WGAN-TV Podcast: How to Publish to Google Street View from Matterport

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 \| How to Publish to Google Street View from Matterport +10 GSV Pro Tips: Part 1 of 2 \| Guest: Wingman Media Brisbane Owner Michael Lysov \| www.WingmanMedia.com.au \| Thursday, 18 July 2024 \| Episode: 222 \| WGAN Forum Member Name: @Wingman Transcript (below) - How do you publish to Google Street View from a multi-floor Matterport virtual tour? - What are Google Street View "blue lines" ... and - How can you update them? How can you improve the walk around experience of a Google Street View tour? Stay tuned. Hi all, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com]. Today is Thursday, July 18th, 2024. You're watching WGAN-TV: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today. We have an awesome show for you: How to Publish to Google Street View from Matterport + 10 Pro Tips for Google Street View. Our subject matter expert is Brisbane, Australia-based Wingman Media Brisbane Owner Mike Lysov. Mike, thank you for being back on the show. - Oh, thank you for having me. - Mike, before we jump into today's topic, tell us about Wingman Media Brisbane. - Technically, the company's focused now only on doing Google Street View. I do some orders ... I do some tours for the venue marketplaces. I have a contract with the company that runs the marketplace. That's where they ordered us to use [Matterport] 3D tours even though they asked me if I can publish it, I said to them, "Yes, I can." For some reason, they don't use me for that. They can publish [Matterport To GSV] by themselves. There's no specific area or industry I work for. I can do a tour for anybody. Maybe that's not a good idea. Maybe I need to take some niche and try to sell it. But look, we're technically not a big city, so if you focus on something specific, you might run out of clients really fast. So I'm just trying to stay with them. And at the same time, Google kind of stopped accepting photographers. So the hiring list for Google Street photographers reduced a lot, and I've got some clients telling me that they called everybody from the list in Queensland, [Australia] which is where Brisbane is located, and only two guys replied, one of them is me. So, there's about 25 of them on the list. - Well, Mike, the reason I reached out to you to be my guest is you've been a long-time member of the We Get Around Network Forum, I would say nearly every question that is asked about Google Street View or Matterport + Google Street View, you've answered, you've given very precise answers, you've been tremendously helpful to the community, anyone that has any Google Street View-related questions. I thought what we would do today is we've aggregate a list of the frequently asked questions in the We Get Around Network Forum about Matterport plus Google Street View in particular, and then some general questions about Google Street View. So I thought what I would do is just run through my questions and see some of them where you can demo, and some we'll just have a conversation about. How's that sound? - Yeah, go ahead. I'm happy to help. - Awesome. So I've enabled you to share your screen. It would be great if you can show us how you publish a Matterport tour to Google Street View. And while you set up to share your screen, I just want to share with our audience that your website is: www.WingmanMedia.com.au That's for Australia. You want to go ahead and share your screen, Mike? - Yeah, I'm doing it now. - Okay. - Go to there. - So I can see your screen. That's great. And really the first, yeah, maybe if you could take it to the web browser, that would be great. And the first question to ask you really is how do you publish a Matterport tour to Google Street View? - I have one tour that I need to publish, so maybe I'll just go ahead with that and we'll see. It's not the complete steps that I do for every tour. I also use the Pano2VR Pro to fix the problems that come from Matterport. - Different tool, but let's start with Matterport, since we're a Matterport-specific community. I see a Word document that's up. If you could go to Matterport, that would be great. Go to: My.Matterport.com - Sorry, the tab is behind another page. Yeah. So, I've done 3D tours for these childcare centers for this company. They have centers everywhere across Australia, most of them, I believe maybe in New South Wales, but their building centers in Queensland. And this is a brand new one they recently built. And I had a chat with a marketing manager, and she said to me they're building another one. So it's going to be another one, they're quite huge, you will see it, I'll show you the Matterport model. They're all live on the website for this kindergarten childcare center on the page that describes every center and everything. I have created Matterport tours for four of them: two already with Google Maps for two years. For some reason the first one we did is not published. I probably need to ask why, I don't remember. But this one needs to go live, so we'll just do it right now. So just to show how big it is, you can see it's huge. I'll switch it back to the floor plan. So they have multiple rooms, and every age has at least two different groups. So kinder one, kinder two. So what we're going to do, we're going to go to Add-Ons to publish it. Then we see a Google Street View. Pretty much at this point, you just click until you reach something where you need to select or do anything else. So that's the first step where you need to pay attention. So what it does, I can't really confirm but I believe Matterport camera has a GPS on board, or not GPS, just a device that takes location. So that's why even without Place ID at the top, I'm trying to push on here, you can see that it's actually almost sitting on the center. So that's the center. You can't see the roof in my 3D model because I trimmed it so people can actually see the floor plan even in 3D. But when it's publishing, it's ignoring any trim, and it's actually showing that, because I was capturing outside, it's showing you that there is a roof as well, but you can't see it in 3D. So what we need to do, we need to rotate it. I would suggest trying to align with walls. As you can see this wall here, that's the internal wall, actually, that's the fence. So when you align it parallel to the fence, you pretty much can be sure it's right. So then you just move the model close to the fence, like this, you can check what's behind it. So you can see there's a back fence as well. As you can see here, it's not really aligning, it's kind of going away. So just adjust it a bit. So now you can be sure it's actually, you can try to move around. You see everything is aligning. Maybe a bit of a gap here again, but it might depend on how I trimmed it. So if the trim line wasn't parallel to the wall, it might create this. I believe this is totally correct. So you've done the part, but actually this probably was stupid of me. First, what you need to do is type the name of the business. This is important because if you don't select the business from Google Maps, it will be published, but you won't see any pictures attached to the Google profile of this business. It'll just go with no Place ID. On Maps, the 360s will be sitting on that business. So if somebody explores the map in the Street View, they will see them, but they won't be showing on the Google business profile of the center on Google Maps. So that's critical, because it is called Rise & Shine. We just type it. Rise & Shine, Warner. If you can't find it here. And that's what seems to be happening. Rise & Shine, see, there's not even a location from Australia coming. It's all USA. I would suggest it's better just to open Google Maps, find it there. Because when you try to look at the Google Maps and you are in Australia, they're supposed to show you the first location from Australia. And that's what should happen. Or see, I already been on that page, so it's selected, you can actually do and copy a Place ID. Where is it? You can copy this or this, but if you just select the name, that's all you need, wait a second, and paste it here, it's selected straight away. So you just click on it. That's why it's supposed to be done first, because once you select the business, it might change your adjustment, how it sits on the maps. So that's what should be the first step in publishing. We'll adjust it again. Yeah, like this. So it might not be exactly with millimeter accuracy, but at least you can grant it's probably 50 centimeters top difference between the ... and because all the scans align to each other inside. So inside, they all kind of will be switched a bit if it's not precise. But it's still going to be really close to reality. That's why Matterport is so good for publishing. Imagine you do it with a 360 camera. You like it if you can connect some location devices, so it writes information inside every 360 you're capturing, but at the same time, this is built into the floor plan. And that's why it's really easy to publish. - Yeah, so Mike, did you actually capture, copy and paste the precise wording of Rise & Shine Kindergarten? - Yeah, yeah. I went to Google Maps. I could have used this, I don't think it's a Place ID, it's more like an address. The Place ID, I don't think you can copy it from anywhere, but it doesn't really matter. All you need to do is just find it on Google Maps and copy it from the search bar. - Okay. - Or you can select it this way and then copy it here. All you need to do is just exactly the same and the same wording, so when you type it on publisher, on Matterport, it's coming straight away. So you don't need to look through the list. - Okay. - So we're coming back here. We aligned it, we put the name here. It's still a name, it's not a Place ID because it's going to change to Place ID once you click Next. Next you need to do the selection of your account. I don't think you need to be a Google Street Trusted photographer to publish it. Anybody with the Gmail account can actually publish tools on Google Maps. We can try to delete, and I'll authorize myself again, but I think it's pretty much easy. You just click edit account. - Yes. - Google will tell you who you want to select for that. And then it just tells you you're going to give permission to Matterport to do something, are you happy with that? If you say happy, it will just be attached here. You can have multiple accounts here. I remember there was a question on your list. - Well, we'll get to it. We'll get to it. Let's keep the demo, let's complete the demo and then we'll be side-by-side to chat. - Mm-hmm, it's just, we'll leave that screen. That's why I'm trying to answer it now. - Yeah. - I don't think you actually need to add anyone here. Maybe it is using the Collaborator feature, you can get permission from a client to use their Gmail account to publish on their behalf. - Yes. - But I will tell you I wouldn't do that. Why? Because personally I don't just publish Matterport. I do a lot of work in Pano2VR after that. So I can't just. - Mike, let's save that discussion. Let's just complete this, and we'll finish up our demo and then we'll chat about the different permutations. - Yeah, so we're clicking. So my account is selected. It was a multiple account. You need to select the one you're publishing with. So then we click Review. See, the Place ID is picked up from Google database, it's here. The business address, that's what you typed, in Queensland, Australia here. So that's again some question that will be coming later. But I always include all scan points. I can explain why. Do you want me to explain now? - No, not just yet. - Okay, so there's the three options, and we're going through this one only. So I selected to publish all visible scans. 360 views, They are not included, yeah, I don't think they were included, but I had one too when I published 360 views, and I still had to work with them. They weren't Google Maps, but they were connected. They say purchase, but in fact it's free. They announced at some point that it's going to be free for some time, but it's still going for a year even more. So we click Purchase, you don't pay anything for that. You click Publish, and then what happens? You just need to sit and wait until the process there, because there are 400 panoramas included, and you can expect it to take some time. Even the boss might be sitting on Amazon Web Services. It still doesn't mean they can publish stuff really fast. So you just wait for it. But in the meantime, you can actually go to this page, business profile for the business. And just, have a look. - I'm sorry, I took you off of sharing. Did you want to go back to show something? - Not really, I'm just trying to explain that while Matterport says they're processing, you can actually come to the business profile of the page of the business that you're publishing for, and check if the panoramas are appearing there. But most of them. - How long does it usually take for the 360 panoramas to show up? - Well, look, if it's a really small business, actually I was a bit wrong about what I just said because you can't see panoramas on the profile until the last bit of your publishing going to Google Maps because the last bit, it actually submits the Place ID, at least that's how it's done in Pano2VR, first they publish every 360, and then at the end you can see the say we're publishing map links. - All right, so let me see if I can just recap here for a moment. So for those who may not even be using Matterport today, but wondering about the process, really, the first thing you went to was your Matterport Cloud account at: My.Matterport.com you called up a Matterport tour that you had completed, you selected the Add-On for published to Google Street View. You then entered in the name of the business. If you knew the Place ID for that business, you could enter the Place ID as well, I believe. - Technically they're asking for a business address there. So I'm not sure the Place ID entered and the address where to work. - Got it. So ... - You can try, I don't know, maybe it is smart and ... - Yeah, but the key thing I believe is you had already given the address to Matterport of that location so that when you went to publish to Google Street View, it already knew about where on the map the property was located. Then, you needed to [Align] the Matterport. - Align, I would say align. - Align the Matterport tour with that actual space. And I'm actually happy that the name of the business didn't pop up easily, because that showed that what one might need to do is first go to Google Maps. Go find the exact name of the business, because we may be so used to a business name as a trade name, but there may be some formal name. Find that name, paste it in that field. And then you were presented with three options when you wanted to publish. The first was to publish all the Matterport scans. It doesn't publish the 360 Views. I've said that incorrectly. It publishes all the Matterport 360 scans: is that the right word to call it? - I would say it publishes every scan that [is public] but not publish 360 Views. - But not the 360 Views. But not the 360 Views. So if you've shot separately. - But remember in a Capture app, when you capture, when you want to scan, it says 3D Scan. When you want 360 View, it says 360 View. So we can just use this so people understand what we're talking about. - Yes. So very important. So if somebody is new to Matterport or thinking about Matterport specifically for publishing to Matterport to Google Street View publishing, it's helpful to know that you have two options, you can either scan or capture a 360. And what that little dialogue box was saying was, oh, we only publish Matterport scans to Google Maps. There was a second button there that gave you the option of selecting only the Highlight Reel 3D scans. And then I think that third option was just to publish one 360. I'm not quite sure why anybody would do that, but that seemed to be an option. - I think the third one lets you select the scans you want to publish. I don't remember what it said, that's why I wanted to stop and actually read it. But that's fine, don't worry, we can. - You'll post to the, you'll have a reason to post to the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com] with what that third option is once you research that. What happens when you have a Matterport tour that has multiple floors? Do you just follow the same process that you just did and somehow magically the floors are automatically indicated on Google maps? - Look, I went through different ideas because Google is absolutely not giving us anything. Try to find a guide from Google how to do it, you'll fail. So I had to go through different steps, and I think at this point you pretty much just need the floor number. So you have multiple tours of multiple floors, and it's part of the big building. And even if we just do the same tour like we have a two-story building and you've done the whole building from the ground to the first floor. So what you need to do is just specify, and I guarantee you, you need to do it before publishing. You need to rename your floors in the Matterport tour with just two digits. You can even use one digit, you can use 0 and 1, assuming that 0 is ground floor. - That's the magic. You just answered the question. If you go back, rename all your floors 01, 02, 03, 04. I believe in the We Get Around Network Forum, I think you also said minus was okay, -01, -02. Am I making that up? - No, I don't remember what I was offering minus, I was offering, like if it's a basement, and look, I've been in many buildings of course in Brisbane, Sydney, and anywhere. And I remember the basement just gets applied as a B, in the lift anywhere, when you enter the lift, you can see like a ground, usually G0. First floor is usually level L1, L2. You can use F instead. If you want to be precise, when you capture something and there's anywhere, go inside and look at the buttons, that would be the name in the buttons because people are going to go there, they need to understand what button to press. - So well, it's always confusing in the elevator. I'm always amazed at how the elevators are numbered related to where I want to go. But my confusion aside, if it's two digits, such as maybe, I don't know what you put for basement BA, BS, B? - Because the basement is going down in floors, I think that the B1 will be level one in the basement, B2 will be level below and stuff like this. - Ah, okay, great. So you might name it. - And just give the floors just two. - You might name the upper floors 01, 02, 03, 04. And the lower floors. - I don't even think you need to use 0. You can just put like, if it's a ground floor, put 0. Because look, I'm confused a bit, I'm from Russia, we don't have a ground floor called the 0 floor. We called it the first floor, even though it's technically maybe the ground floor. - Yes, no, I totally get that. Because I'm always amazed when I get in an elevator and I'm trying to figure out am I pressing 1 or am I pressing F? - Yeah, yeah, and sometimes they have multiple ground floors because the building sits on a slope. And one side of the building, the ground floor maybe just a little bit. - All right, that's a show for a different day, it talks about our different angst regarding elevators, but the short answer is name your floors with one or two digits. - Yeah, actually it's three if it's 100, if it's a hundredth floor, it needs to be three. So I think they might have some limits. But for some reason if you just try to publish something that's called floor one, floor two, like what the Matterport usually does when they create a floor, I simply just ignore it. I've never seen a, it is not even cut off at two digits or two layers, it's completely removed. And maybe the reason for that, because when you call the one floor, floor one, and when you call another floor above or below floor two, what we have, if they're using only four digits, they will be still called one, the same, just will be floor. - Okay, so the good news is, well, the good news is we used one of your examples in the We Get Around Network Forum to post that has multiple levels, and you can actually see as I recall it said L1, L2, L3. - Yeah, yeah, want to be precise, use letters, L1, G0, want to be just absolutely bold, just call it with a number. That's it. - Got it. Overstood. I was going to ask you a question about only publishing some Matterport scans to Google Street View, it sounded like that the answer was option two, which was your Highlight Reel. If you only wanted to publish, presumably the scans you wanted to publish were in your Highlight Reel, and that would make it easy to publish only those scans to Google Street View. So that third option we don't know the answer to is, are you able to select one or more scans manually to upload to Google Street View? I think what I'm going to ask our viewers to do is check out the We Get Around Network Forum: www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com and hopefully Mike, you have a moment after the show you could just start a discussion on that topic. - Yeah, yeah, sure. - That would be helpful. - Look, I'm personally seeing if that company or business that is hiring you, they only want Google Maps publish tool, but for some reason they don't want 200 panoramas, what you can do, because what I do is with this tour like the one I showed to you, this is actually used on the website as a 3D tour. So they want to have a Matterport tour on their website. That's why it's captured with the maximum density and everything. And that's why it generated 400 panoramas. If they called me and told me, oh Mike, we don't want to walk every three meters. We are happy with just you jumping from one room to another, like it's done with any DSLR or mirrorless camera, because people just won't spend so much time making shots every three meters. If that's the case, I would not use the Highlight Reel. I would just capture a really bad quality 3D dollhouse tour. But that still will be jumping from room-to-room. Maybe I would in that childcare center, I would need shots in the doorway to connect two different rooms. But the Matterport Pro3 Camera is fantastic. It can see stuff 10 meters away, and the rooms there are not 10 meters long. So I will do one. - Well, this begs a lot of questions. You mentioned earlier you use a different tool, Pano2VR Pro. So are you using Matterport to publish the hundreds of 360s to Google Street View, and then using Pano2VR Pro to curate which 360s you want to remove from Google Street View? - No, no, what I do, I disable all technical scans, scans behind furniture, in some corners where I just need the quality of the dollhouse. Then I come to the tour when it's ready, to the 3D tour I disable all these points because there's no benefits from them. Nobody wants to go behind the couch and look at the wall. - Ah, so if you disable the scan within Matterport Workshop, then it's not going to publish to Google Street. - Yeah, yeah, that's what the first option is. It says it will publish all visible scans. - All visible scans. Okay. - If we disable the scan, then it's not visible, so it's not published. But like I said, for someone who doesn't want a Matterport tour at all, and I have a lot of businesses that are not using my 3D tour on the website, 3D tools. I don't know what's the reason because they cost something like some money for hosting, or they just don't want it. Some of the businesses don't have websites, I've done some for franchises and they have like an oh, common website for the franchise, and then they have nothing for the particular locations. So they just don't have any space to publish the tours online. - Okay. All right. So I got a lot of questions to get through with you on the show. Let's say you've published it, and for some reason the client says, could you unpublish that? Can you do that using the Matterport Workshop Google Street View Add-On and unpublish? - Yeah, you can unpublish from Matterport, but because I'm using Pano2VR, and once I get the data on Google Maps, I can see all the 360 scans. Actually I can see all the scans published. There are no lost panoramas that don't have any Place ID, happens sometime. Then I just go to Pano2VR and then download it to Pano2VR. It's not just a way to edit the tours, it's a way to have a backup version of it without having anything hosted on Matterport. - Okay, so I think what I'm hearing, let me see if I understand this, is that you publish the tour to Google Street View from Matterport. That's easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy and it builds what people in this space call the constellation. You're not figuring out how to connect the dots. It literally, the dots are already connected for you. That said, sometimes it puts too many links, and it gets really confusing within Google Street view. - So it's not, sorry Dan. Then it's not sometimes, it's all the time. - All the time. - That's why I use Pano2VR Pro. - Okay, so you then use the Pano2VR Pro. Sign into Google Street View with your same Google Street View account, just like it was linked to Matterport, you download the entire tour to Pano2VR Pro, And then you curate the tour and the connections of how the different 360s are connected. And presumably what you're doing there is you may either eliminate some of the 360s perhaps, and eliminate some of the connections so that they're not so many options for the consumer to have eight ways from Sunday to exit a scan. It has too many what we call sergeants. Could you explain what those sergeants are? - Not sure what you mean. - Or chevrons, or the chevrons, the things. - This is like the pointy thing, right on Google Maps? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's. - Look, the problem is Matterport Publisher, and I don't understand why they're doing that because they have a 3D model. They know where the walls are. When you walk in the tour you can't go through a wall, why are they doing it in GSV? - So is that sometimes, Mike is that sometimes what happens is when you publish a Matterport tour to Google Street View, it ends up letting you walk through a wall, and that's why you're downloading to Pano2VR Pro? - It happens with every Matterport tour published. - Okay, got it. Every time you publish. So it's easy to publish from Matterport to Google Street View, but if you really want your tour to look professional, you need a Google Street View moderator tool like Pano2VR so that you can make sure that people can't walk through walls. That they won't be given a sergeant, an arrow, that lets them literally walk through a wall. - It's not just they send a wall. They don't understand what they send. Because imagine that, like in the tour you kind of went through the 50 scans over and ran at the 51 at day end, where you can't even see where you come from. So that's what they're doing and I don't understand why. So for that reason I have to use Pano2VR. And another reason why I use Pano2VR is because Matterport doesn't let us put your logo inside. So all the tools I do, I brand them as the ideal logo. That's what I do. - So for example, if a viewer has ever seen a logo in the nadir in the bottom of the tour, Matterport doesn't enable that feature with Google Street View, so you're using Pano2VR to add the client's logo or your logo in the nadir . And Pano2VR enables you to do that. - Yeah, Pano2VR Pro. sorry? - A tool like Pano2VR Pro enables you to add a logo as an example. - Yeah, that's correct. So what I do in Pano2VR, I clean excessive connections; and I put my logo and then I publish it again. And by the time I do it, I would either click on Matterport Publisher to delete the tool, because I have a backup copy on my computer. So I don't need this Matterport to be sitting, I don't need this tour to be sitting on Matterport. I can delete it, and then I'll just publish it from Pano2VR. Or I can click the button in the Pano2VR, and delete it from there. - Okay, so you just published that tour to Google Maps. How long does it usually take for the 360s to be viewable, and then how long does it take to actually have those 360s connected by Google Street View? - Look, I think it really depends on location, country, and things. I've seen, like there were cases when I couldn't see it working for weeks. Now technically you can expect, like at this in Australia, I publish in Australia, if this in Australia, you can expect everything working within two, three days. And I would suggest don't touch anything until it's working, and you see the problems, because if you start touching it, look, if I go now to check my account, or the Google Street Trusted Photographer account, because this tour is publishing now, it'll be sitting there without a Place ID, until the last bit from the publisher, from Matterport comes to Google server, it won't be attached to any ID. That's why there's no point in checking it all the time. If you want, we can share the screen, we go there and we'll see in my account, the last tour is what we are currently publishing. - Okay, so for clarification, because this question comes up frequently in the We Get Around Network Forum is, "hey, I've published my tour to Google Maps, I can see my 360s, but they're not linked together. Have I done something wrong, or when will that happen?" And the answer is it's all over the board. It may be two days, it may be a week, it might be 10 days. There isn't any guarantee from Google Street View about how long it takes, but it will eventually be linked together, be patient. Careful if you're doing this for a client: don't promise it's going to be available tomorrow or I'm going to publish it to Google Street View tomorrow, because the client's going to go look, they're going to see 360s, but they're not linked together. It takes some time. It's one of those variables about Google Street View that's kind of a mystery of there's no guarantee of how many days it will take, and there's no formula based on the number of scans, the location in the world, or when your tour will be live. Be patient, don't touch it, don't use a tool like Pano2VR until you've actually seen the tour is fully assembled on Google Street View. I think that's what I'm hearing, correct? - No, if they're all published, you can grab it with Pano2VR because the map will be already there. If Matterport tells you it's published, it doesn't mean it's working, it just published. But once it tells you it's published, you can go to Pano2VR and download. It'll be all 360 and maps of the links. So you don't need to wait just to get it to Pano2VR, but you need to wait till it's fully functional in Google Maps. If you want to call your client and say, "Mike, it's working, go and check." That's why you need to wait two, three days. - Yes. Plus ... - Because it won't be working straight away. - Plus in your case, what you're saying, even once it's published, you really do need a tool like Pano2VR. There are others, but Pano2VR Pro, the tool that you use, will enable you to moderate the tour, reduce the number of scans, improve the walking experience, and add the logo. What about stairs? If you have multiple floors ... How are stairs handled in Google Street View? - Well, in the same way, if you have a, what it's called, stair landing, when you go up between the stairs. Like in the middle floor, I usually rename the floor at the stair landing. So if I'm on the first floor, and I enter the door to the stairs, I will still be designating the scans before the stair landing to this floor. Then on the stair landing, I will change it to another floor. So when people walk it. - So the answer is it depends on which floor you've assigned the landing. Have you assigned the staircase as its own floor, that doesn't seem to make sense, or have you assigned it to the. - No, it's not its own floor. Like I say, you are on floor 15, right? And then you have a task to capture floor 16 as well. So once you're on the floor 15, your floor number will be 15 in the Matterport tour then you can choose, there's no kind of rules or anything, you can call the whole stairs with landing and they're both sets, you can call it the same number, 15. And then change once you enter the number 16 floor or you can change the floor to 16 in the stair label. - Okay, so the short answer, it's up to you. - It's not a specific floor number, you just keep the same number until you see it's good to switch to another floor. - Yes, so the short answer is as the photographer, just assign the staircase to the floor level that you'd like it attached to, whether that's the floor below or the floor above. Yeah, when you were uploading ... when you were going to publish from Matterport to Google Street View, you had already connected your Google Street View account to Matterport. You gave Matterport permission to use your credential to log in to Google Street View. Explain the process of how you do this for a client that wants the tour published via their Google Street View account versus your Google Street View account. - I don't usually do it, and I don't offer it, but the reason that I still need to edit it in Pano2VR, it's going to create a lot of problems if I publish with my client account, and then how I'm going to connect and download it in Pano2VR they will need me to give authorization for the Pano2VR account as well. - Yes, and I'm in total agreement with you, and even for other reasons when we start talking a little bit later about pricing. But I would say that the short answer is if your client twists your arm and you need to, then they need to have their own Google Street View account and then they're going to need to give you the credentials so that you can add and give Matterport permission to publish to that account. But that said, it's not necessarily for our group, our [Www.WGANForum.com] our community, it's not necessary for photographers, it's not necessarily a best practice to give up control because you want to be able to moderate that tour, be able to make changes, and you may need at some future point to make additional changes, you may need at some future point to take the tour down, whatever the reasons are. And as soon as you publish it to a client's account, you've lost control of that tour. - Yeah, I just won't be able to do anything. And look, you asking how they can actually ask you to publish on their accounts. Before I went to that section to publish the tour, I didn't know that you can invite a Collaborator. So that's your way. They can't just tell you the password and the Gmail account name, nobody will do it. So what they can do, you can actually make them a Collaborator.. They will come to that interface, they will enter their own account, they'll enter the password that you won't see, and then when they tell you please publish under our account, you just select this account and push publish, that's it. But like I said, you won't be able to edit it. That's the problem. - Yeah, if you're new to this world, and I think Mike has just given you great advice, which is publish it to your own Google Street View account, and frankly, get a tool like Pano2VR Pro in order to be able to moderate the tour. What's the difference between Google Maps and Google Street View? - None, technically none. Once Google started to capture roads and everything for people to navigate and see around, then they made a tool called Business Inside View and it was the tour inside the business. And I think they're just reverting back to calling everything as a Street View. So it's a Street View for business or Street View for us. I don't see ... like every time I see ... - It's a semantic thing, it's just we sometimes ... - Yeah, yeah, just whatever people used to name the product. I had a problem with my client. I offered to do it when I was walking around, and he said no. And then he called me in a week and said, "Can you do that?" I said, "I think I visited you a week ago." And he said, "Well, you just said something I don't understand, I want this." I said, "That's just a synonym of the things I do. I can't just quote you five terms. You're going to be confused with them." - Totally get it. So "blue lines" ... what are "blue lines"? - A blue line is the line that is actually recorded in a different way. So the blue line is. How do we do blue lines? You need a camera that can do that, that should be in it. - Well first, Mike first, what is a blue line, for our audience? - Blue line is something like when you do a tour of a business, you actually do just like a donut-style thing. It's a hot spot. You jump from one hotspot to another, and it's represented on Google as a circle. So every tour published from Matterport will be represented, every 360 from Matterport tour will be turned into circles on Google Maps. So when you know that "Pegman" thing; the yellow figure on Google Street View, you need to click on it to enable Street View. And then when you see it's actually both of them on Street View. So the blue line is Street View and you will see donuts as well. They're all now called Street View, and they actually turn on with this "Pegman" thing. - Let me explain it a little bit differently because if you're not familiar with blue lines, the way people typically ask a question is to say, "hey, when I go to Google Street View, my client showed me or said that the view outside their business is old." It may be a restaurant, for example, and the restaurant is a new restaurant, but they took over a previous restaurant space. And so when you go down Google's Street View, and you look at the building, you see the old restaurant rather than the new restaurant. So the client says something like, "Hey, can you update Google Street View?" And that's what people also internally will talk about as the "blue lines" on Google Maps. So how do you override old Google Street View blue lines with a current view? - Look, first I wouldn't promise any business that you can help them with that, you have no control over this media. I was caught in the situation when I thought, oh, I'll just start offering businesses to get Street View on the whole street because I can create the blue line for them going through the street, and they will be there, their logo at the corner. So one business agreed, I got my friend engaged because my car is huge, it's a van, and he has a really tiny car, like even probably, I don't remember the model, doesn't matter. So he came to that place, it was a bit of a drive for us, we drove both directions. It was 2 1/2 kilometers each way. That's what we promised him. I asked very little for that because I wanted to test it. And at the end of the day, it went really bad, because look, I didn't even know it's happening on Google Maps. So you can have a blue line on the street that's actually having multiple timelines. Like in one spot they have a timeline with two different days, in another spot just moving five meters further or 10 or 50, there's another timeline in the same direction. And you can't see the previous timeline anymore there. So what happened when I published it on Google Maps, and he only wanted, [A part of the job] that I offered, he only wanted me to update the actual Street View opposite his business because it was a private house, and then they knocked it down and built the childcare center. That's not the Rise & Shine, it's a different one. And I tried to do everything, and it came up with the problem that opposite his building, the timeline existed there. It didn't include my 360 at all. My blue line wasn't there. It starts showing 50 meters away, then disappears and shows again. So at the end of the day I told him, I can't charge you for that, but if you can pay like $100, you still got like the whole street of 2 1/2 kilometers. There are hundreds of photographs with your logo. - Yeah, so I've asked Google in person this exact question, and it's been some time since I asked that question. And so let me see if I can build on what you've said. Firstly, I totally agree with you. Don't promise your client that you can update those blue lines, because it's more of an art than it is a science. That said, what I heard Google tell me was three things about trying to update the blue lines in front of a business. Google is looking for quality photography. So the better the 360 imagery, the more likely you'll have an opportunity to replace something that was shot with a lower resolution. And second, is that the 360 content collected, the distance is a longer piece. So if you're trying to just shoot the 360s in front of a business, that may not be long enough to replace when there's something that's two, three kilometers, many miles, of contiguous space. So your likelihood of success is actually doing a lot more 360s to do a lot more. - Yeah, yeah, you probably need to do the whole street. - To do the whole street in order to replace a segment, because in whatever secret sauce that Street View has of deciding when to replace a blue line, and as you said, it doesn't necessarily replace it, it's providing a timeline. So there may be 10 times that street had Google Street View done, and you can go back in time to see what that street looks like. But if you want yours to be on the top, and the thing that's displayed, better camera; better quality images; longer piece of road, and that will help you, but it's not a given. Now that said, Mike, how do you then attach the Google Street View, the blue line to go inside of a business? - Look, I don't think it's going to work, because the whole idea of how it's done is that you need to record a 360 degree video and it kind of attaches your camera. I'm using Pilot Era. [www.WGAN.info/Labpano-Pilot-One-EE] Your camera should have a location that is enabled. - So just for our viewers, I want to point out you're using a Pilot Era. [www.WGAN.info/Labpano-Pilot-One-EE] And there are many versions of that camera now. - Yeah, I think the one they called one, it should work too, they have another one which [www.WGAN.info/PANOX-V2] I think it will work too. As long as they have the publisher's software inside the camera, that will work. - Yes, and I would just point out, because that line of cameras, while it's multifunctional and does lots of different use cases, they've done a really awesome job of having a workflow for press this button to shoot specifically for Google Street View and to publish to Google Street View with a very simple workflow that doesn't necessarily mean you have to download it to your computer before you upload it to Google Street View. You can go right from the camera if you want. - I see, they don't even supply any tools to do on a desktop, maybe for different cameras, but Pilot Era, it's just built-in, so it just is that. - Yeah, it publishes right to Google Street View, but you know, you may have a reason where you want your workflow to edit your 360s before you actually publish them to Google Street View. The line of cameras from Pilot [www.WGAN.info/PANOX-V2] enables you to publish directly from the camera to Google Street View, and it has the GPS built into the camera so it knows exactly where it is. Two things, Mike, I've had some success connecting the blue line into a building. I would say it's hit or miss where you literally go from the street into the business, and somehow magically Google Street View figured that out and connected it. But I wouldn't promise any business you can do that. The second is there's a new technique. It's something that Google has just started playing with, and I would encourage our viewers to go to the We Get Around Network Forum -- www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com -- and look for a discussion by Kevin Dole @Home3D within the We Get Around Network Forum, and Google actually has a workflow that enables a photographer to shoot from the street, go inside the business, be able to go outside the business. At the time that Kevin did this post in July 2024, there may be only 10 photographers in the world that have actually been trained on this new process that Google hasn't really rolled out yet to the rest of the world. If they do roll it out to photographers, it's super-exciting and will probably make us feel really good about being able to go from blue lines into a business. Which one would intuitively expect that's how it should work. "I see that restaurant, now I want to walk into the restaurant." Let's switch topics. If I publish my Matterport tour to Google Street View via Matterport, but it only shows up as private, now what? - The tour shown as private? - One of our viewers wrote that question, that says the tour is showing up, maybe it's showing up in their Google Street View account as private, and they haven't said it to the public yet. I'm guessing that's what's happened. - I'm not aware of any settings for the tools that you can make private to public. They are all public, once they're on Maps, everybody can access them. What they mean maybe, they mean that they can't see it on a business profile, the business they created it for. But that's probably why they need to check their Place ID is correct, Place ID is correct. And actually when you look at your account, you need to see if there is any Place name. If they grouped, because when you do the tour, it's not just you see single images. When you do a tour for a business, like I published right now, Rise & Shine in Warner, when it's built, it is going to be grouped, and the name of the business will be at the top of this group. If it's not going, there's a Place ID that you'll see no Place ID on the 360, that's it. - So I'm going to guess that's probably why they can't see it, is that they think they've published it to the correct business, but it's actually they published it maybe to a different business or a different place, and it's missing that Place ID. Do you know how to apply for a Place ID? - I believe you can't, look, even on Pano2VR, you can't just -- I think it's a problem with Google Publishing. You can't edit anything on Google Maps. If you want to update something, if one of panorama's missing Place ID, or you kind of lost one, when you were publishing, you forget to build a connection for one 360. So you publish and realize one 360 is missing, because you didn't connect it to anything. Maybe it's not even included in the tour in Pano2VR. So what you need to do, you need to delete it, and then check that everything is the way you want to publish, and then publish again. So if one panorama is missing or Place ID, you need to assign a Place ID, if you do it from Matterport, you assign it's actually what it's publishing. If it happens you publish from Matterport Publisher, you have 300 panoramas, 299 has a name, and it's attached to the business, but one is showing on your account as a no Place ID, I would suggest to wait, at least, because you can start doing stuff, but it's not working the way you want because you didn't give enough time for Google Street View to apply all the links. But if you come in three days, and you see 99 panoramas published and one attached to your account has no Place ID, it won't be shown on the business profile too, because it has no Place ID. It might even break your tour because it's kind of completely detached from the other 360s. In that case, delete it again in Matterport Publisher, and then publish it again. It's not you, it's just the way Google Street View sometimes accepts when you upload everything. It can be a time delay, software should handle it. I can see in Pano2VR, because I can see every panorama publishing with the progress. Sometimes I see huge delays. They just stop. You see nothing going uploaded. It can stay like this for a minute, and then they start uploading again. So that maybe was the case, and somehow one panorama detached from everything, and so. - Yeah, sometimes some things are just a mystery with Google Street View, and that Place ID is really super-important. So if you want to make sure your tour shows up on the map, make sure you're using the correct Place ID that's associated with that business. Mike, let me ask you this question. I know you have a cold. And you've been so gracious to do the show today, despite that, we're only about halfway through the questions that I have. Do you think we could just schedule a part II maybe in August, maybe a month from now, and do a? - Let's maybe do it in September, because I have a job at the end of August. I'm flying to Cairns which is 2,000 kilometers away. It's not Google Street View, it's the venue places. They have like three pubs there. So I'm going to spend a couple of days there. - Yeah, right, I'll tell you what, I'll reach out to you. We'll schedule a part II for the show. So we're not rushed, and that we don't kill you because I know you're just hanging in there with your cold. - No, it's not a cold, and I think it's going to be better in a few days. It was just a little congestion gone bad. - All right, well, so thank you to our audience for your patience for letting us reschedule a part II. Mike, thank you for today's show. Thanks for agreeing to come back. And just a reminder for our audience, our subject matter expert today, Brisbane, Australia-based Wingman Media Brisbane Owner Mike Lysov. Mike, thanks again for being on the show today. - Thank you Dan, for having me. - And I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum, and you've been watching WGAN-TV.
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WGAN-TV Podcast: How to Publish to Google Street View from Matterport20079