WGAN-TV eBook: Daniel Brown-My Journey as a Matterport Service Provider

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	Text Me 5 Minutes Before WGAN-TV is Live \| WGAN-TV \| Daniel Brown with Meidansha: My Journey as a Matterport Service Provider \| Guest: Meidansha Inc. President Daniel Brown \| Thursday, 7 November 2024 \| Episode: 232 www.Meidansha-co.com Transcript (above) - Are you a real estate photographer thinking about adding Matterport? - Are you in a completely unrelated career and thinking about making the leap? - How did an independent financial advisor transition to offering Matterport and related services? Stay tuned. Hi, all. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com Today is Thursday, November 7th, 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: My Journey as a Matterport Service Provider: Daniel Brown with Meidansha Our guest today is Osaka, Japan-based- Daniel Brown with [www.Meidansha-Co.com] Daniel, thank you for being on the show today. - Good morning, - for being on the show today. - Oh, that's right. It's afternoon there, yeah. - Daniel, how about telling us about the services that you offer today? - So Meidansha is the provider of cutting edge 3D spatial imaging solutions in Japan. Meidansha's concept is to enrich people's lives through next generation spatial imaging. We offer 3D virtual tours, drone services, 360 degree virtual tours, point cloud capture services, product scanning, and some software solutions. The 3D virtual tours is probably what's talked about most on the We Get Around Network, we create immersive and interactive digital twins of properties perfect for architecture, construction, and hospitality. We use the Matterport Pro2 Camera. We also enhance that with the Leica BLK360 G1 for large scale projects. And we usually use Matterport for our 3D virtual tours. However, lately I'm considering trying some other tools because there's a potential market for showcasing Japanese real estate to Chinese clients who at the moment cannot access Matterport. - Well, let's go back to your services for a moment, Daniel. - Cool, yeah. - I want to say I heard 3D, 360, digital twins virtual tours. I think I heard a lot of different terms. So could you just kind of expand on what does that mean as opposed to I offer Matterport? - Okay, so I just mentioned, I just explained now what we do with Matterport, but if I was to take this last year and the work that we've been doing, Matterport has probably been about a third of what we've been doing. We've had kind of requests to do unusual things that just are not possible with Matterport at the moment. So to give you an example, we offer drone services, but in particular we offer it with 360 panoramas and also we use drone photography to create 3D of landscapes and roofs as well. These sorts of things can be done with Matterport in some ways, but they're very difficult to do that way. So we've been using things like RealityCapture and 3DVista to assist those things. Also, we make high resolution 360 degree panoramas. In particular a job this year we were requested to make an example of a 360 panorama before and after a renovation. So it could have been done with Matterport with the kind of embedding, but the client wanted to show it on a big screen for presentations. So what we did is we created high resolution panoramas in 20K using a mirrorless camera. And we did, as I said before, before and after and used 3DVista, so you could compare before and after the renovation. Point cloud capture services I also mentioned. We use Matterport to generate the point cloud because it's the cheapest solution as opposed to using [Leica Cyclone REGISTER 360 Plus], which is quite expensive. We use Matterport combined with the Leica for that, for just paying for the E57 or the XYZ file. Through the Matterport MatterPak, you can- - That's the Leica BLK360 G1: first generation. - That's correct. That's the one. - And so you're using that in conjunction with the Matterport platform? - That's right. When we do it to generate point clouds, the client doesn't usually need the walkthrough 3D digital twin tour or whatever you want to call it. They just need the point cloud. We've been using that for generating, for instance, the exterior of a building and we then -- in the last year we've had a case where we sell that to an artist, a 3D artist who uses it to create a world in the Metaverse. So yeah, these kinds of uses sort of have been popping up from time to time recently. And because we already had the technology from making 3D virtual tours, it's been a good secondary kind of income source. Also on point cloud, have you heard of Cupix? - Yes. [WGAN.info/CUPIXonWGAN] Cupix is very fast and it can be done with regular 360 cameras like the Insta360 series of cameras. These generate a very kind of low grade point cloud, but the speed is an important element there. So in the last year we've had clients who wanted a scan of the inside of a furnace for instance, but the furnace can only be entered for 10 or 15 minutes at a time. So yeah, the Cupix is the ideal solution there because just waving the camera around or strapping it to a drone is enough to get you a full scan of the furnace in about 10 or 15 minutes. So yeah, these sort of solutions have been popping up in the last 12 months, which is sort of whereas the last few years we've been really concentrating on Matterport 3D tours in general. We're starting to get a situation where we get these sorts of secondary services making more and more of our sales in general. And finally we offer some software solutions. For instance, we heard about RSET and MPEmbed through the We Get Around Network and we've been in talks with these companies and we are the support desk provider for Japan for these two companies. - Isn't that cool? - Yeah. - So you're providing it in Japanese or just the advantage of the time difference being on the other side of the planet than RSET an MPEmbed? - Japanese because, well, some of the clients could possibly provide someone to speak in English, but there would always be the risk of something lost in communication, if you know what I mean? So having someone who speaks Japanese in Japan is a time benefit, a time zone benefit. And also the language benefits there too, I think. - Did I hear photos as part of your services? - Yes, sometimes as an extra we provide regular photographs for our clients. For instance, if I was to talk about categories of clients, we do a lot of work for home building companies. The home building companies were in a situation where they were employing a regular cameraman to do photos of the house as well as asking me to do the 3D of the inside. So that was like a secondary cost. So I said we could throw in some pictures of the exterior of the buildings because that's something that Matterport doesn't provide on its own. So yeah, we use a DSLR or a mirrorless camera to provide the exterior photos. And the interior photos are mostly provided from the Matterport tour itself. - And the categories of clients that you're providing these various digital marketing services to are? - Yeah, in terms of the jobs we've done this year outside of the building companies, we've also done a lot of work for the public sector, city tourism boards and also in the past some national government projects. So in particular these city tourism boards, we've been doing work for MICE, which is: Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions that are called sort of for large group-orientated tourism. So for instance, recently, and I'd like to introduce it later, we did a big project for a convention center in Kobe, which is a city close to where I am in Osaka. Also for, in the public sector, we have been documenting for marketing purposes sort of reconstruction of ancient buildings, that sort of thing. A big castle or a temple or something like that. It's not used so much for the building administration, but more for advertising the process to taxpayers, I guess is the best way to put it. Outside of the public sector and the home building companies, we've done a lot of work this year for hospitality. In particular, mainly through agencies we've been getting requests to photograph in 360 high resolution and also in 3D for big hotels, Four Seasons and Hyatt, et cetera. But this sort of work is done through agencies and often foreign agencies outside of Japan. Yeah, also through advertising agencies. As in local agencies, we often get requests to document display booths that are used in exhibitions. When the Olympics was on, in 2021, here in Japan, there was a lot of demand to photograph pavilions that sort of popped up all over Tokyo, especially because people weren't actually able to visit them at the time because of the COVID restrictions. So we did a lot of work documenting pavilions for an oil company in Japan called ENEOS Corporation and also a sports shoe maker called ASICS Corporation and another one for a television station called WOWOW. And finally I mentioned the industrial clients earlier when I said that we did the inside of furnaces, so on behalf of a client that does the maintenance for these plants, we've been getting these very, very fast-paced jobs, as I mentioned before, scanning done in 15 minutes. And then afterwards taking back the data and creating point clouds. And I also forgot to mention, but we send those point clouds to a partner that we met for your network, the We Get Around Network. The partner is in Vietnam: Baezeni. [www.Baezeni.com] is the name of the company. So they put together for us a simple BIM based on the simple point cloud that we sent them. And that's been a pretty regular business for us these last 12 months. So we're very pleased that we met this partner for your Network and also this client as well. - Forgive me, the category for that client is industrial? - I say industrial clients. It's kind of a niche market, but they do maintenance on plants and that's what they do, not chemical, but well, all round plants. Yeah, industrial plants. - And they're looking for a BIM model of their client's facility? - That's correct, yes. - How would they use a BIM model of a client's facility? Is that for training purposes? - I think mainly they use it just as an add-on to justify their services and the costs, et cetera. Because many of the plants that we are scanning don't actually have BIM to start with. They only have regular DWG two dimensional diagrams of the buildings. So what we usually do is we receive these diagrams from them, so we have a base to start with. And then we provide the point cloud on top of that. So what happens is we can get an idea of what the inside of the furnace looks like now as opposed to the way it was designed. The inside of the furnace, no one, I don't think many of our viewers have actually seen the inside of a furnace before, but it's caked several inches thick with soot, with ash, that sort of thing. It's quite hazardous to be in there, so you can only spend 10 or 15 minutes there at a time. But yeah, we go in there with a drone, with an Insta360 camera strapped to it and just fly it straight up the furnace and then straight back down again. And that provides us with a sort of a cylindrical point cloud of the inside. And we can, from there, measure how narrow the inside is. And from there we can understand just how much soot, how much ash is caked on the sides of the building. And also the primary purpose, from what I understand, is to see if any of the bricks that support the furnace in the inside are coming loose. So yeah, we've been doing this at a number of locations in Japan these last 12 months. - So that would be as for maintenance where your BIM model, no, is? - I think the BIM is not essential for getting an idea of what the inside looks like now. That is the point cloud. - The point cloud. So the point cloud is helping your client understand, "oh, there's about 10 inches worth of soot that needs to come off" - Yes, yeah. - Because they can calculate what the furnace was new versus well, the wall is now 10 inches thicker than it was. - Yeah. - Yeah. Do you actually go into the furnace? No, no, you send your drone in there with the 360 camera strapped to? - Yeah, you actually have to go in there because the furnace's walls are very thick, so you can't control the drone from the outside. And we've had an issue in some of the furnaces where the walls actually block the GPS sensors, so the drone itself can't fly straight inside the furnace. So we've sort of come up with some ingenious kinds of ways of doing things like for instance, lowering the Insta360 camera on a rope from the top of the furnace down and other times putting it on a three or four meter pole and then slowly raising it up, et cetera. Yeah, there's been a few on the site sort of problem solving things that we've had to do, but the basic technology in the way we take things back and process the data afterwards doesn't change. - So how do you create that point cloud? It's going from the 360, which platform are you using? - Yeah, I mentioned Cupix, which as I understand is incorporated in San Jose in the US but actually is run from Korea. The company has some really interesting solutions in terms of generating 3D, like OBJ files, et cetera. So it's very low cost just to produce these 3D scans, I guess. But it's not very useful as a real estate tour or something like that because the 3D is pretty rough, like it is with Matterport, but the photograph quality is not as good as the Matterport tours. And also the link between locations where the photographs are is kind of, how do we say, difficult to control the photographs. - Well, I think what I'm hearing, you're not using Cupix for marketing purposes, you're using it- - Oh, of course not, no, no. - Specifically for the cloud that it can be created. I presume you're using CupixWorks? - That's correct, yes. - Yeah, which is written about a lot in the, [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com], we've done a number of WGAN-TV Podcasts with the Cupix team. - Oh, really? [WGAN.info/CUPIXonWGAN] I must have missed that one, sorry. - Well, I think we've done something like 200 and I think today's episode is number 232, so I could imagine you haven't watched all 232 hours of the WGAN-TV Podcast. :-) - Now that you mention it, I do recall something. I do recall something. - Yeah, yeah. - And I do remember speaking to a person in the US about it. Yeah. - Yeah. In terms of other client categories, even if you would, I know you've been in business five years and we'll go back to the beginning of time, but when you think about clients over the last five years in terms of categories, let's see if I can just break it down, go a little bit slower in fact. You talked about tourism, what would be the application for your tourism clients? - So our tourism clients, if I was to go back five years, that's where we started. But initially, because we were just starting out and we didn't have the connections that we do have now. It was like Airbnb pensions, that sort of thing. And generally those Airbnb pensions were renovated houses made by building companies looking for side projects. At the time, we couldn't put Matterport on an Airbnb site. I think that's changed recently. - Yes, today you can do it on a VRBO and- - Ah, yeah. - It's going to escape me - Yeah. - But when we put captions on the show [VRBO, HomeAway, Redfin, Realtor.com, Homes.com and Google Street View.] - Please do, I'd like to know. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So what we started there with tourism, but Corona or COVID really knocked out all of those industries. And in a way that sort of led to home building companies, because from there, these sorts of pensions were all on the market for sale. So that was the first time we'd really done anything for real estate. - But in fact, let's go back to the beginning, and so we'll pick it up there. - Sure. - How did Matterport first show up on your radar? - It's an interesting story. So when we purchased our Matterport Pro2 Camera, although the company is incorporated in 2019, the camera was bought in 2017. So it's our foundational investment to offer a high-quality 3D virtual tour service. And the adoption was driven by my late business partner. Incidentally, his name is also Daniel, as in his name was Danny. We just call him Danny to make it easier. Yeah, so Danny was from the US and he'd heard about Matterport through people he was associated with here in Japan, other American people. And he came to me one day in 2017 saying he was going to start a new business. And so I watched from a distance for a couple of years. And in 2019, I recommended a client to him. It was a client that I knew through another business that I was in. - But what were you doing at the time when your friend Danny said, "Hey, I'm going to start this business around Matterport. I'm going to buy a Matterport Pro2 Camera." What were you doing at the time? - I was what we call in Japan an Independent Financial Advisor; mainly I dealt in equity sales, selling stocks on the market and calling people to buy and sell. So-called retail, retail stock broking. Yeah, so I was independent. - You did that for a number of years because before you were independent, you were providing those services for a company in Japan? - That's correct. So for five and a half years I was salaried working for a company. And then after that I went independent for about three or four years afterwards. And there was sort of a gray time in between when I was sort of half doing what I am now and half doing that work. So that halftime that I'm talking about was in 2019. So at the time, in general, this sort of business of calling people to buy and trade stocks was sort of a declining market in Japan. The stock market itself is going up, but the people with both the time and the money to pick up the phone and talk about stocks and then make trades, it's sort of been declining for years. - It sounds like you were looking for something else at the time. - Exactly. - And here comes your friend Danny. And what did you initially think when he showed you a Matterport tour? - To be honest, I was impressed with the tour, but more -- what I was concerned about was that Danny had been a university teacher for five, 10 years, so he'd never been in this position where he'd sold something, if you know what I mean? He was already selling some things with some success, but he wanted my help to find more clients. So one of my clients was the general manager of a facility, which is very old. It's like a 100-year-old restaurant in Osaka. So the group that owns the company, the group that owns the restaurant is a hotel chain. So I introduced him to that place and we got the deal to do this as a 100-year-old restaurant, which is like a nationally registered cultural asset or something like that. And yeah, we scanned the building right before it was used in the Summit, what do we call it? The [June 2019 G20 Summit in Osaka] So the wives of the presidents and prime ministers, and so on met there for their Summit. At any rate, it was used just beforehand to show what kind of building it would be to those in the [G20] countries. And it was also used afterwards to advertise the facility. - Cool, very interesting use case. - Yeah. - And it was used on an international basis for people to pre-tour space without physically getting on a plane. - Yes, exactly. And it was right before COVID. [6 months] And that was really important because for me it showed me that serious companies, not just people dealing in Airbnb could actually use this. And that's when I decided I have to put more effort into this work than my stockbroking. And yeah, Danny was ecstatic that we got the deal. And at the end of that year in 2019, we incorporated and made a company. And yeah, unfortunately the next year, I think it was April or early May in 2020, Danny actually passed away, so since then I've been running the show. - Sorry for your loss. - Yeah, it's a long time ago now. - So it sounds like COVID now enters the picture. - Oh yeah, COVID at first knocked us out for three, four months until we knew what kind of approach to take. But a chance meeting with a person from the biggest advertising agency in Japan, a company called Dentsu, would lead to me doing a presentation at their local headquarters here in Osaka. And from there, we got contracts to do home building companies; large scale home building companies, and we traveled the country doing, I think it was in total 61 locations. And then from there other projects that I mentioned like documenting governments, major government institutions, sort of reconstruction of ancient buildings. Also, yeah, the Olympics came up the following year because it had been delayed from 2020 to 2021. And the pavilions that I mentioned before, they were all through Dentsu, the advertising agency. - That was a good chance meeting. - It was for sure. - It's not something that you proactively pursued, it's something where the opportunity came to you. - I was just so; my mind was just so full of what we could do with this technology at the time in late 2019, early 2020, so literally every person I met I would talk to about this. And in general that my wife would tell me to shut up, but it just happened to be I was told the right person. And yeah, that led to that chance meeting and the presentation at the advertising agency and the work that we got afterwards. - So, literally just by telling everyone you possibly could that you came into contact with, someone helped make a connection for you with ultimately a super-large client of yours. - Yes, I think you've really got a belief in what you're doing and someone's going to see that and they're going to reward you, if you know what I mean? - At that point were you providing any other services other than Matterport? - At that point, purely -- we were using the Matterport Pro2 Camera. That was it. - Oh, 100 percent at some point of Matterport using a Matterport Pro2 Camera was 100 percent of your business. - That was correct. In fact, the business itself was still very small. The two of us were only doing, I think if you take into account exchange rates, we were still doing only about, I guess about $10,000 to $30,000 a year in scans. But yeah, the following year that would triple. That's the kind of scale of work that we were doing. - And why did that happen? Was that a result of COVID or something else? - In a way, it was a result of COVID because I think about 60-70% of the scans were places that benefited from having a Matterport tour. But others were just, how do I say, it's a new thing and they wanted something new, if you know what I mean? But yeah, in the years since we've refined what we do and offering all the kinds of other services that I've mentioned, and although that does impact a bit on the profit that we get from these jobs because you need extra software subscriptions or new cameras, it has actually widened the number of industries that we can service because we offer all kinds of new technology that makes a 3D virtual tour a lot more attractive to them. - Daniel, if you could expand on that, because I think up until that point of time we were talking about a Matterport Pro2 Camera. - That's correct. - I think if we fast forward to today, either of you could talk about what gear you're using today or in that timeline of just telling your story and progressing forward when you started adding gear and why. - Sure, everything we bought was, there was always a reason we bought it. So, I will go through it in order. The second camera that we bought was the Leica BLK360 G1; the generation one Leica BLK360. And the reason was at the time, there was no Matterport Pro3 Camera to start with. It was in 2020. We wanted to expand our capabilities to do large scale projects. I mentioned before that a major government department was doing a reconstruction of an ancient building. The trouble is that it's half outdoor, it's surrounded in scaffolding and natural sunlight pours into the location and it's huge. Not just widthwise, but on several levels going up. So we were getting to like 700 scan points and the Matterport Pro2 Camera was just not placing them accurately. More to the point sunlight would suddenly stream in through the scaffolding and make certain areas unscannable at the time. Yeah, so we at the time, because it was COVID- - Just for clarification for our viewers, a Matterport Pro2 Camera is not really designed for outdoor use cases. - Yes, absolutely. - Period. Paragraph. End of sentence. It was before Matterport came out with Matterport Pro3 Camera that could be used outdoors and also scan at great distances. So yes, that's when you bought the Leica BLK360 G1 camera. - That's correct. - Which works with the Matterport platform. Works just like connecting the BLK360 to your iPad as you would a Matterport Pro2 Camera. - That's correct. I think the Matterport Pro2 Camera is simply the best invention that Matterport has ever made. Even the Pro3 doesn't come close, but as you say, it's just not made to work outdoors or on a big scale. The quality of the photo is amazing and that battery lasting nine hours is just made for real estate photographers. But yeah- - then what happened? - It was becoming a stumbling block. - What was next that ended up in buying yet another piece of gear? - Well, if I was to sort of go back to the BLK a little bit, the Leica BLK360 G1, we never used it alone because the quality of the photo is not so great. But yeah, the quality of the 3D is like the best you can get with Matterport, even more than the Pro3. So yeah, even today we may only just take three or four scans or maybe 10 with the Leica BLK360 G1, but the rest of the work we'll do with the Pro2, but just having that BLK360 there gets us jobs that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to get. Yeah, other cameras, it's more recent, but I haven't mentioned the clients we cater for -- real estate -- and that's because we've had trouble trying to crack the real estate photography market in Japan. - Specifically residential real estate. - Specifically residential. The biggest; there are probably two or three reasons it's difficult in Japan. One is there's a bigger emphasis on new construction as opposed to homes that are resold. The second is that the Japanese equivalent of the MLS, called Rains in Japan, unfortunately only caters for JPEG photos. So if we were to put up a 360 tour or a 3D tour of a building, it would only be able to be used by the selling agents or the -- yeah, the selling agent. So in general, the buying agents don't really want to, you have anything with the selling agent's branding or links back to the selling agent's website. So this is sort of a big stumbling block there. And the third issue we found with real estate is that the contract system here is very different. So it is very open and free. So it means that anyone who's capable of selling the home is able to sell the home. That means there's not a great incentive to spend a lot of money on photographing, videoing or making 3D tours of a building. That said, we tried to find a better price point to make real estate photography feasible in Japan. So we picked up the Ricoh THETA Z1. We've had some use with it, but unfortunately we've still not been able to crack the real estate market here in Japan. But incidentally, my reason for buying the Z1 was [www.WGAN.info/wganVTP Save 15% Coupon: WGAN] which I watched through your network: Virtual Tour Pro. It is an easy camera to use when you're accustomed to using a DSLR for taking 360 photos. And yeah, the cost point is a lot lower. So yeah, it's a really good camera to use if you're wanting to do buildings on scale. That's what I noticed. - So you purchased it solely to see if you could break into residential real estate. That didn't happen. - That's correct. - But along the way, you ended up buying a number of Insta360 cameras? - That's correct. Insta360, I just wanted to try out to see if we could do something with 360 video, but in reality, we would end up using the Insta360 cameras to do the Cupix that I talked about before, the 3D scans of the insides of the furnaces. Also a recent use that I've been trying, it's not the photogrammetry of buildings, but rather the photogrammetry of items. You can strap a number of these cameras to a pole and then walk around an object, then you can reframe the video afterwards, just focus on that object. And then you've got simultaneously three or four videos from different angles of an object. You can take these videos into RealityCapture, and then you can make a photogrammetry model of the object that you were just walking around. So they're pretty useful and they're really, really cost effective. So yeah, I love these cameras. They're just fun to play with. That's probably the best way to put it. - You bought the Insta360, I had a note. Was it Insta360 ONE R and X3 and X4 was this all related to the video capture that either for Cupix or using your drone workflow plus Cupix to end up with point clouds? - That's correct. The Insta360 ONE R is not supported by Cupix, but as I mentioned before, they're a very cheap camera, so you can strap them to that pole that I mentioned and make photogrammetry. The X3, initially it's the camera I bought. I bought that expecting to be able to do something with 360 video. It didn't happen, but I did use it to showcase to a client once what a 360 virtual tour of a building would look like by walking around their premises with it. And so that actually got me a job, but we didn't actually use it on the job. Then recently Cupix has updated their support for the platform, so the X3 will not be supported for much longer, so we bought an X4 for that purpose. And also I wanted to see what an 8K 360 video would look like. - And when did you end up buying a drone? - The drone was bought in the hope that we would find work. We are using Drone 360, et cetera, and it did take a long time. We bought the drone back in, I think it was 2021, so it was a DJI Mavic 2 Pro. And yeah, from there a licensing system was introduced in Japan. So I got my license. That took a while. Then there are other sorts of administrative hurdles you have to go through. But finally all those things cleared. Just this last 12 months, we're starting to get work creating 3D with the drone by bringing drone video or drone photographs into RealityCapture. Also doing 360s in RAW and then processing them and making 360 panoramas. These two things we've been using the drone for this year. So finally we've got our money back on the training and the drone itself. - Was the drone work -- aside from being inside the -- - The furnace. - Furnace you were describing was, has the drone mostly been aerial 3D or 360 mapping? - Aerial 360 is the most common use that we've been using it for, yes. - And then, and at some point, you were using a DSLR to shoot 360s. - That's correct. - Right, so you're taking what, four, five, six, eight shots around, how many shots around were you taking? - About that many. - And I think you- - These houses aren't that big. - Yeah, and you were using PTGui Pro for stitching these images together? - That's correct. The workflow, yeah, needs a number of different software, yeah. - Okay. And then where did those images end up, on which platform? - Okay, we use 3DVista, which I had heard about on [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com]. And in particular, there's a man, I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but has been posting on your Forum, some of his work with 3DVista. And he had a slider from side-to-side where you compare two panoramas. Obviously you want two panoramas of the same spot, but you could compare like day and night. Or in our case, we got a job to compare before and after a renovation of the interior of a building. So at a space of about three to six months in between shoots, we would mark the point that we scanned at on a floor plan of the building. And not scanned, photographed at, sorry. And we've used the process you just mentioned, taking still shots with the DSLR with the fish eye lens. And we then compare those two photographs before and after using 3DVista, I think it's called Stereo. No. [3DVista Feature Is: Dual Viewer (Twin View/Split View.] - Yeah, [@Realwalk3d ] - Actually, no, it was a man, an older man who did a lot of. Separately, he showed some examples of a small town, making a small towns map using another software, but he also had examples of a 3DVista slider. I'm sorry his name escapes me. But yeah, that was the influence there. And no one in Japan is doing anything like that. So I had a question one day, is there a solution that's not Matterport? The client had reasons. That's not Matterport that could compare before and after the renovation process. And so I said, yeah, sure, I've got something for you. And yeah, that's how the job started. - And what was the purpose of looking at the before and after? How was the client using that technique? - Yeah, so the client that we service was an advertising agency, but the ultimate client was a subsidiary of a building company. The building company is a pretty big building company in Japan, and particularly here in Osaka. The building company has a sort of a business where they build a whole apartment condominium building, and then afterwards they take care of like the garbage and that sort of stuff, the actual individual apartments sold. But afterwards they buy back some of the apartments as well. So they bought back two of the apartments of an older apartment building, an older condominium building that they had made, and they wanted to renovate them to make them more modern. So, they wanted to show two things. One, just how their renovations look. And two, they actually wanted to sell the apartment afterwards, so they wanted to use the results to sort of sell the building, sell the room, I should say. So at any rate, yeah, they were looking for something new and it couldn't be Matterport because they already had a photographer that does Matterport for them. And for some reason, I think possibly they were exclusively contracted to this person, so they needed a solution that was not Matterport. So for that sort of contractual reason, we came up with 3DVista for them. - And what is the largest project that you've done with 3DVista? - Largest project? We've done projects with 3DVista that are complementary to large projects with 3D tours, for instance, a project we did for Kobe, Kobe City, their tourism board has a big MICE facility, Convention Center. We use 3DVista to make the sort of home screen of the tour. And from there you can choose individual Matterport scans to fly into. That's probably the biggest project. - You have this tour available. Can you show us this tour? - Sure, let me get it on my screen there. - I want to say that it's in fact even while you're setting up, so if you want to visit Daniel's website: www.Meidansha-co.com www.Meidansha-co.com www.Meidansha-co.com Tell us about this tour. It's a very large project. - Sure, can you see it on your screen at the moment? - [Dan] Yes. - Sure. Okay, so this was created using 3DVista and Google's mapping tiles. They didn't have the budget for 3D scanning this large area, but it does illustrate what the client wanted displayed. In particular, this is a monorail running from the middle. And the client has this monorail station, which you can walk off and then enter these four facilities that you can see marked with these lines and writing at the top here. So apologies because it's in Japanese, but they are respectively, the Kobe International Meeting Hall, the Kobe International Exhibition Halls, there's three of them. And each of them are really, really big buildings. I think there's a combined square footage of something like 400,000 square feet or something like that. So we wanted a method to sort of put it all into one package, which is why I came up with the idea of using 3DVista. And the client, we were one of the tenders that were putting in our proposal. We were the only ones that proposed something like this. And they went for it because you can see the- - Is it clickable? - Yeah, it's clickable. You can either click these buttons here or click on the writing on these spots. It takes a little while to load. So I'll show you some examples that I opened earlier. - Okay. - Just one moment. So this is inside the meeting hall. So there are meeting rooms and a big theater inside this building. I think altogether it's six floors. - Forgive me, Daniel. So we went from 3DVista to Matterport, and then you have a menu on the left, which is? - This is MPEmbed. Yeah. - [Dan] Okay. - MPEmbed we've been using since 2020. Yes, 2020. Because at the time, Matterport didn't have a menu like this. And we had issues with some clients that said, "yeah, Matterport is great, it makes the building look good, but we want to show the content of the building. Is there some way that we can sort of index the content?" And so that's when we found MPEmbed. And we've been using them since 2020 as mentioned before. - How did you find them? How did you find MPEmbed? - Yes, I found them through [We Get Around Network Forum]. At the time, the previous owner had created a number of explanatory videos, which you can still find at [www.WGAN.info/training], I think it's called. - Yeah, the WGAN-TV Training Academy. - That's correct. - So, can we fly into a spot? Show us. - Sure, let's fly in. Okay, so I think personally I like the big amphitheater at the bottom, so we'll go have a look at that. Once I work out how to press the buttons. Here we go. So as you can see. - So far I've heard that you've blended three platforms: 3DVista, Matterport, MPEmbed, where there is yet another, and then there was Google Earth. - Yeah, Tiles from Google Earth. That's correct. - Any other technologies that you used on this one? - I guess if you were to say one more, I'm going to have to jump to a different room, but we have some 360 panoramas that we created using the DSLR. - And why did you use a DSLR rather than a Matterport tour? - There's a big gap in time between when we took the shots and did the 3D scan. So the project itself, there's four buildings all similar in scale to what you see here. So as you can imagine, it would've taken a long time. Altogether we spent three months, probably 30 scanning days doing the facilities. But in between, there were events being held at the facility. So often we would have to scan a location, and then we would only be halfway through doing a room, and then the next opportunity to scan would be three weeks later or something like that. So this kind of proposed lots of challenges, which I'll probably- - I want to ask you about that, but is there anything before we take it off screen share, was there something that you wanted to show us in particular? - Sure, probably just the size of some of these places. So if I show you one more of the exhibition halls. - Yeah. - This is not the largest, but if you have a look. These big empty spaces. These sort of provided a number of challenges. - I'm going to imagine you shot that space with BLK360 1st generation. I can't imagine that you had any success with the Matterport Pro2 Camera. - With the Matterport Pro2 Camera, you can sort of attack the edges of the facility. But as soon as you go more than two or three meters into the facility, the camera just gives up. - Yeah, but I like that we looked at this because I think it kind of gives the scale and the scope of what you, five years later, since starting your business, you're able to do a 400,000 square foot space, blend in 3DVista, Matterport, MPEmbed, used four different cameras, I think that you used. Matterport Pro2 Camera, BLK360 1st Generation camera, a DSLR, incidentally, which DSLR do you presently shoot with? - I'm using Sony. - Sony. You're using a mirrorless camera? - That's correct. - Mirrorless, fisheye lens, stitching and PTGui Pro. And where are those images going? Right to 3DVista? - There's a few steps in between. I recommend anyone who's interested to watch Ben Claremont's Virtual Tour Pro course, which do you still offer an incentive there? - Yes, for Virtual Tour Pro by Ben Claremont. I'll put a comment in the show notes [www.WGAN.info/wganVTP Save 15% Coupon: WGAN] So that was helpful to you in terms of how you were figuring out your workflow on this particular project. And I also heard, I want to say that you also used the 360 camera, though I wasn't clear on which camera or why. - On this particular project we didn't use a 360 camera [except for] the Matterport Pro2 Camera and Leica BLK360 G1. - The mirrorless doing with the fisheye lens, rotating the camera; stitching all those images together, Matterport Pro2 Camera, Leica BLK360 G1 400,000 SQ FT. Could you just touch on some of the challenges? You mentioned a few. - Yeah, yeah. - Which were large open spaces. You're not going to be able to use that Matterport Pro2 Camera to do a space that has nothing unique for the camera to kind of grab hold of. You mentioned that you were shooting around events, so you needed to wait for different parts of the building to become available to scan. Other challenges on that particular project? There were a number, but we were fortunate that, let me say first that the client had done a lot of research about 3D tours, and in particular, Matterport. They actually gave us, when they were asking for tenders, they actually gave us a sheet of requirements. And they actually said that in areas where the ceiling is more than 20 meters high, we require the Leica BLK360 generation one to be used in that many words. So it was quite surprising to see such an informed client. But at any rate- - You bought the BLK360 at that time? - Sorry? - Did you have the BLK360? - Oh yes, we did. This was in 2020. - So you're very happy that that was part of the scope of the project. - Oh yes. - Because whoop! Check that box. I had at that time probably a $21,000 scanner. - Exactly. Yes. - Yes. - Yeah, exactly. - Many yen! Many yen! :-) - But may I say that they were very communicative throughout the whole process and very helpful. So kind of challenges that we had or their needs first. They were looking for a way to promote the meeting halls and exhibition halls to local and international businesses and organizations that would consider holding events in western Japan. Because this area of western Japan is like a space of like one hour train ride either way. There are three or four big cities, so there's plenty of choices as far as facilities go to host big events. So they wanted to promote the ease of use of this Kobe facility, right? So in particular, it's closeness to the train station was an important factor and they wanted that shown somehow, so we did that with Google Maps Tiles. Also the size of the spaces. So these are pretty big spaces. I mean, there are slightly bigger ones in Osaka, but these are big enough for most institutions to use. And the fact that there's a hotel nearby, which just sort of- - Congratulations on this project. What an awesome project. - Yeah. - Probably both exciting, and I suspect a little bit frightening. And initially because it really, the scale and scope of the project, knowing that you may need 30 days to actually complete the project and then bringing all the assets together. So, what a great accomplishment. Did you ever imagine that when you had your Independent Financial Services business, that you would become an authority and an expert on all these different technologies in order to help clients with their digital marketing in Japan? - I had no idea. But at the time when my late business partner came to me, he was so excited talking about this new technology. I was sort of skeptical at first, but when I saw that people were actually being helped with this technology and that they were walking away happy, it was something that I sort of thought was missing from my work. And it was something that I really wanted to be part of at the time, is what I thought. So yeah, seeing happy customers like this one. - Looking back, would you have done anything differently? - Yes, a number of things. In the remaining time if I could explain just a couple. For instance, if I was doing this again, I would focus on niche markets because while we sort of had hoped at first to crack real estate, it was a lot of wasted time trying to find real estate agents that would use the technology. It would be better to focus on industries with the money to spend to start with. So things like architecture, engineering, construction, and tourism. If we'd focused on these from the beginning, we would've had more success earlier on, I think. Also we haven't talked about it much, but yeah, building a strong online presence is really important. Most of our contacts that we get, although I do spend a lot of time going and mingling, networking, that sort of stuff, most of the work we get comes from people seeing our website. So the best possible marketing assets you can make are the tours themselves. Always make sure you've got permission from the client to have their tour on your website. People will call us or send us an email saying, "Hey, we want one like this one." And they'll send us a link to something we've already done. So yeah, the tours themselves, buy more tours. That's something really, really you need to tackle. So if I could recommend a way to display your tours on the website, I think even now that the We Get Around Network has some sort of connection with WP3D Models -- we use their page for displaying all the tours that we've done with categories. And finally, what I would recommend if you were starting over and doing it now, I would develop strategic partnerships with other businesses rather than just trying to fight it on your own. For instance, videographers and photographers. Your service can be an add-on for theirs and vice versa. Also web page makers and marketing agencies. Particularly with the webpage makers without their corporation, you'll find that the tour that you make goes on some page that you have to click three or four times to get to and never sees the light of day. So you've always got to make sure you connect with these people so they know how to display your page to start with. But also these people, if they're satisfied, they'll call you in to do other new clients that they get as well. And that's true of marketers as well. Often the marketers don't know how to use the tours successfully. They're thinking about, "Hey, I can't use this on SNS, so what do I do?" [Social Network Services, Facebook, LinkedIn] And then you have to sort of teach them how to do that. But once they know that, they'll start calling you in for more job projects. - Awesome, I've enjoyed hearing about your journey today. Thank you for being on the show today. - Thank you very much. - We've been visiting with Daniel Brown with Meidansha. Daniel is based in Osaka, but actually covers all of Japan. Just a train ride away from everything. Check out his website: www.Meidansha-co.com , thank you, Daniel. - Thank you. (Dou itasimasite) You're welcome :-) Oh, that's wonderful. Very good. - For Daniel Brown in Osaka, I'm Dan Smigrod. And you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
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