Video: Matterport ShopTalk #11: Insta360 Compatibility and New Firmware | Wednesday, 11 November 2020

Hi All,

Above is Matterport ShopTalk #11 Webinar held on Wednesday, 11 November 2020.

Presentators:

1. Amir Frank - Matterport Marketing Content Manager
2. Kirk Stromberg - Matterport, Director Product Manager
3. Nicole Rogers - Matterport, Director of Partner Marketing
4. Michael Shabun - Insta360 Vice President, Business Development & Marketing

Insta360 Shopping Links

1. Insta360 One X
2. Insta360 One X2 (Matterport Beta Testing)
3. Insta360 One R
4. Insta360 Pro 2 - Not compatible with Matterport
5. Insta360 Titan - Not compatible with Matterport

Transcript - (Matterport Video Above)

Amir Frank:
Hey everybody! Thanks for joining us on another session of Shop Talk, we're on session 11 today. Super happy to have you with us, appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. Super, super excited for today's session, we've got Michael Shabun with us, and Kirk is back to answer lots of questions about Insta360 and its compatibility with Matterport.

We also have Nicole Rogers joining us, will be helping us out with questions. She'll be answering your questions throughout the webinar. And then at the end, we hope to have a really good amount of time for the live Q&A. So with that said, let's just go ahead and dive right in.

Amir Frank:
As I mentioned, episode 11, we are talking Insta360 and that's it. So we don't have anything other than this planned for you. So bring on the Insta360 related questions in the bottom of your Zoom browser, you should see a Q&A button there. You just tap that to open up the Q&A panel and throw in your questions for Michael and myself, Kirk and we'll hopefully be able to get to all of them at the end.

Amir Frank:
Michael, thank you very, very much for taking the time to join us today. How's it going? How are you?

Michael Shabun:
All good on our end. Thanks so much for having me. We're always excited to join the Matterport live sessions and share the latest and greatest. Everything at Insta is moving at lightning speed as always, we have some exciting new releases that we'll share some information about, and hope that it's a really engaging discussion today.

Amir Frank:
That's great. Awesome. Thanks again for joining us. As always Kirk, you've been with us a couple of times now, I believe at least, our senior product manager for Capture. Thanks for joining us. How are you?

Kirk Stromberg:
Good, glad to be back. Hi everybody.

Amir Frank:
All right. So yeah, let's go to the next slide and see what we've got. A lot of data, Michael, I'm going to let you take it away from here and I'll just advance the slides.

Michael Shabun:
Hey, everyone. Again, I'm Michael from Insta360 and I want to kind of demystify and kind of help educate everyone around the differences between the two main cameras that are currently compatible with Matterport. And in general, we think this is really the perfect partnership. Insta360 simplifies 3D/360 capture and Matterport simplifies capturing and creating 3D scans. And, and really the combination of this has been opening the door for everyone to really affordably and quickly create 3D scans. And we're so excited about this partnership.

Michael Shabun:
What I want to talk about initially is that there are two cameras currently that are fully compatible across Matterport. And that goes for Android and iOS and the two cameras are the ONE X Enterprise Edition and the ONE R. The ONE X Enterprise Edition is a revamped version of the traditional Insta360 ONE X and I'll talk about some of the differences that it comes with, but essentially it's a fully developer's-ready camera. It's been tuned in the firmware to be able to do in-camera stitching. And for us that's a huge difference-maker for being able to quickly and seamlessly integrate with platforms like Matterport.

Michael Shabun:
So in terms of camera specs, you're not seeing a huge difference. The biggest thing here is personal preference. The resolution is similar. They both capture video at 5.7K instills at 18 megapixels. And the most important thing with Matterport is that both cameras will capture HDR to make your still photography that much better indoors. They both have a similar battery. The ONE R has a slightly upgraded battery, and you do have additional options for a longer battery, but in terms of the cameras and the performance, they're fairly similar.

Michael Shabun:
What we like to say is that ONE X is really the best all-around 360 camera. If all you're interested in doing is capturing 360 then the ONE X is, is perfect. The ONE R is the best all-around camera and I'll show you why in a couple of slides. With the ONE R you get a little bit more flexibility. In addition to capturing your 3D scans. You can also get really great video and high res stills out of the additional modules that come with ONE R, and I'll show you in a sec here.

Here are the different setups for the ONE R. With the ONE R, you get three basic versions, you get the 360 version in the middle, you get the 4K Edition on the right, and the 1-INCH Edition. And so it's basically having a 360 camera, an action camera, and a DSLR all in your pocket at the same time. It gives you the most bang for your buck. It's the smallest camera crew that'll fit in your pocket, and you can take it anywhere.

Michael Shabun:
To use all three modules, you can use the same core piece to control the camera. All you need to do is swap out the lenses. It's a really cost-effective great solution. Is it okay if I answer a quick question? I just saw one come through.

Amir Frank:
Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Shabun:
Okay. What is the difference between the ONE X for consumers and the ONE X Enterprise? Great question. The ONE X for consumers and the ONE X for enterprise, they operate on the same exact app. The only difference is that there's been a firmware change for the cameras. So the ONE X Enterprise now supports in-camera stitching and the ONE X for consumers will focus more on image capture and quality, and it will also focus on ...

So if you look down here on the firmware support, this is the big difference here. With the in-camera stitching, you're going to be able to do a lot of the processing in the camera, so you don't have to do as much work on the backend and it's going to auto-correct for different exposure differences. So when you're capturing photos inside and you don't want the windows to be overexposed, it's going to account for those differences and make it a lot better. Thank you for asking that question.

Michael Shabun:
I want to go in-depth in detail on some of the specific features that really make using Insta360 and Matterport a great combination. And the first one is HDR. Being able to capture HDR from a small pocket-sized camera is absolutely huge because what you used to do before that is you physically had to take multiple pictures in the same location at different exposures and combine them all together. Now, the camera does all of this in cameras.

So you're pushing one button and it's automatically taking multiple photos for you and combining them together in the camera. So this is absolutely huge, and it does this at 18 megapixels. The advantage here is that if you're a real estate agent and you want to take really great quality photos inside, you're not going to see this ultra-white bright light coming in through your windows, your windows aren't going to look overexposed. You're actually going to get, you're going to be able to see outside. And you're also going to be able to see light bulbs without them creating this halo effect. So it really makes indoor photography quite nice.

Michael Shabun:
In terms of usability you're not going to find an easier 360 camera to use than the Insta360 ONE X and ONE R. Essentially, it wirelessly connects to an app. You're able to see what the camera is capturing while it's capturing. So as you're clicking photos and capturing into your Matterport Capture App, you're able to preview those photos to see if that's something that you want to keep, or you want to re-shoot.

Michael Shabun:
I saw another question come in. Can you get the enterprise firmware for a current ONE X? Yes, you can. You can just download it from the Insta360 website. It's available for free, and you can install it like you would a normal firmware. You'll get a bin file and you'll load that onto your micro SD card. And then you'll turn the camera on. And it'll auto-update in power cycle.

Michael Shabun:
With battery life, we talked about it a little bit, a couple of slides ago, you're going to get about an hour of continuous shooting. If you're taking stills that hour will get stretched out to a couple of hours. We do have interchangeable battery, so you can always have extra batteries on hand to swap in and out with the ONE R. There's also a boosted battery and the boosted battery will double your battery life. So if you don't want to walk around and charge batteries, if you don't want to carry extra batteries around, you could potentially look into the ONE R and get the boosted battery, which is available on Insta360.com.

Michael Shabun:
Another big advantage of using a small consumer 360 camera for 3D scans is just the sheer amount of time that it takes. So each photo will only take you three seconds to take. And in that three seconds what's going to happen is the photo will get captured. It will get transported into the Matterport app, and then you'll be able to get live, preview it and see if you like that image, or if you want to take it. Being able to take one image and only three seconds is a huge reduction in the amount of time. And the folks that Matterport I'm sure can talk more about the differences between a camera like the Insta360 ONE X, the ONE R, and the Matterport Pro2 Camera.

Michael Shabun:
And then accuracy, right? So this is a big thing. You're always concerned about how accurate are these cameras going to create or make my 3D scan and how great is the quality going to be? I think those are the two things that I always think about. And with the Insta360 ONE X and the ONE R you're going to get within about four to 8% of a totally accurate scan. And this for us is huge.

Michael Shabun:
Amir, you can talk about ... Obviously, the Matterport Pro2 Camera is more accurate, but what is that like to you guys in terms of the difference between the ONE X and the PRO2?

Amir Frank:
I mean, it's kind of comparing apples to oranges and really what you need to use for the job that you're doing. The PRO2 is accurate to within 1% but that's because it uses infrared sensors to measure everything as it's turning. This requires the Cortex engine to convert it. So you're going to have a little loss of accuracy there, but you are going to be able to produce a much faster scan output. So yeah, it completely depends on the client, the job, what you're doing. We see these being used in professional services like insurance.

They need to do a pre-mitigation scan, which allows them to measure more accurately, to get an estimate of what it's going to cost to fix this place. We're talking about after massive damage, like floods and fires and things like that, but then they also have two other scans that they do to post-mitigation and the post-reconstruction. And that just needs to zip through those, they have already taken all the measurements. They don't need to do that again. And this is an amazing solution for that purpose. So it's using the right tool for the right job.

Michael Shabun:
That's exactly what I was thinking. We have insurance adjusters that have been reaching out to us, that's whereby the ONE X and the ONE R because they say it reduces their capture by 50%. And all they need to do is get in, shoot something for simple documentation and get out with all the bells and whistles and by using Matterport they're able to do it so simply. The feedback that I get is always amazing on it.

Amir Frank:
Absolutely.

Michael Shabun:
Okay, let's go to the next slide here. So essentially this is all you'll need to do your entire capture. And I always feel like I'm under preparing for these things when I show up with my kit and it's three items, but this is all you'll need, you need the camera, you need a device that can run the capture app, and you need a tripod. That's it. And you're able to then upload and capture these amazing 3D scans. And we have a really cool promo for you guys on some of the stuff that we'll show you in the next slides.

Michael Shabun:
I always like showing this because this is a sample 3D scan that I did. Actually, this is over a year ago when Matterport and Insta360 were first announcing the partnership, and this was shot with the ONE X. So if any of you are wondering, what is a tour look like with a ONE X shot by somebody who had very little experience using the platform beforehand? This was my second scan that I ever did, and I'm really proud of it because it just shows how powerful the Matterport software is in order to stitch all this stuff.

Michael Shabun:
Amir, if you want to show this and play around with it a little bit and move it around, so folks can see. This is a four-story house in Los Angeles, California. You can see when you're looking out the windows that you can actually see out of the windows. You can see what's going on there. And with 360 cameras in the past before HDR, it just didn't look as good. The windows were super blown out. The reflections didn't look great. Now, you're seeing crisp images and it looks like you're actually walking through the house.

Michael Shabun:
This scan, this is about a 3000 sq ft house, four stories, lots of staircases, lots of mirrors to look out for, and windows. This took me about an hour total to do so. I'm really impressed by the Matterport technology and the Insta360 camera together. I think I did this on a single battery. I didn't have to swap batteries at all.

Michael Shabun:
And then this took me, I think about an hour or so, or an hour and a half to process on the Matterport side.

Amir Frank:
Awesome.

Michael Shabun:
I see a question here. The ONE X Enterprise is not the same as the ONE X2. There are two completely different cameras. The ONE X Enterprise is an upgrade on the ONE X, and the ONE X2 is the newest product line that Insta360 just came out with.

Here it is. This is what Matterport supports. So with the ONE X, the consumer and the enterprise edition are both supported as long as you are... Make sure you're on the latest firmware in order to access the newest features. With ONE R, you can see it here. It's a must, you need to be on the latest firmware in order to use Matterport the capture app. Otherwise, it won't work. So please, if it's not working, make sure you're on the latest firmware. And then ONE X2, it's going to be available soon. It's still in development. There is a beta available for Android and for iOS, it will be available soon.

Amir Frank:
Kirk, this is-

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah, I can jump in here. So far we're continuing to test with the ONE X2 on the iOS version of Capture. The Capture version of Capture 4, which is out in the app store. It looks to be largely compatible with it.

But since this is just a brand new product, we'd like to do a little bit more testing here. So in general, if you're an Android user you can go to Matterport.com/beta and get yourself into the beta program there. Again, we usually caution folks with beta releases using them on commercial jobs. There might be some rough edges. So use that with caution. We will make announcements there as soon as we get better compatibility with the ONE X2, in terms of the Android built.

Kirk Stromberg:
And as Michael noted, for the ONE R, there was an older enterprise version of firmware that we use for the beta. If you were part of the beta for the ONE R when it was initially released, you do need to migrate over to the current production release and earlier versions of the ONE R firmware are not compatible with Matterport Capture.

So if you're having problems, if you're getting error messages saying that the 360 module is not installed or something like that, that's usually the sign that you need to update your firmware. So in general, the rule of thumb is make sure your cameras are up to date on the latest firmware. You can use the Insta app to check that. And for the ONE R, download the latest from their website and copy that over.

Kirk Stromberg:
One thing, I'll note too, with the enterprise edition of the ONE X. So as Michael outlined, the ONE X Enterprise Edition will start doing in-camera stitching and do all the image quality work in the camera proper. Currently Matterport Capture, just like on the original ONE X is doing that work off-camera. So we'll take the two hemispheres, take the HDR shots and synthesize that using Insta360's SDK.

So going forward with the enterprise edition, where we update Capture, you'll now have those fully stitched and HDR images resident on the camera so that you can pull them off afterwards, unlike the original ONE X where if you want it to do that, you need to put those images off the desktop application and do your stitching and your HDR as Michael has outlined. I know there's a little bit of nightmare, but in general, we wanted to try and map out where your support is for Capture on either iOS and Android. And we're very excited that we're moving forward with all the new cameras.

Amir Frank:
Nice. Just to dig a little deeper, Kirk, if you don't mind, I'm going to just ask you a couple of questions as long as we're on the topic. With regards to the HDR and the enterprise edition, as Michael mentioned, that it is doing the HDR processing in-camera. Is that something that, you just mentioned that Capture is still doing R ONE processing, using Insta's SDK, is that something that in the future we plan on changing to take advantage of their HDR in-camera?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yes, yes. Good question. So right now, if you use Matterport Capture with the enterprise edition, we're still going to stitch on device, not on camera. And so we need to update Matterport Capture to then make the new call. When we see the enterprise edition camera say, "Hey, hold on, you guys go ahead and stitch on camera." So that doesn't exist yet for Matterport Capture.

We're still using the old method. Users won't have to do anything in particular when we can update Capture to take care of the enterprise edition firmware, then it will recognize that and will let the camera do all the in-camera stitching and HDR work. Currently, we're operating exactly as we were with the original ONE X. That's a really good clarification.

Amir Frank:
Okay. And then Michael, Kurt mentioned that if you just use your app, it'll tell you if you're using the latest firmware and if you're not, you can just easily download it and install it very simply that way. Are any of the firmwares in beta where you would actually need to more manually go about that?

Michael Shabun:
That's a great question. Thank you for asking that. So for any consumer firmware, you can always upgrade through the app and it's super easy. Once you're wirelessly connected via wifi, it'll hit you right in the head and there'll be a bright red dot that'll tell you, "Hey, upgrade now wirelessly." So it'll be super easy. For the enterprise firmware and anything that comes out as a specialty firmware on the enterprise side, you'll actually need to download that manually and install it on the micro SD card. And the instructions are super easy.

They're available on the website. So if you go to Insta360.com and you go to downloads, and you download the firmware from the enterprise portion, it will give you a step-by-step instruction. It's basically you take the firmware, you load it onto your micro SD card. You put your micro SD card into the camera. You turn the camera on and it'll auto-update. Super easy.

Amir Frank:
Easy. Awesome.

Kirk Stromberg:
And we have a couple of questions I was thinking can I just ... [inaudible 00:21:28] talking about a couple of questions. Let's see, one question I think was on the earlier model and somebody was asking and concerned about large spaces and misalignment? So in general, for any kind of scaling, you can end up getting misalignments or failure to align. Misalignments would generally be if you are going down a long straight hallway and you see something ... the subtle misalignment is something tweaks off and looks a little bit bent. The really horrible misalignment is you scan something and it ends up on the mini-map, a little 2D map and it ends up someplace that totally doesn't make any sense.

Generally, small misalignments can be fixed in cloud processing when you upload the job. Large misalignments happen because our algorithms have looked at all the data that they're getting and they make a mistake and they say that they found a good solution for this.

Kirk Stromberg:
So really large misalignment, you generally want to delete and retake those scans. So if you're moving reasonably like a meter and a half by eight feet or so between scans, you're keeping line of sight between prior scans and the current one that you're doing. That really maximizes your chances of being able to get everything to align and work perfectly. And on our website, we got some scanning guidelines in getting started.

So if you're finding that you're going through a space and you're getting a lot of misalignments or failures to align, check to make sure that how you're scanning, take a look at our guidelines to see what are the tips and tricks for doing so. And then there are some environments where this is more challenging, so there'll be more challenging instances with very bright environments, super shiny surfaces. So you'll see if you have people or pets moving in the space, that can throw off things because the comparisons now have new elements that weren't there before.

Kirk Stromberg:
So let's say Jim, might take a look at our tips and tricks website, see what's going on there. And then obviously if you're having really bad problems, get a support ticket going so we can take a look at what's happening.

Kirk Stromberg:
Two more ones to do real quick if we can. So comparison to the ONE X and the general Insta360 camera and the Matterport Pro camera. So as Amir was talking about before, so these are kind of two different classes of cameras and they generally segment themselves in terms of what you're trying to do. So with the 360 cameras, we are synthesizing depth data.

We're looking at the imagery and we're calculating what we think the actual depth measurements are. With the pro camera, we're actively sensing that has an active depth sensor that's going out and pinging stuff. And so in general, you get a higher fidelity more representation of the 3D space with the active sensing cameras, but that comes at a cost because it's much larger and much more expensive, and is generally slower as you drift through the space.

Kirk Stromberg:
So like, as Michael was outlining before, and Amir outlined before, there's a lot of instances where basically you want for the price the ease and the convenience, you want to be able to go through a space and get really good imagery and a good representation of the space. And it doesn't have to be that high fidelity. And you can do that with 360 cameras because you can move very quickly through them. They're cost-effective, they're small, you're not lugging a larger camera around as you go through.

Kirk Stromberg:
Now, conversely, there are jobs where you would need that fidelity. And so it's worth the time expense to actually go through and do a careful scan maybe for measurements for the 3D model itself, for other assets that you might need. That's when you tend to use the pro camera. So there's a dual [inaudible 00:25:01] spectrum here. In general, it probably depends on your clients, your kinds of jobs. Sometimes again, we want to keep giving you guys the right tools for the right job. We want to think about this as like a tool kit to you to say, "Okay, what tools do I need to use for this particular job or this particular space?"

Kirk Stromberg:
Just one more quick one. The question around the range for the ONE X to cell phone? Sometimes you're scanning and you have to hide it and use a connection to the Capture app. This can be a challenge. In general, any space, if you have a really wide open space, staying out of the shot of the 360 camera is difficult because it just captures everything at the moment you take the shot.

So in general, one of the things in our backlog is being able to take two shots and subtract you from the space. That's still in a backlog though, that's been a common feature request. In general, to try to find a place to hide, try to get close. I have found that sometimes if I'm behind the corner, getting my mobile device just peeking out from behind the corner in a subtle way, might give you better line of sight connection to the camera.

Amir Frank:
So you're recommending to try to maintain some sort of line of sight between the mobile device and the camera itself to kind of increase that wifi manually?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah, if you're finding that's an issue. Now, also we have found if you go into say an apartment complex or a hotel where there are a very large number of wifi access points sometimes you can see challenges there. And in those environments, it can be challenging because there's just such a heavy [inaudible 00:26:35] environment. So your range to the camera for any camera might be more difficult to maintain.

Amir Frank:
So, we'll get to more questions in a minute, just want to point out for anyone who's not aware and has not been there yet. If you go to Matterport.com and you find that resources tab at the top, first thing in the dropdown is support, then it'll get you to our support hub which has a lot of frequently asked questions that you can look at.

You can find the link to our help center, which has hundreds of articles. And as we were talking about before those tips and tricks on how to deal with misalignments and so on and so forth and have a scan different sized spaces. And phone number for anybody reaching out from the U.S. if you want to talk to anybody on the support team, is this right here: 408-805-3347

Amir Frank:
If you go to that support page and you scroll down to the bottom of the phone number, that's right for you, depending on where you're logging in from, if you're in Europe or Asia, the right phone number will be listed for you. So definitely check out that support page. And you can always reach out to the support team at support@matterport.com. Happy to help answer your question.

Amir Frank:
And lastly, not only can you reach the support team by phone, by email, you can also chat with them. If you go into that help center, as I mentioned, that [inaudible 00:28:07] is found in the support page. There'll be a little yellow kind of help bubble in the bottom right corner, just click on that, search for an article in the help center. If you can't find it, you can just start a chat with any of our online service professionals.

Amir Frank:
And last thing, I always bring this up, but super, super important to make sure that your account details are up to date. This is the email that we use to notify you of anything that is mission-critical regarding your account. So definitely always, I mean, this goes well beyond Matterport with anybody. I just want to make sure that your account details are up to date.

Amir Frank:
So last thing before we dive into the Q&A, just one to bring to your attention, if you're not familiar with it already, our Facebook page, facebook.com/Matterport, that's our corporate Facebook page that you'll be able to just keep in touch with everything that's going on with Matterport, new things, collaborations, and whatnot that we're working on. So check it out and stay updated.

Amir Frank:
And also if you've got this amazing space, like what Michael shared with us earlier, and you want to share it in our gallery, don't be shy, reach out to us at go.matterport.com/nominate-your-space, and let us know. It'd be great to have it in the gallery and show it off for everybody to see. So check that out. And that's pretty much it for the presentation part of [Matterport] ShopTalk today.

So now we'll just open it up to Q&A, so feel free if you haven't already. Let us know of your questions and we'll just tag them up. I'll bring Nicole back in. Nicole, thank you very much for joining and helping us out with the questions.

Nicole Rogers:
Yeah. Awesome. Michael, thanks for the talk today. So a lot of the questions were answered during the webinar, but one person had a question, can I use the ONE X for outdoor shots and then the MP2 for indoors, and how do I connect them?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah, this is a case where basically you can just assume that you're continuing to use the cameras through the rest of the scan. So the background on this one is, the Matterport camera has active depth sensors that use a frequency of light that when you're in full sun tends to get a lot of interference. So it's challenging to do a full 3D scan outdoors in full sun.

Now, because with the Insta360 cameras we're using what we call the Cortex Artificial Intelligence Engine. We're looking at just imagery and we're predicting that depth. We don't have the sunlight interference problem. So you can continue scanning outdoors with a Matterport camera doing a 360 View and then placing it and converting it, which is a little bit more of a work to do. Or you can switch over, stop your connection to your Matterport camera, connect your mobile device with Capture on it to your Insta360 camera, and then just continue taking shots as you would within the camera, continuing to try and keep similar distance from the prior scans, line of sight.

Kirk Stromberg:
And the reason why this generally will work is because we are not getting that interference. We're synthesizing the data. So you can take those outdoor shots. Now, alignment is more challenging in those instances, especially if you get into really wide open spaces. So be careful as you're going through that, but in general the mode is, just turn one camera off, turn the other one on connect to it in the same scan job that you're doing and capture, just keep ongoing.

Amir Frank:
Yeah. And if I can just actually add a little bit to that. We have a lot of agents who really the shot of the pathway or the little sidewalk leading up to the front door which is great. I totally get that. We're talking about misalignments, and as Kirk just mentioned, the way to do that is not to start from outside the house and scan your way into the house, because it's super important to remember that when you're out there scanning, you're not creating a virtual walkthrough, you're creating a 3D model. Once that 3D model is done and processed, then you go into Showcase Edit and Workshop and kind of create your Highlight Reel and your virtual walks from your model.

Amir Frank:
So just keep that in the back of your mind, have a really nice solid foundation by starting indoors first, scan away. It doesn't have to be at the front door, but if you are thinking about having that pathway kind of leading in and through the front door, try to keep the front door open. Anytime you have a camera that can see the front door. So you don't build that wall as mesh in the doorway. That can also cause issues and prevent navigation through the doorway.

So just kind of keep all these things in mind as you're scanning and how you want the end result to be for your customers, for your visitors. And you'll be fine just by scanning the inside first and then kind of come back to the front door and scan a short path outside, and you can use the 360 for that. It's a great solution.

Nicole Rogers:
Great. Just want to mention a comment from Mark, which I think is awesome. He says that I'm a tech specialist for a school, and we are using Matterport and Insta360 for virtual field trips during COVID. So I think that's a great example of how to use Matterport and Insta360 together. So thanks Mark for sharing that with us.

Amir Frank:
That's an awesome example.

Nicole Rogers:
Eric has a question on, can we pull measurements off of these scans once we're in Matterport?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah. In general, once you have processed the space, you can go into measurement mode inside the cloud inside showcase and take measurements inside that space, any ad hoc measurement you're going off of. One thing to remember as you're taking measurements off a 3D space is that we're trying to take those measurements from the 3D structure.

And when you're in showcase and you're viewing it, usually you just see the imagery portion of this, and you can cycle with your zero key and you can see different modes in showcase to show the mesh, show the wire, frame and things like that. So you can get a sense also of exactly what you're measuring off of.

Kirk Stromberg:
And as you go through that measurement, if you're saying I'm pulling from one wall to another, or I'm measuring something inside the space, that preview that you see as you target a particular area will try to give you a sense of what 3D structure you're attaching to, you're wrapping onto for the marker of the measurement, but in general, that should be applicable for our models.

Amir Frank:
Indeed. Another quick tip for anybody taking measurements, there is a little gear icon that allows you to choose whether you want it ... where are the points from what you measure, where you want to stick so it can by default it'll stick to corners and edges and whatnot. And if you don't want that, you can turn that off. That could end up helping you more accurately pinpoint exactly where you want to measure from?

Nicole Rogers:
Cool question from Milton, what settings should be used within the ONE X auto or manual.

Kirk Stromberg:
We use Matterport Capture with the Insta360 cameras, we go into automated mode. So we are going to be trying to get full HDR imagery and get the best shot that we can. And obviously with the newer enterprise firmware for the ONE X, we'll be letting the camera do that full HDR and white balancing stitching. So in general, to keep it simple, we'll do everything automated.

It will go for the best HDR shot that we can. Now, photographers often want to control that. And so right now our solution doesn't let you go in and tweak the exact parameters for those shots, because once you take all of these shots and we synthesize it into a space for a 3D space in Matterport, we'll try to balance lighting and brightness across the entire space.

Kirk Stromberg:
And so we'll be making some macro adjustments at the entire space, which some folks love and appreciate, and some folks want much more fine control. And so at the moment, we don't have fine control for tweaking individual shots and parameters because when you're taking 360 imagery, you're trying to balance potentially very different lighting conditions from just one direction versus the other. So in general, that's a long answer but the answers is, it's automatic. You don't have to set anything.

Nicole Rogers:
Which is better with Matterport Insta360, ONE or Insta360, I think X2?

Michael Shabun:
I think generally both cameras are really great. And I think Matterport does an amazing job taking the hardware that Insta360 provides and creating a universal experience out of them. So that's what I'm kind of saying, whether it's ONE X or the ONE R, at this point, it really becomes more of a user preference. With the ONE X2 it's obviously our newest piece of hardware and the image quality looks sharper, and the color science has been upgraded, but a lot of that doesn't matter when it goes into Matterport.

And I think Kurt talked more about how the images are being processed inside of Matterport. But from our perspective, if you have a ONE X or you have a ONE R, you're good with that. I would doubt if you have the ONE X and it's the consumer version, I would download the enterprise for more so that you're on the latest and greatest. But again, the scan that I showed you that I captured that was on the ONE X, and the ONE X came out before the ONE R. So no problems using any of the three cameras.

Amir Frank:
Michael, you and I were talking about what do you do outside of Matterport can also come into play with your decision with which camera to get. You mentioned the ONE R has that warning sensor, which has stunning, beautiful images. So if you want to use this, it's just like an action camera or something outside of Matterport then the ONE R is an amazing solution. I've been lucky enough to use the ONE X that Matterport has almost as a personal camera. So I'd take it with me when I go camping and things like that. It's been fun. It's a blast. I love that camera.

Michael Shabun:
Thanks for bringing up. The ONE R is the most versatile camera that I've ever seen. Like I said before, I have a whole camera crew in my pocket. So it's beyond real estate photography or insurance inspections and captures. You want to have a great camera to use with the family on vacations, or if you do any sort of sport or activity or hobby on the side that takes you outdoors, then you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck with any Insta360 camera and in particular, the ONE R.

Nicole Rogers:
Cool. Some other use cases I just wanted to mention here. One individual is using it in their beach resort with over a hundred houses and that'll be a large project. And then we have somebody else who has been using the Pro2 for the past two years, and they're really looking forward to compliment the whole process with the Insta360 ONE X, which they just purchased and they're getting the delivery tomorrow. So they're excited to take 3D tours of cathedrals. So some other use cases OF the cameras, which is great.

Nicole Rogers:
Continuing on the questions, another individual's asking, you mentioned that the model generated would be within 4 to 8% accuracy, any advice on trying to achieve closer to the 4% mark when capturing onsite?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah. I'll take this one. In general, the more scans the better so increase your scan density. The challenging environments are going to be very long, large open spaces. So this is where ... if I had a really long hallway, the slight tolerance starts to build up as you move further and further down, you get a little bit of error in scan one to two, a little bit more as you can three to four. And so those long chains will tend to build up. So smaller spaces, higher scan density are generally going to be your best bet there.

Kirk Stromberg:
I mean, this is kind of obvious, but if you're doing something where very, very accurate measurements are really, really important, then you may need to augment the [inaudible 00:40:42] that you're doing with the Insta360 camera with actual DISTO measurements in the space.

So this is one of those cases where we're going to try and do the best job that we can, and we continue to train the Cortex engine to try to get more accurate predictions, but this class where we're synthesizing 3D data does have its limits. And that's the kind of case that you need to know about. So generally watch your scan patterns and look at your environments and, and try to learn and set where your expectations can be in terms of that accuracy.

Nicole Rogers:
Also, any suggestive limit on the number of scan points that can be captured using the Insta360, if so, how does this compare to the Pro2?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah, that's a great question. So this is not specifically tied to the camera. The limitations are more tied to two elements of processing. So one is on your mobile device. So where you're running Capture, say an iPad or an Android device, and I always [inaudible 00:41:40] the device. So the real critical part for the size of the job is obviously storage on the device, but the amount of RAM is actually fairly critical for the size of the job that we can operate on.

And so this is something that is not well advertised on iOS devices. They don't really kind of advertise that kind of thing. So in general, a more modern device with more RAM, higher tier device like the pro-line of iPads, the general modern iPhones all have four to six gigs of Ram and that's working memory.

Kirk Stromberg:
So the idea and the issue is as I'm building out that space, as I see the mini-map, the more and more scans and more, and more data that the system has to try to keep track of just starts to stress itself. So we generally, have been able to be operating in the hundreds of scans spaces, but we are continuing to try and optimize that. And this is a little bit of whack-a-mole, we'll find a performance problem over here, and we'll try to whack that down.

It'll come up over here. So in general, you can get a larger space with a Pro camera since we're using synthesized data that is more intensive with the 360 cameras. So in general, the size of the space that you can capture will be small as the 360 camera, but it's really driven mostly by what device you're using with that camera.

Nicole Rogers:
Yeah. And adding onto that, Kirk, when scanning with the ONE X of the ONE R, what is the ideal distance between each shot? Is it five to eight feet like the MP2 or closer?

Kirk Stromberg:
You can generally follow the same guidelines. If you're in very close environments, if you're in environments where there's a lot of twists and turns, narrow hallways, gives you one [inaudible 00:43:25] watch your line of sight. You can generally get a sense of as you're going through and scanning. If you're starting to see lots of misalignments, you might want to tighten up. If you are doing well, then you can keep going at one and a half meter, eight feet or so distance.

Nicole Rogers:
Great. And then another question here, what tripod would you guys recommend for ONE X? And is that the same tripod for ONE R?

Michael Shabun:
We have a couple of different solutions available. I think the most important thing to consider when picking up a tripod is the height and, and if it erases from your shot if it has a nice low small footprint. So we have some on our site that are included in the virtual tool kit. It's about four and a half feet tall, which is a great height for you to be able to capture scans. The scan that I showed was shot with the tripod and the monopod that's available on our website. But essentially you can use it with any tripod or any monopod. Obviously, if you're shooting something on a really, really tall tripod, I think he needs to look into that. But Kirk, you can give a recommendation for what the ideal capture height is, right?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah. In general, the first part is that this will depend on the kind of job that you're doing. But in general, what we found is that centering the camera around four and a half feet up, or so gives the great perspective as you're moving through the space. It might be at first glance when you start and you might think, I want to operate at head height for a typical person in my region, but that may actually end up as you move through the space, because you're thinking about how the viewer is visualizing the tours they go through, and that may actually provide a less optimal perspective.

So we try to have it down a little bit lower. And like we noted, with your tripods, if you end up going outdoors or you're on uneven surfaces especially when you're outdoors, if it's really windy, make sure that you've got some weight on that thing. I've had a camera blow over on me when I was just outside of reach. And I was unhappy. So [inaudible 00:45:47].

Amir Frank:
Photography stores we'll have these small five-pound sandbags that have kind of a little grippy handle in the middle. You're just going to wrap it around the base of the tripod or a monopod and it works great.

Michael Shabun:
I've seen all sorts of cool creative tripods and monopods that people get, and I've seen more traditional ones that have the monopod, and then they have the three tripod legs all the way on the very bottom. I've seen the circular ones that all they have is like a way to disk on the bottom and it reduces the footprint even more. So send us your pictures of whatever tripod you guys ended up getting we're interested to see it.

Amir Frank:
Yeah. I actually ordered one of those circular ones. It found a YouTube video who somebody likes using that. It's a workout. It's actually a mic stand. So it has a very, very heavy base. And it's a bit of a workout as they're going through, I think after skin 30 or 40 it's kind of wearing you down, but a nice solution will not blow over in the wind.

Michael Shabun:
So knock out your gym time and your scan at the same time.

Amir Frank:
Exactly.

Nicole Rogers:
Well, that's it for questions, [inaudible 00:46:58]. Oh, wait.

Kirk Stromberg:
Nicole, I was going to jump, I was going to touch one that somebody had been asking. Yesterday Apple announced a new flavor of their MacBooks and their computers that are running on Apple Silicon. So basically the CPU that they're running will be their own homegrown.

And one of the implications, as they say, is that generally, IOS apps would be able to run on these computers. And so we may end in the situation going forward, where folks are saying, "Well, can I install, say Matterport Capture on my MacBook Pro or MacBook Air that is running Apple Silicon, and have that connect to my camera and run with it." So we haven't tested that yet.

That does seem like that's interesting because obviously you've got a ton more storage, more space, and so forth, but we need to test that. And I would be shocked if it just works perfectly. So standby for more news on that event, we don't have one of the shiny new devices yet from Apple, but we will try to get one and see what changes need to make.

Amir Frank:
We did a ShopTalk not too long ago about, I talked a little bit about backing up. [inaudible 00:48:06] ask the question here. Does Matterport have a plan to build a mechanism for easily backing up and archiving the scan off the iPad? Kirk has spoken about this many times.

Like so many things it's something that we would love to do. But for now, I think the recommended approach is still to use either iTunes, just your finder if you're on Catalina, or something like the Explorer, iMazing that can go in there and grab specifically the data from Capture without you having to backup the entire iPad. Kirk, you know of anything else?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah. There's only one sneak peek I'll give. So we know that the thing that Amir's talking about, and he's done some really awesome YouTube videos and articles about how to do that. One thing to always watch out with that is that if you do a scan job, number one, and then you duplicate that scan job, and then you continue working with the scan job, number two, if you copy just scan job number two, we have a pointer to the original scans and job number one.

So if you take just scan job number two off of the iPad, you're actually missing some data from scan job number one. The next version of Capture 4 or 5 we'll have a little export feature in it. And so the notion there is that you could go in and say, "I'm going to select a specific job and I'm going to export it. And I'm going to zip that up and then be able to get that off the device or share it to somebody else via the app or something like that."

Kirk Stromberg:
And what we intend to do is then look and see if it's a duplicate job, we'll go try and find all the other data that is associated with it so that you have a simple package for that. So again, this is not a completely sophisticated backup and restore feature, but the notion is we want to make it a little bit easier for you. So each of these we're going through, we're trying to improve that situation for you and make it simpler and easier to do your jobs.

Amir Frank:
That is very exciting and unexpected news, Kirk. That's awesome. I love that.

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah, we're building it. We'll get it out and TestFlight it as soon as we can. Standby for that.

Amir Frank:
That's great. Until that does happen, best use-case is to just take the entire jobs folder, the jobs folder when you go into Capture using, like I said iTunes or iExplorer used to the junk folder to scrub the whole thing, put it on your hard drive, back it up into an external hard drive. That way you know you've got everything. And yeah, that's about it.

Kirk Stromberg:
That is definitely the safest thing to do.

Amir Frank:
All right. Do we have any other questions or is that it because we are pretty much out of time?

Nicole Rogers:
We are pretty good in terms of answering them. There's just one question on the Matterport Pro2 or future versions have on phone storage?

Kirk Stromberg:
Yeah. In general, if you don't operate ... So the Matterport Pro cameras are trying to get the data off camera as fast as possible to the place that we're synthesizing all of this together, which is your iOS or your Android device. So in general, we haven't been architecting to have onboard storage. So unlike your 360 cameras, where in general, when you take that shot and Capture asks the camera to take the shot, you will have that original image on your camera as well. Similarly, the BLK360, the high-end LiDAR scanner, in general, can operate in a push-button mode where you could take scans without capture at all. And they store on device. In general, our model has not been met. And so the whole notion is get out into Capture as fast as possible, synthesize that and get that raw data up into the cloud for processing.

Amir Frank:
It's actually a really good point that you made, Kirk. So I actually wasn't aware of this initially either. I just assumed that everything that we capture just got some new Capture and it avoids storing it on the 360 camera itself. In fact, it's not, that's a good thing, you can use those images for yourself and maybe marketing or whatever you want to, but it also means that it's taking up storage in your SD card, and you need that storage if you want to keep capturing. So just keep going and assume that everything's good. You may end up running out of storage on your SD card, in which case you need to erase it before you can keep going with Capture. And that's pretty much it for today.

Amir Frank:
So thank you very, very much to Michael Shabun, who was nice enough to join us, really appreciate your time today, Michael and Kirk.

Michael Shabun:
Thank you so much for having me. [crosstalk 00:52:47]-

Kirk Stromberg:
Thank you, Michael.

Amir Frank:
Of course. And thanks to Nicole. Awesome job helping us out with the questions, really appreciate your efforts there, and thanks to all our attendees for joining us today on this webinar. And we hope to see you in the next Shop Talk, we have these every two weeks. Take care, everybody.

Nicole Rogers:
Take care.

Amir Frank:
Bye-bye.

Nicole Rogers:
Bye.

Kirk Stromberg:
Bye-bye.