software to do the before uploading.

So loop closure is definitely an issue. I don t know that we have the time to talk about loop closure right now. But let's chat about that a little bit. What do you do especially a place like the one behind you. I don't know if it comes all the way around. It does. It goes around the core of the building.

This was about an 18,000 square foot if I recall, full floor office in San Francisco, where you would need loop closure, meaning you would start at point A and then go back around and go back to point A, I guess. A full 360 around the building and loop closure for us. This is also one of those, the more you do this.

The more comfortable you are looking at your minimap and seeing maybe you didn't totally perfectly align everything. But having faith that it will process out and so I always call it processing out with my team where we can see that there has been drift in the model. This is more true with probably the Pro2.

Which was infrared scanning versus lidar scanning, where we would have a little bit more drift. The lidar camera has a longer range and that underlying scanning technology is more accurate so I would say if you're experiencing problems with loop closure, I would be curious to know which camera you're using.

[00:54:29]
Amir Frank: In any case it's been really only an issue for us where we would have things start to overlap in a really large scan and a really large space that didn't process out all the way and then my solution, I know this isn't fast, but I would typically get in touch with Matterport support and then they assist with the loop closure.

I don't know Amir if you have a different answer, but I've had Matterport to help with a couple of situations like that. Yeah. It's definitely an issue, but what I would say is scan density. Scan density is the Number 1 thing that anyone can do very simply, yes. You end up taking more skin positions, it takes a little bit longer, but with more overlapping scan data.

It's going to align faster so you can move on to the next one quicker and more accurately. So you have less drift and then like you just said, in the processing once you upload all your data to the processing engine, you've got something that's a lot stronger than iPad or whatever you might be using a mobile device that does look and try to realign little bit.

It's not going to work miracles but if you are a little bit drift. If you do find that once you come back all the way around until you're starting points there's a little bit off by a couple of feet even, it can fix that in processing.

[00:55:57]
Emily Olman: Yeah, fixing processing and always my other big tip would be the most critical point where you would want the scan density is at the intersection. If you have a hallway that's hitting another hallway, make sure that your first scan is not at an angle coming off that hallway because that's going to introduce alignment issues right away.

You want to stay in that straight line and then go down the new hallway in a straight line, I would say watch out that zigzag approach that sometimes people take where they will quite literally move into a new intersection and then cut the corner because they're walking in that direction. That's a natural way to walk you don't usually walk out into the center.

The Matterport camera needs to be placed in the center because that will keep you in full alignment. That would be my biggest tip is the density but also that's one case where your placement of the camera can be very helpful to just know you need to maintain that straight line.

[00:57:01]
Amir Frank: Yeah, 100%. We do have a good question here that commercial real estate. I want to get your point on your thoughts on commercial real estates and using Matterport in that industry. Positive, negative, or was it anonymous, had a question. There we go. Can you explain more about how Metaphor helps in commercial real estate, good and bad?

[00:57:32]
Emily Olman: Yeah, I think the commercial real estate is a really useful example for people of how having a virtual tour as part of the marketing and I would say in the future, the digital twin as well, being able to have sensor data or to be able to use that potentially for a future tenant as something for planning.

But definitely on the leasing side, having the Matterport tour has become really an expectation. I think that if you don't provide a virtual tour, and another thing that really helped my business was, of course during the pandemic, we were all prevented from going and doing tours and brokers couldn't meet people on site or that they couldn't do it safely.

For the commercial real estate industry, I think having at the very least a handful of panoramas beats having just photography pretty much every time. We have clients that do it as an insurance policy in case there were ever another lock-down. We have clients that do it because they want to be able to give it to a tenant to potentially do some design work.
It has multiple use cases in the commercial real estate space. But where they don't usually use it is like they don't necessarily use it for floor plans because they already have all of that drafted from architects typically. But if you needed to know the square footage of someplace that maybe somebody was getting as an acquisition or purchasing then again.

You could get like that very fast floor plan and dimensions from that as well.

[00:59:16]
Amir Frank: Yeah, and a lot of times companies will come in, rent a space and add some walls, tick down walls, change things around to make it fit their needs, and all of a sudden those plans may not be any good anymore, so you want a quick Matterport scan to create an as-built or at least those schematic floor plan drawings.

We have companies like Savills, Cushman, Wake-field, and JLL, massive CRE companies that use it not only for the promote use case. JLL has a room where they bring in customers and they say, how does this space look to you?

[00:59:54]
Emily Olman: Exactly. Amir, you're so right and I know Franklin was on the call or he's on this call, he was watching earlier. For the advanced use cases, you can use these 3D scans and I don't know that Matterport works in all cases, but certainly for even imagining, can you fit a certain piece of equipment into a building.

The modeling, Mark and his team do that kind of work, and so I think that's really an important thing to keep in mind is that if you have a 3D model, you can actually use this to run simulations, and those simulations are best done with a reality capture.

[01:00:40]
Amir Frank: Yeah, simulated virtually before you bring in a whole bunch of furniture and start moving it around, the physical space.

[01:00:47]
Emily Olman: Yeah.

[01:00:47]
Amir Frank: It makes a lot more sense to see what the layout is going to be prior to that.

[01:00:54]
Emily Olman: Yeah, commercial real estate. There's a great question I think here. Amir, I want to take a look this.

[01:00:58]
Amir Frank: Yeah, for sure.

[01:00:59]
Emily Olman: They should use the scans if they have to make measurements anyway. But they don't get it.

[01:01:11]
Emily Olman: I think that the pitch to commercial real estate broker who feels like the best value of this is the dimensions or is the square footage are getting another floor plan. Like I said before, my clients don't use it, typically for the floor plan. They use it specifically like you're talking about for project meetings without traveling.

You can have a Zoom call like this, and there's many different Matterport ecosystem partners that besides a Zoom meeting where we can look at the Matterport model together, there are other examples, maybe Amir knows a few of them where you can go in and you can actually meet in the space together.

[01:01:55]
Amir Frank: Yeah, [inaudible 01:01:55] is a good one. I don't know if you've heard of them and [inaudible 01:01:59] also does that as well, each one goes in with an avatar.

[01:02:07]
Amir Frank: Press CRE is a massive industry. That means a lot of different things, but it's not just promote, it's not just, here's a space familiarize yourself with it. Yes, that's a great use case. But also for the facility manager to use those assets, certainly in a space again, like the one behind you to see all that MEP critical, if you are building a structure.

[01:02:32]
Emily Olman: Yes.

[01:02:33]
Amir Frank: Prior to installation and sheet rock, have that scan, that is an incredible asset for a facility manager to have to know what's going on inside the walls after everything has been put up.

[01:02:45]
Emily Olman: Yeah.

[01:02:45]
Amir Frank: A lot of different use cases but unless you actually see somebody using it and putting it into their workflow then it's hard to understand how they get used. I get that. With that said we did go a little bit over. I told you we would do this.

[01:03:05]
Emily Olman: Did we?

[01:03:05]
Amir Frank: We didn't get a chance to answer all the questions. I apologize.

[01:03:10]
Emily Olman: No. Well, people should reach out to me.

[01:03:12]
Amir Frank: Yes, how can they reach you?

[01:03:15]
Emily Olman: Well, they can reach out to me a couple of different ways. The YouTube channel, like I said, I post a lot of videos there and I always love getting suggestions from the community, so if you subscribe there and then shoot me a message or a comment on any of the videos, I will definitely think about that for future stuff.

They can go to hopscotchinteractive.com. They can email me at emily@hopscotchinteractive.com, and I think that those are really the best ways. I share a few different things on LinkedIn as well, so under Emily Olman on LinkedIn, those are the places I'm most active, and if you're just starting out or even if you're way deep in the weeds.

On industrial use cases or engineering use cases, that's the direction that I think hopscotch will be spending a lot more time in 2023. We're looking at the advanced use cases more closely for our business, so I'd love to meet everybody and welcome you to get in touch.

[01:04:23]
Amir Frank: Awesome that sounds great. Huge thank you, Emily for taking the time to be with us today, and thank you very much to everyone who attended to ask all these great questions. I really hope that you got something out of this. I know I did. It's great to have somebody who has been using Matterport for so long to share their experience.

[01:04:44]
Emily Olman: Thank you so much, Amir and I wish everybody who joined the best of luck. I know that it can be amazing, it can be overwhelming doing what you do. But we all like the same stuff and so I'm just really happy to get to know all of you and thank you for watching today and thanks for having me.

[01:05:06]
Amir Frank: My pleasure and to your point in networking, super important. We didn't even get into that, but maybe next time we'll touch on networking, so definitely reach out to Emily.

[01:05:15]
Emily Olman: Yeah, thanks, Amir.

[01:05:17]
Amir Frank: Take care, everybody. Thanks again. Bye bye. Have a good rest of the day.