WGAN-TV Podcast: Matterport 2024 Fall Release

WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host 31.34K 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	31.34K DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user	plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 0
	WGAN-TV \| Matterport 2024 Fall Release: Defurnish; Merge Models; Field Tagging; AI Property Descriptions \| Guest: Scan Your Space (a Division of Sparks Media Group) Founder and CEO Tom Sparks \| Thursday, 24 October 2024 \| Episode: 229 www.ScanYourSpace.com \| www.SparksMediaGroup.com \| @ScanYourSpace Transcript (video above) - Would you like a demo of Matterport Defurnish Tool? - What are some unexpected ways to use the Matterport Merge Models Tool? - Is AI Property Description another potential add-on for Matterport Service Providers? Stay tuned. Hi all, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com]. Today is Thursday, October 24th, 2024. You're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today. We have an awesome show for you! Matterport 2024 Fall Release: Defurnish Merge Models, Field Tagging, AI Property Descriptions and more. Our subject matter expert is Tom Sparks, founder and CEO of [Www.ScanYourSpace.com], a division of [www.SparksMediaGroup.com]. Tom, thanks for being back on the show. - Thanks for having me and the Bitcoin is in the mail. - Thank you, Tom. Tom, before we jump into today's topic, please tell our viewers about Scan Your Space and Sparks Media Group. - Sure. So I started Sparks Media Group to cater to residential real estate agents, really. The market in general. We offer everything from photography, aerial, property websites, 3D tours, floor plans, virtual staging, renderings, and pretty much anything you can need to market a residential real estate listing. Shortly after launching that, I realized that there was a market for the commercial side and other industries, industrial, hospitality, retail. And so I created Scan Your Space to cater to those markets. - And your coverage area? - We're covering California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and soon to be Utah, Oregon, and Washington. Sorry, forgot about the two up there. - Cool. And in terms of Matterport gear, scanning gear, camera gear for digital twins? - Yeah, so we have several Matterport Pro3 Cameras, Matterport Pro3's. We have several Matterport Pro2 Cameras. And then I have some other technologies, other systems. - Okay, cool. For our audience today, Tom, I just want to give our viewers a heads up. We're going to talk about eight things: 1. Matterport Defurnish Tool, 2. Matterport Import and Export Tags Tool, 3. Matterport Merge Spaces Tool, 4. Matterport Field Tags Tool, 5. Matterport AI Property Descriptions Tool, 6. Matterport Property and Intelligence: the new Measurement 2.0 Tool, 7. Matterport Automatic Bill Back for Enterprise, 8. Matterport Advanced User Controls: Roles and Permissions for Enterprise. So Tom, as you know, on Tuesday, October 1st, 2024, Matterport announced its 2024 Fall Release with all these tools, some of which work today; some of which are in public beta; some that are in private beta; some that are positioned as public, coming soon. We thought it might be helpful that if I talked with a Matterport Service Provider, a busy prolific Matterport Service Provider, that we could kind of get some sense on what these tools mean, particularly for Matterport Service Providers. Tom, I thought we could start with the Matterport Defurnish Tool. If you could first give us a demo of that, and then we'll discuss it. - Sure, sure. I'm going to share my screen. So here I have a tour that I uploaded now. This Defurnish Tool only works on tours that you've uploaded after they released it. So I think after October 1st. - Yeah, actually the date is ... let me see if I actually have that. I wrote that down. April 14th, 2023. Even before we talk about that, let's see how it works, and then I'll talk about what happens if you have models that are older than that. - Okay. So here's the tour. Simply click on Edit. And then on the bottom right side, you're going to see a Defurnish button. You're going to click that. And this space has already been Defurnished, but if it hadn't been, there's a button that you would click and it says Defurnish. And I think it allows for 225 spaces right now for the beta that you can Defurnish, 225 tours. So I clicked that for this tour, and then I waited. It took maybe somewhere between a half hour and 45 minutes, I think. And then I got an email saying that the space had been Defurnished and it was ready to view. And so once I got that, I just hit a refresh on my browser, and I wasn't sure how to view the Defurnished space. It looked pretty normal to me. And then I noticed down here in the center, there's a Hide Furniture button. And do you want me to click that and show you what it does? - Yes, please. - Okay. So here we're in the living room. There's carpet, there's tile, kitchen off in the distance. Then hit the Hide Furniture button. And it got rid of everything. It got rid of a little too much. - Could you take that Matterport tour, goes full screen on us? Yeah, thank you. - So you see there was a sofa here, and this step went all the way over. And when it removed the sofa, it removed a good portion of the space. - Could you toggle again just so that we could see that? So depending on where you are in your Matterport tour, you may have a different view of how it Defurnished the space. - Right. And you look right here, there's the side of the cabinet. And when you Defurnish it, that cabinet wall disappears. So I was a little bummed. And I noticed on this one over here, it's now replaced the carpet with tile all the way throughout. So when they go back to the sofa, and they go back to the furniture, you'll see that step down and then the carpet. So it works, just not quite perfect. - And how did it work in the rest of the house? - It worked pretty good. Hid the rug, hid the sofa in here. I think it did really well on bedrooms, and I'll show you an example. So if there's a lot of furniture in a room, it's going to probably not work as well. Let's see here, let's go to the second floor. And this was the only room that was staged. So if we hide the furniture, that's pretty good. - And if you went back to the living room, I think we saw that some of the furniture outside, I don't want to say disappeared. Why don't you talk about what you saw there? - Yeah, so here's some patio furniture outside. And when we hid the furniture, it kind of got rid of it, but it added some weird artifacts. So if I come up to it, you'll see it did a little better. - Mm-hmm. Okay. Unless there was something else to show on Defurnish, I'm going to take you off of screen share, and then we'll chat about it. - Okay. - Sure. - So gee, perhaps in all fairness to Matterport, it seemed amazing that all the furniture disappeared. It was poof, it felt a little bit like magic. The Matterport Defurnish Tool is still in public beta, so it's not "officially available" unless you want to use it. It obviously had some rough edges for you. How important are those rough edges? That is this, I guess what I'm trying to wonder is, is this a feature that you will roll out to clients immediately? Is it something that you will use selectively until you feel that it's further along? What are your thoughts on that? - Sure. So I'm, I don't want to say a purist. I don't know. I prefer the highest quality possible. So I don't think I would offer it until it improved enough where at a minimum, it wasn't replacing entire floor sections with stuff that wasn't there, or removing walls, stuff that architecturally isn't in the house that could cause some concern for clients. So- - I know I looked at an example on the Matterport website, and it looked perfect. So maybe it's going to vary from model to model of whether it's going to be perfect or not perfect. But I think I'm hearing some hesitancy about rolling it out to clients today, or is this, it's going to depend on- - Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to wait. - Going to wait. - Okay. - I'm going to wait. - Have you asked any real estate agents what their thoughts are on decluttering yet? - No, because I didn't have anything that I would want to show them. I know that some agents request it. Some agents request virtual staging of furniture. It'd be nice for them to offer a one-stop-click virtual staging. - Yeah. And that's coming. Matterport announced Project Genesis on June 14th, 2023. That's more than a year ago. Today is Thursday, October 24th, 2024. I suspect that when Matterport announced Project Genesis, they thought they'd be launching all these features by now. And that hasn't happened. So, the virtual staging, the press a button and have it virtually staged in one of X number of different furniture styles is definitely something Matterport's offering. You can certainly use a third-party company today, a Matterport authorized company, to virtually stage a room, multiple rooms, multiple floors, an entire house. But I think obviously what we're looking for is something that is a 10X in savings. That you went from hiring someone to virtually staging one or more rooms to letting automation at the press of a button go poof. Furniture is gone, poof, furniture, new furniture has just arrived. - Yeah. - So perhaps if that new furniture enters the room, maybe it covered the carpet and you couldn't tell maybe some of the rough edges that you're looking at. - Yeah. I think this will be really helpful, maybe if they had a selective Defurnish where particularly with Matterport cameras and the mirrors, because a lot of people have asked about that. How do we hide the Matterport camera? I could see this being useful for that. - Would that work just like maybe the blur feature? You toggle on, enable, make Matterport Pro2/Pro3 Camera go away that's in the mirror in reflections. And it just does that automatically. And so you're using just one feature of the declutter for something super specific. Remove the camera from bathroom mirrors. - Well, and I would like to see it just as a default where it just does it because there's no sense and there's no need to see the camera. I mean, for fun sometimes but sometimes I'll get on Zillow and I'll pay attention to bathrooms to see what kind of camera people are using, particularly in my market, because we only offer scans with the Pro2 and the Pro3 and a lot of people are using the other cameras, which there's a quality difference. So anyway, yeah, I like to see where it comes from. - Totally get it. Are there any other wish list items for Matterport Defurnish Tool? - No, not for the Defurnish Tool. - I heard you say, make it better, make it work. That you can't roll it out in its present state. I'm not sure it's fair to say that it's a party trick, but it's something much more sophisticated than that. And it seems like it's super-close to actually working perhaps as one would hope with the expectations that it's better than good enough. - Yeah, it's just a lot of it comes down to the structural changes that it's making to the house. I'm looking at this one view right now and it hides the vent in the floor and it removed the whole bump-out nook in the kitchen and just replaced it with the wall. - Yeah, that's a no-no, right. Can't change the physical structure. - Stuff, carpet, flooring, whatever. That could be changed anyway, but not structural. - Yes, a no-no and you'll get real estate agents in trouble with their local MLS. When I looked at it, I was thinking, "Oh, I just want to declutter the garage. I didn't need to declutter the whole house." Did you have that as a wishlist item? - No, but that could be a wishlist item for... This particular house has some rooms staged and some not. And in this garage, there was a paint can on the floor or a few paint cans on the floor and it removed those. So it would have been maybe nice to be able to select which rooms or how you can use the blur brush in Matterport workshop mode just to kind of be able to paint over something and click a button and say, "Poof, Defurnish it." - Yeah, you and I did a show together on [www.WGAN.info/VSAi] and they have a brush and you indicate what it is you want or not want changed. So perhaps Matterport could... And maybe that's already part of the roadmap, but a tool to let you say, "I just want this sofa removed. Everything else is fine. Just remove this." Or, I can think of just in terms of our own house, you walk around our home and generally it's clutter-free except when you get to a certain room and then it's a mess because we just put everything in it. Perhaps if we were selling our house, we would say, "Well, could you just make everything go away in that one room?" - Yeah, yeah, exactly. - So garage, other room. Okay, before we move on, anything else on Matterport Defurnish Tool? - No. - So Matterport... Oh, and actually there was one other thing on the Defurnish Tool is that you have both a Matterport Classic account and a current Matterport Pricing account. When you looked at your Classic account, were any of these public betas available in Classic? - To me, just the Defurnish was available for me to use. - In your Classic? - I'm on the waitlist for the other ones. - Yes, but you're on the waitlist on the other ones in your current pricing plan, in your Classic pricing. - Yeah, on both of them, I'm on the waitlist. - Oh, so all these features show up in both Classic and not Classic? - Correct. - Yeah, okay. I'd be a little bit concerned about that, of telling our viewers that it's coming at some point for Classic. I think what I would encourage anyone that's using a Classic plan is to go into their Settings, look for Features and see what you can sign up for and can't sign up for. - Can I share my screen? - Sure. - No, hold on. I don't want to share my screen. I thought I was on the Classic account, I'm on the current account right now. - Yeah, so I've been told by a Matterport representative that the features launched in Matterport 2024 Fall Release were not available in Classic. So I have some concerns. If you tell me otherwise, because I know you got both kinds of accounts. Also, since we have many Matterport Service Providers that have been shooting for quite some time, any Matterport tour that was shot on or after April 14th, 2023 will work with the Defurnish Tool. If you still have the Matterport tour on your iPad prior to that date, you can re-upload it, reprocess it, and then it'll work. And if you don't have the model on your iPad or your Android tablet, you can use [Matterport Cloud Restore] feature - Yeah, yeah, the import. - [Matterport Cloud Restore] feature, but you can restore your model from the cloud back onto your tablet, then upload it, and then it'll Defurnish. Tom, were you going to say something? - You said anything after April? - April 14th, 2023 should work. If it doesn't work, it's possible that perhaps your model was shot before then, but didn't get up. If it's not working, try to re-upload it to the cloud and see if that fixes it. And if it doesn't, go back to the Matterport Cloud Restore, restore it to your tablet, then upload it again, reprocess it to Matterport. - Yeah, you're correct about that actually, because I opened a tour that I shot in August of 2023 and the Defurnish is available for that. - Okay, promise I'm not making this up. - Yeah, that's why you're on that side of the screen and I'm over here, you're the professional. - I don't know, you're on the left or the right. Matterport Import and Export Tags Tool that's listed as a Matterport public beta, but it doesn't seem to, you have not been activated on that, correct? - I have not. - And I think we've also seen people post in the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com], that they have not been activated as well. So it may be that you're just signing up for something that's coming soon and Matterport's creating a list of people who want to test the Matterport Import and Export Tags Tool. But what I'd like to do, Tom, is describe what I know about it and then get your thoughts on it. - Sure. - With the Matterport Import and Export Tags feature, which is supposed to be coming soon, you can export all the tags in a Matterport tour to a CSV file. You can also import your tags from a CSV file and you can copy tags from one Matterport space to another. As you think about your clients, probably on your commercial side, would this have been helpful on any of your past jobs? Would it be helpful getting new clients? - Well, the only way I think that I could use this is if I scanned a space, created a bunch of tags for it, and then for some reason had to go out and re-scan some rooms or maybe, yeah, I don't know, part of the space and re-upload it, I would lose all those tags upon re-upload. So then I could copy them from the previous one and import them. My question would be, I guess it would have to be the same model, right? Would it know where to place them? Or what happens if I downloaded tags? - I'm going to say it doesn't -- you may have a Matterport space that doesn't have any tags in it yet. And you're going to upload for the first time tags and presumably they're going to just show up in a cluster of some sort. And then you're going to start dragging them to the appropriate place. - Yeah, I want to see how it's going to work. We don't get a whole lot of tags. On some of the commercial projects we do, we did a restaurant and we did a car dealership and both of those have some tags. - Let me speak first here. Because I had a museum in Atlanta that I scanned and tagging was super-important. They wanted to tag lots of items. And what I would have preferred is to say, "Hey, just give it to me in a Google Sheet, an Excel Sheet." They don't need to know the CSV file, but I'll convert it to a CSV file. That project would have been so much easier and faster for everyone had I just said to the client. -- They are, presumably they're in a content management system for all [the items on exhibit]. So I'd like to think they already actually have a spreadsheet or some content management system at the museum where they have all the tag information. Here's the headline, here's the body text, etc. Down to being able to have images. And I would have loved to have gotten that file from the client. Instead, literally what I did is as I scanned the space, using my iPhone, I took pictures of each of the little cards in front of each object. I came back and then at that time, there was a limit to the character count. So I had to edit the [Text]. And then the museum director, the executive director, actually didn't like my edits. So I went down to the museum, sat side-by-side as we literally went through MatterTags making the changes within the model. So had that feature existed at that time for me, a model that was tag-heavy, it would have been super-easy and super-fast to be able to import the file. And then it would have been, in that particular case, tremendously helpful to be able to say, "Oh, let me take the tags and export them. "And for whatever reason, I do a refresh "on the space of some sort, but I want my tags." - Yeah, I actually did a museum, as you were talking about that, I remembered it. And they don't have any tags on their tour because I said, "Let me know when a good time is to come down." And I guess they get busy, I get busy. Because I was going to have to sit there and click each one. Now, my question to you is if you had this CSV file of let's say 400 different artifacts, different tags for artifacts, you're going to have to go meticulously through that tour and find out which, I guess you could match them up by the nameplate if you got close enough to the nameplate. But you're going to have to match up each one. So when you import them, is it just going to be a cluster of 200 stems all right in the middle? And you're going to have to [drag]: that would get annoying. - Yeah, well, personally, I think for those Matterport Service Providers or those clients where tags matter and they're doing a volume of tags, the ability to export/import is actually going to be huge. It may, in fact, enable Matterport Service Providers like you to develop new business where tagging is an essential element. So for us to do the museum, if we hadn't tagged everything, that wasn't of interest to them. Tagging made the difference. Now we're talking about volume importing/exporting of tags. - So I have an idea, feature requests. For this, take little QR codes about this size, maybe a little smaller, paper tags, and they can all be individually unique ones. And you put a QR code by one exhibit. And that QR code is tied to a line on the Excel spreadsheet. So when you upload, it replaces that QR code with a stem and with a tag. - Yes. That might just work by also just adding a blank Matterport tag for that matter. And they're numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then they get matched up somehow. - Something more automatic. - Matterport probably has to figure out is there an easier way than putting 200 tags in the middle of a space? For example, is there a way to do it as you've described it with AprilTags? Or QR codes, is it a way to... I'm going to lose my train of thought on that. Maybe by room, you go to an art museum, another good example, and the art museum has different galleries. And this is Gallery 1, Gallery 2, Gallery 3. Because this feature is not, as far as I know, I haven't heard anyone in the We Get Around Network Forum say, "I've been testing [Matterport Import/Export Tag" Tool]. What I've been hearing is, "Hey, I've signed up for a number of betas and anybody got access because I don't." - Yeah, yeah. - Okay, all right. We'll move on. Matterport Field Tags Tool. This is another Matterport 2024 Fall Release Announcement that is available on beta. And though you've signed up for beta, again, I don't think anyone has been invited to [use it via beta request] on this yet. But let me describe how Matterport describes this and then see how that resonates with you as a Matterport Service Provider. So, imagine that a client says, "Hey, I need a Matterport scan of this space. It's my Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing [MEP] room. And every place there is a faceplate that says, "this is chiller one, chiller two, chiller three, HVAC unit one, anywhere there's a faceplate, take a photo of it." - Yeah. - Now, what you'll be able to do is as opposed to going back to your office and taking those iPhone shot images and somehow annotating the Matterport space with that, you'll be able to do that in the field while you're scanning. Take the photo, annotate the space. Take the photo, annotate the space. Is that ability to do Matterport field tags of help? - Definitely. So, part of my business is, I do a lot of site surveys for various companies. And actually tomorrow I have one, a new construction build of a restaurant. It's a fast food chain. And I'm going to be scanning the entire inside, the entire outside. And then they want 360s on the roof. And aside from that, they want measurements of width and length, height of some of the walls. And they also want pictures of the Roof Top Units, the RTUs and the tags, what brand it is, what model number, serial number, that sort of thing. And so they want me to just use my cell phone and take a picture of each of the labels and a few further back shots to show the actual unit and then upload that to a Dropbox account. And so if I had this available tomorrow, I would simply take a picture of it with the iPad and attach it right to, I'm assuming it's going to be like placing the 360. You can kind of move it around and place it on the mini-map where you want it. So maybe you can do the same with the tags. But yeah, it would have been helpful tomorrow. - Do you think you could charge more for annotating the space as opposed to putting everything in a Dropbox? - I don't know that I would charge more for it. I think if anything, it would help make my job easier. And I guess maybe there could be some benefit to charging more in the sense of, it's going to make the customer or the client, the end user, their job a little easier because they're going to know right where that was taken. - Yeah, I mean, it seems like it'd be way easier to tag in the field than try to match up once you get back to the office or for that matter for your client to go, "oh, okay, here's the serial number for the Roof Top Unit." Well, we got three Roof Top Units, which one was it? And then trying to figure that out. - And it would be a couple of feature requests. Maybe once you do a 3D scan or a 360, you're going to know where that is generally, right? The 3D, you're definitely going to know because it's using LiDAR. The 360, you're going to be able to kind of manually drop it. But then you can hit a button that says, now add a tag to it. So you're not having to then create the tag and re-drop it. It's just automatically going to place it where that 3D scan was taken or where that 360 was taken. - Do you think it would do it with the metadata from the phone? - Well, I use my iPad to scan and will it? I don't know. You know, the accuracy of the 360s where they place them is not great. So I think on every 360 I've ever taken with the Matterport Pro3 Camera or with the Pro2, I still have to move it a lot to get it into the right place. - Yeah. - Okay, I'd like to see that improved. - Yeah. - Kind of a random feature request, but. - Yeah, I suspect that the Matterport Field Tags Tool will be tremendously helpful in construction, facilities management. You've described some kind of site plan for the restaurant that you're shooting. Anything where there's documentation of things that are hard to read and somebody -- since We Get Around Network gets requests from companies that we match up with Matterport Service Providers, that kind of request comes up quite a bit. It's not just scanning a space. It's, "oh, we also need them to either use our existing app to do this documentation or we need to use their smartphone to do this annotation that you're describing and put it in a Dropbox. - Yeah, we do it every week with banks, with restaurants, with cell phone stores, with shipping stores, warehouses. Even on the residential side, agents like to point out highlights of the home. So maybe the refrigerator in the kitchen is a year old. You could put the refrigerator make/model, you know, when it was purchased on the tag. So if somebody's looking at that virtual tour and they go in the kitchen, they'll say, "Okay, this is included." And it's a fairly recent one or they can put the information about the water heater when that was replaced or how old the roof is. There's all kinds of uses that even in the residential side that it could be good for. - Okay, awesome. Matterport AI Property Descriptions Tool. Could you give us a demo of that? - I can. Just give me one second here. All right, so here we have this tour that we tend to reference a lot on the show. I click on the details and I have a name. I don't have a description or a summary, but this is now here where we can generate one. So I'll click this generate button and inspect the details. There's some dropdowns here. - So essentially Matterport is using spatial data and object recognition to understand the space and then you have a paragraph or three describing it. - Yeah. - How about just read us that first paragraph, please. - "Step into a world of refined elegance and contemporary comfort. In this exquisite Vacaville residence, the thoughtfully designed two-story home boasts 1,880 square feet of luxurious living space, offering the perfect blend of style and functionality for the discerning homeowner." - Yeah, it's amazing. Okay, so you have tone and length. What are the other options there? - So we have, this is aspirational, there's informative and then there's short, about 500 characters, medium, 1,000 and long, 1,500. So let's just see what informative looks like. - Okay. Is there an opportunity for you to, would you do this just to give this information to your client at no cost? Is this an add-on to write descriptions? - For a while we were offering a copyright add-on for orders where I would pay somebody to look at the photos of the house and create a description. And agents were doing that too. They were paying somebody. - Yeah, I hope you're not in that business anymore. I want to take it off screen share, but before I do, let's just, if you could read that first paragraph in an informative tone that has a medium length of 1,000 characters. - Sure, "this meticulously designed residence at 278 Cheyenne Drive in Vacaville offers 1,880 square feet of living space across two floors. The home boasts three bedrooms, including a generous 310 square foot primary suite and four bathrooms for ultimate convenience. The layout incorporates three living room areas, providing ample space for relaxation and entertainment." Now actually this is wrong because there's two and a half bathrooms in this house. - Ah, it's hallucinating. Okay, so have it, if you can get it to write 99% of the copy, but before you close that, what's the difference between regenerate and accept? - Regenerate, we'll rewrite this. Accept, we'll place it on the description. - Ah, can we do that? Yeah, perfect. Okay, so that went into your basic info. Could I take you off the screen share? - Yeah, did you want to do the summary or? - Oh yes, that'd be great. - Okay, let's do that and see if it differs. So it's informative and aspirational. Summary says, "Spacious three bedroom, four bath home in Vacaville with 1880 square feet over two floors, features a 310 square foot primary bedroom, multiple living areas and a garage. Bright interiors and a landscape yard offer modern comfort." So I think it's just more of a condensed version of the description. Yeah. - Okay, you're going to hit save in the bottom right or no? - No. - Okay. All right, so I'm going to take you off of screen share. I don't know about you, but I just find AI so amazing and the fact that it can take the entire property and look, the AI can look at all this spatial data. It knew the square footage. Was the square footage someplace else that it grabbed that or did it literally go calculate? - I think it was probably from the property report. - On a good day, it knows how many bedrooms, bathrooms there are. It can be factual. It can be aspirational. I'm kind of blown away by this feature. How about you? - Yeah, and I'm trying to figure out, oh, it counted. The reason it said four bathrooms is because the sink was in one room and then separate from the sink was a toilet and a shower. So it counted that as two bathrooms. - Oh, okay. So you have to provide some fact-checking just to make sure. But that's like in a previous product or service that you offered, you actually charged for that. Yeah, would you like property descriptions? That's X dollars as an add-on. - Yeah, so I think we were charging $150 for that. And then agents would pay somebody to physically go out to the property and they'd be out there with a notepad and a pen and they're writing down, oh, look at the nice drapes and whatever. - Okay. - I'm not that creative. So I would hire somebody. - Are you going to charge for using this feature? Is this an add-on? - It could be. It could be an add-on. - Why not? - Well, we don't get a lot of orders for residential that are just Matterport only. - Okay. - So if I got Matterport with a regular photography package or a property website package, then I would probably use [the Matterport] AI description and put it on my property website. - There are a number of third-party vendors that you can actually pay them to write copy. - Yeah. - Glad we're not in that business, but it seems like now AI will do it for you unless the client has access to a Matterport account, they may never know that this took you 10 seconds, this took you 30 seconds to generate that copy. And yet if they went to do it themselves, if they took pen to paper and started to write, that could take them a half hour, an hour. So you could literally say, "Hey, I can save you an hour." How about doing this? Test and learn with some of your clients, see if you could actually make some money as an add-on on those features. - Yeah, I'll keep you posted. I'm no Stephen King and I know a lot of agents get really bogged down with creativity. Imagine if you have 20 listings a year, how hard is it to come up with original descriptions for each one? I have a problem with that. So this would be helpful for me. - Yeah. - Yeah. - You're speaking as if you were a real estate agent, but, as a Matterport Service Provider, you may actually be solving a real problem for some of your clients that hate to write property descriptions. - Yeah, yep. - So I would be curious if you can make some money as an add-on on that particular feature with residential listings. - And if it doesn't work out, I'll call you as backup. - Matterport Property Intelligence Measurement 2.0 Tool. If you could go ahead and share your screen, show us how Matterport Measurement 2.0 Tool is kind of new and improved. - Sure. - And I want to say you were on a previous WGAN-TV Live at 5 show where you actually demonstrated all the features of Property Intelligence. [www.WGAN.info/TomOnWGAN] Matterport Property Intelligence if you wanted a deeper dive. Today, we're just going to show you something new with the Matterport Measurement 2.0 Tool. - Yeah, so here's the ruler down on the bottom left. And when you click that, it's going to give you the measurements automatically. So from here to here it is four foot one. This is eight foot six for the ceiling height, 21.8 for the overall length. You come into this room, you have measurements. - Does this blow you away versus how it was being done where you would literally just click on that + button and start doing measurements? I mean, this is the way it used to work, what you're showing right now. - So I've used this a lot, actually more on the industrial side for getting clear height and clear span measurements of warehouses. A property manager wants to know how big a garage roll-up door is or how far between columns. And trying to get the mouse right in the corner sometimes is a little challenging. And then you draw up to where you think it is. And sometimes it would shift a little bit. So I actually like the fact that it does most of them for me. And then if I ever have some specific ones, like maybe from here to here, I can do that. - So you still have the measurement tool. It's just now you have Matterport Measurement 2.0 and I guess I would describe that as measurement on Steroids. But this really is, yeah, in fact, if you don't mind, I'm going to take you off of screen. Go ahead. - Okay. - Yeah. - What I'm trying to say is the difference between a 360 tour and a Matterport Digital Twin, we've now gone from a 360 tour that's only photography to a Matterport Digital Twin that has the benefit of the spatial data. And now we're starting to see how Matterport is able to use all that data to do things like, "oh, let's remove the furniture." "Let's automatically generate the key measurements." I mean, we know the measurements the real estate agent wants versus what the measurements of every room, in part because they're going to end up using that in marketing. And then you see Matterport automate things with MLS platforms. So these measurements automatically populate. So if you used to have to type in here, living room, here's the measurement, it's now happening automatically on some MLS platforms powered by platforms that are in that space. - And just on that topic, I think it'd be nice to see some levels of accuracy between the Matterport Pro2 Camera and the Pro3, as far as how accurate these measurements are. There's other providers that are categorizing their tours as being ANSI Z765-2021 certified, which is recognized by Fannie Mae, which means that the square footage that they're reporting is good for public record, good for appraisals, that sort of thing. And iGUIDE hasn't, I'm sorry, Matterport hasn't adopted that yet, but it would be nice for them to recognize that or at least show some levels of accuracy of these measurements. - Well, I know you mentioned iGUIDE in passing. We actually [www.WGAN.info/iGUIDEonWGAN] talking about all the standards that they support. It is a bit surprising Matterport has not announced compliance with some of the standards. So it would be interesting to actually know how Matterport Pro2 Camera, Matterport Pro3 Camera, Ricoh THETA Z1, Insta360 X4, and how all these cameras compare statistically. That would be interesting. Maybe Matterport will do their own internal study and then release that. And then maybe they'll actually be compliant with some of the cameras, maybe Pro2, maybe Pro3 actually could meet the standards. That would be nice. So part of your question I think is, oh, we just saw these automatic calculations on the rooms. Sounds like you may be taking out a laser measurer on your next house scan and taking some measurements and comparing them to what Matterport Measurement 2.0 actually does to compare and see what the deviation is, if any. - And the accurate, well, the measurements are, they're helpful for residential as far as being able to tell if a bed will fit on a wall or a sofa will fit in a room. But on the commercial side, I think it's BOMA. I'm still kind of getting into all that, but there's a different set of standards for commercial real estate spaces and how they're measured. And so it'd be nice, maybe you can select when you're uploading, is this a residential or a commercial space? And then it would adjust the measurement settings for those spaces based on what kind of space it is. - Yeah, I went ahead and [www.WGAN.info/iGUIDEonWGAN]. And if you're particularly interested in ANSI standards, other related standards, we did a show. You can Google it, and it will be easy to find. iGUIDE Refresh New 3D Tour Display and iGUIDE ANSI Floor Plans So it's a deep dive into these standards and iGUIDE is compatible with these standards, which are, I want to say adopted wide in Canada and in some US states presently. I guess it's like anything else, Tom, if you put a disclaimer on the measurements to say, "Hey, trust but verify. Measurements may be off" might be sufficient for planning purposes on putting a sofa someplace. But if you're down to an inch or two that really matters, you probably want to go measure yourself before you go buy that sofa and find out that it's two inches longer than the distance between the walls. - Yeah. - Yeah, okay. Anything else on Matterport Measurement 2.0? - No. - Okay. Matterport Automatic Bill Back for Enterprise. This feature we're not really demonstrating, we're not going to talk a lot about, but I think if you're a Matterport Service Provider, while I know this could make your eyes glaze over, it's important to know that if you're talking to an enterprise client, they may want to be able to easily bill back different departments or silos within their own company. And there is a way to do that with a Matterport feature for enterprise. And I know Tom reminded me that somehow, some way I skipped over Matterport Merge Spaces Tools. - As my favorite UFC announcer, Bruce Buffer would say, the moment we've all been waiting for. - Yeah, the moment we've all been waiting for. Matterport Merge Spaces Tool. Again, this is something you signed up for a beta. It's not -- I don't think it's like you're not eligible. It's kind of like, I don't think, again, I don't think anybody in the We Get Around Network Forum has reported that they've been able to activate the beta. So again, we'll talk about what that is. I'll describe what it does and then ask you some questions about it. So the example would be maybe if you're taking a Matterport tour of a hotel and the client comes back a year later and says, we did a refresh on one of those floors. Could you just insert our new rooms into the tour? Previously, you really couldn't do that without going back to Matterport and having a bespoke conversation and maybe getting charged a fee for them to do some kind of "surgery" on your Matterport tour. Now with, or what I should say is once Matterport Merge Models Tool comes out, you'd be able to say, oh, that floor changed? Okay, I can insert that into my tour. A room changed? I can insert that into my tour. I mean, I know I had that happen. We scanned a house and after the scan was done, the agent talking to the homeowner said, you gotta fix that bedroom. It's not going to sell. And so they spent some money on construction. They rebuilt the bedroom and we had to come back out and scan the bedroom. And that was a little bit of magic behind the scenes of deleting some scans and then replacing them. - Yeah, they should call this the Dee Johnson feature. - Yes, in honor of a former Matterport employee. So this features, one of the questions that comes up in the We Get Around Network Forum all the time is I've been asked to scan a commercial office space. They've, it's new construction. They've only built out three of the 10 floors. That's all they want. Is there any way for me to put it into one Matterport model? And there's been some smoke and mirrors about how you might accomplish that with using deep links or using third-party layers that could display multiple tours. But now you literally could say, oh, take those three floors and merge them into one Matterport tour and just stack the three floors on top of each other. So that would be an example. - Yeah, there's a few different cases I could think of that I've come across in real life. You mentioned redoing a room and having to go back and do it. I actually had to go back to a property today and rescan a room because we had previously scanned a space with the Matterport Pro2 and there was some sunlight coming in the window and it created black spots on the tour. So I went back with my Pro3, but when I went there, some things in the room had changed. So I just took the original tour that I had and re-scanned just that one room with the Pro3 and then I just deleted the old Matterport Pro2 scans and that was fine. More importantly, think about a large hotel. We do a lot of hospitality. And so you have maybe a 10-story hotel and every floor has different event spaces and it's all connected by an elevator shaft or by a stairwell or whatever. Sometimes they're nice stairwells, sometimes they're not. So I'm like, let's get in and get out. And I have several photographers who work for me. So I could bring three guys and I could say, "okay, you do this floor, I'm going to do this floor." And the third guy does the bottom floor. We're all going to scan right to the stairwell, the common stairwell and have enough of that overlapping stairwell in place where we can then go back to the office and I can merge all three by having that common overlap of the stairwell in place. - You see this as a tool that you will use as soon as it is commercially available. - Yeah, if it merges it as if I was there doing it all in one tour, yeah, I would definitely use it. - Yeah, so you could get, I mean, there are going to be clients that say, hey, we're a 24/7 place or we're an 18/7, whatever it is. We're busy. We don't have time to shut down our business for you. And we don't want our people in your scans, another story. - I come across it every week. Every week, we can block out an hour. There was a restaurant at the hotel that literally they could only shut down for 45 minutes. And it took me three days to scan it because I could only do 45 minute chunks. - Yes, so another use case where you could put three of your team members on the job, go into that 45 minute window and get the job done. That might be the difference between getting the business and not getting the business. - Yeah. - I was thinking of another use case, Tom, just as you were speaking and you inspired the use cases. Say we were talking about a banquet facility where they may have three, five, 10 different ways that they lay out the space. They may have round tables, square tables, blah, blah, blah. You could shoot the same exact space configured 10 different ways and go stack them in one Matterport tour so you could travel. I suppose in a metaphor, you're going to different floors. It's the same space. It's just configured differently. - Yeah, and I came across that last week. We did a resort that had meeting spaces and these large meeting space rooms. They have air walls, which are temporary walls that they can slide out and make smaller conference rooms. And so when we first did the tour, all the air walls were closed. And so there were like four individual meeting rooms and they wanted us to come out and re-scan with all the air walls open. Well, Matterport has a views feature where you can hide scans and show scans, but we weren't able to use the views feature to show the same tour with two different views, meaning one with air walls closed, one with it open. - Yeah, so that just would have solved that, yeah. - Well, I don't know if Merge would have solved it because to me Merge is adding this space and adding this space as one. If you have the same space, how do you merge it without? - Just think of it as a different floor. It's unexpected ... Innovation occurs at the intersection of something that was designed for one use case and somebody comes up with an idea that can be applied in a completely different way. And I'm going to suggest you could take the banquet space and just stack the same space on top of each other. And so what if you're traveling from floor to floor to floor, seeing the exact same space, just configured differently? - A hotel would be a great example where they have their meeting spaces configured, audience style, round table style, whatever. - Wedding style, yeah, yeah. And then in the construction industry, you think about scanning when plumbing and electrical are in before Sheetrock goes up and then re-scanning after Sheetrock is up. And so now you have a kind of X-ray version of what's beneath the Sheetrock. And so however you do it, whether it's views or merge, being able to combine that into one tour so you can say, okay, let me see through the walls to see where all the plumbing is or let me see. - Yeah, if you have that need, I would actually send you to go see SIMLAB STAGES Stages powered by Matterport. It's an overlay on the top of Matterport and it's a timeline feature that lets you go back in time. So literally in the example I think you're describing, Tom, if you had the buildings finished and there's a leak and before you go knock all the walls down trying to find where the Mechanical, Electrical, the Plumbing are, you just literally move your slider going back in time of the Matterport tours that you've taken over time in order to go find, oh, let me see what's behind that wall. Anyway, I would actually send you to SIMLAB STAGES for that feature. I got one more Matterport 2024 Fall Release item: Matterport Advanced User Controls: Roles and Permissions for Enterprise. So often in a large company, you want to say, well, I want to invite people to my account, but I don't want them to see anything associated with money. I want them to be able to edit the tour, but I don't want them to be able to buy any of the add-ons. So there's lots of roles and permissions for enterprise. It's not something we're going to demo today, but really for a Matterport Service Provider, perhaps it's talking to a larger client, potential client, I think it's probably helpful to know that a Matterport enterprise account has these kinds of features for advanced controls at a granular level describing roles and permissions. That said, Matterport has 25 different iterations of that. And if it's really super-important to have granular controls over what people can do and see on the back end, again, I would send people to SIMLAB , both their SIMLAB STAGES product for AEC construction, project management, construction management, and to SIMLAB SIM-ON for facilities management, IoT, IoT controls, because their roles and permissions is actually super-robust at a granular level. And you can do practically anything that you could possibly think of, of what you want to grant permissions. We've covered a lot of ground. Was there any last thing you wanted to say before we say bye? - Yeah, I just checked my Classic account and I don't have a Defurnish option to be made available. It just shows Merge Space, Field Tags, and Import and Export Tags for the Classic account. - Maybe you could just show your screen. Do you want to show your screen on the Beta? Not on the Classic, but on the new one where you signed up for all the Betas? - Sure, yeah. - Yeah, so if you're a Matterport, you have a Matterport account, you go to Settings, look for Features, and then there's that, it says Beta, and then you just enable that you want to apply for the Beta, and then you'll get some invite. - Yeah, and then on the Matterport Classic one, this is all here except for Defurnish. - Okay, cool. Tom, thanks for being on the show. - Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. - We've been visiting with Tom Sparks, Founder and CEO of Scan Your Space, a division of Sparks Media Group. You can check out Tom's websites at www.ScanYourSpace.com, www.SparksMediaGroup.com. Tom also has an awesome YouTube channel, @SparksMediaGroup. And Tom, you're about to release a video on which feature, Matterport Defurnish Tool? - Yeah, tomorrow morning, I'll drop how to do the Defurnish process. - So if you want to see a little bit deeper dive in the Matterport Defurnish Tool, check out Tom's YouTube channel: @SparksMediaGroup A lot of great content there. For Tom, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum, and you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
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WGAN-TV Podcast: Matterport 2024 Fall Release20398