Illustration courtesy of InsideMaps
Illustration courtesy of InsideMaps
InsideMaps 3D Tour courtesy of InsideMaps. (Shot with an iPhone 11)
86-WGAN-TV How to Shoot and Create InsideMaps 3D Tours for Free with an iPhone with InsideMaps Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Gabe Knox (@InsideMaps_Gabe) and InsideMaps Chief Technology Officer Jörgen Birkler
Transcript: WGAN-TV How to Shoot and Create Free InsideMaps 3D Tours with an iPhone
Hi All,
(Transcript below ....)
Are you professional real estate photographer that wants to offer virtual tours as an Add On?
Are you researching 3D virtual tour platforms that offer a Matterport-like experience without the investment in a proprietary camera and platform and can be shot and produced much faster with an iPhone X or later paired with a $200 rotator? And, a real unlimited free plan with a super-affordable nicely loaded $29 unlimited plan with some optional extras (like floor plans, blue-sky/green grass (and more) image editing and curated snapshots)?
Add InsideMaps to your short-list of 3D virtual tour platforms to research and take for a spin.
Begin by watching this (above) deep-dive demo and discussion with InsideMaps Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Gabe Knox (@InsideMaps_Gabe) and InsideMaps Chief Technology Officer Jörgen Birkler recorded live on Thursday, 3 December 2020.
The show:
✓ WGAN-TV Live at 5: How to Shoot and Create Free InsideMaps 3D Tours with an iPhone
Discussion included:
1. Front-End: Demo of InsideMaps 3D tours (shot with iPhones 11/Pro 12, shot with Ricoh Theta Z1); including measurement, photos, video, floor plan
2. Creating InsideMaps 3D Tours using:
► iPhones 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max (leveraging LiDAR) to create free 3D Tours (beta) [also iPhones X and 11)
[InsideMaps is the first virtual tour platform for residential real estate to leverage the LiDAR in the Apple iPhone 12 Pro - paired with a rotator - to enable professionally created 3D Tours.]
► iPhones 10, 11 and 12 to create affordable 3D tours
► Ricoh Theta Z1
3. Image quality and workflow using the InsideMaps HERO Rotator for iPhone + InsideMaps Capture App (Demo with Rotator)
4. InsideMaps 3D tours versus Matterport 3D tours
5. Sweet spots for InsideMaps 3D tours
► Residential Real Estate
► Travel and Hospitality
► Property Management
► Architectural Visualization (including BIM Revit/IFC exporting and interactive interior designs.)
6. Back-End: How to edit an InsideMaps 3D Tour
7. InsideMaps Pricing: (3D Tour, Floor Plan, HDR photos, Video) and photo-realistically rendered walk-throughs for Architectural Visualization
► Beta
► Subscription Packages
► Per Project Pricing (for Cloud-Processed 3D Tours)
8. InsideMaps Pricing: HERO Rotator and accessories (batteries, charger)
InsideMaps is a WGAN Gold Member.
Happy holidays,
Dan
InsideMaps HERO Rotator
Transcript (Video Above)
- Hi All. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, December 3, 2020, and you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
We have an awesome show for you today, how to shoot and create free InsideMaps 3D tours with an iPhone. And my guests today are InsideMaps' Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Gabe Knox. Hey, Gabe, good to see you.
- Hello, Dan.
- And also InsideMaps' Chief Technology Officer, Jörgen Birkler. Jörgen, good to see you again.
- Nice to see you again, Dan. Thanks for having us.
- You bet, thanks for being on the show. Before we do this deep dive into how to shoot and create free inside 3D tours with an iPhone, I just thought I'd ask the say, hey, InsideMaps has been providing 3D tours, 3D tour tech for years, and I've received my first InsideMaps demo about six years ago from your CEO, George Bolanos, how come nearly all We Get Around Network Forum Community Members have likely not heard of InsideMaps? Gabe.
- Sure, well, I'd like to say, even though most of your Forum Members may not be following us, we've been following you, Dan. I really like your Forum and I always look to it to see what's going on in the industry, you do a really great job here.
So why haven't most people seen InsideMaps? We've been enterprise-focused, for the past several years, we have been elephant hunting. And what that means is we've been picking specific industries, taking deep dives to understand what they really need and customizing our solutions to meet those needs.
A great example of how that's working right now is in the single-family rental industry. So, we are the absolute leader in that space as far as photography and 3D capture technology. And those clients are unique. We're talking about groups that own tens of thousands of homes across the entire United States.
They've acquired these portfolios from other aggregators, and a lot of cases, they just don't even know what they own.
And each asset is very unique, and so having a technology and a service plan set up, so you can go out and capture that entire portfolio every time someone moves out and every time someone moves in and uses that information to make remote investment decisions as far as whether we should acquire this property or not?
What is the scope of work required to get this property ready to maximize its value for a renter?
Or, to flip it? And, then getting marketing content needed to do a great job with 3D tours, HDR photos, floor plans, and building data, and deliver that all through API for our enterprise clients to ingest, feed into their ILS, their Internet Listing Service, and then syndicate out to all of their marketing channels is really been our focus, and we've gotten really good at it. Go ahead, you're good?
- Gabe, I'm just curious why those enterprise clients ended up choosing InsideMaps, there's literally 170 different 3D, 360 virtual tour platforms at last count?
- Certainly, so first the technology has to be affordable, InsideMaps works with an iPhone and rotor that we manufacture right here in Texas.
The equipment investment is very low. Next, it has to be easy to use, our clients equip their own workforces to use InsideMaps, or they utilize other third-party service providers, and they have to be able to learn and use this equipment very quickly and be proficient.
And next is dependability. You cannot have a wasted truck role in this business. So, when we're talking about, let's say a rental home, if you are delayed one or two days in getting the photos and 3D tour that you need to get that home marketed, that costs our clients $60 a day in holding costs, so we have to be incredibly reliable.
And then the other side is just enterprise partnership, being able to assemble all the massive amounts of data that we collect and deliver that to our clients in a way that they can ingest it. And so understanding their back-end and being able to deliver through API so they can use this data efficiently.
- So what's changed to make InsideMaps interested in more mainstream customers like professional real estate photographers and 3D tour providers?
- Sure, Jörgen, do you want to talk a little bit about what's new with us? You're on mute.
- Yeah, so the past year we've been working a lot on our tech and a lot with machine learning. And what we have been able to do now lately is to push some of that technology to the device, to the extent where we have so much technology running on the iPhone that we can produce a 3D tour from the phone itself.
So that enables us to offer, I think, offer a really compelling platform for photographers having a future-proof iPhone that they can shoot their 3D tours with. DSLRs, I mean, point and shoot cameras have already been replaced by mobile phones and they are now also replacing DSLRs. With InsideMaps, we believe there is no need, and these other big bulky cameras will be pushed to a niche market.
And if you're doing more 3D tours and addressing a bigger market, the iPhone is the way to go. The other thing we have is also identified some features that we think photographers are looking for, like customizing the tours and so on.
But also our overall lower cost of both the hardware investment and the cost of processing the tours, I think is compelling for the photographers.
And then on top of that, we have some services that we provide for our enterprise customers that we believe can be interesting for photographers. We have blue-sky replacement and fast turn around of floor plans and other services.
And of course, another interesting development is the LiDAR now with iPhone 12, which allows us to do a very compelling birds-eye-view of the property using the iPhone 12 Pro LiDAR.
- I just got my iPhone 12 Pro, so I'm super-excited to take InsideMaps for a spin and understand how this LiDAR thing fits into real estate photography with InsideMaps. Gabe, how about showing us an InsideMaps 3D tour, if you could from the user's perspective of say someone who's looking to buy a house.
- Sure, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. I apologize if I have an abnormal amount of tabs open, that pretty much describes my life. And so here we go, what you're seeing here is the InsideMaps listing page.
So we create this property page for each one of the scans that have been performed, what's really unique about InsideMaps is with one scan and zero touch, this is what can be delivered back to our clients, and it's really all their marketing needs. And so, Dan, you asked why these enterprise clients choose InsideMaps?
Well, they want to be able to take a low-skill person, put them in a property for 35 minutes, and that person walks out with a complete package professional, visual assets without any post-production or any work on their side, and that's what we do.
And let me show you what it looks like. And so here; the property page customizable to our clients. That happens to be my wife, actually, who has a brokerage here in Texas.
We see 3D tours, HDR photos, video, and floor plans. And I'm going to go into each one of these assets individually. First, we'll look at the 3D tour. We'll start from the beginning.
So, with InsideMaps, you'll notice that the way a 3D tour can be navigated is with a pointer, using spin stations, just by clicking on circles that are in the tour, or they can click on the red dots, which are in the floor plan.
And so if you see on the top left here, this is a mini-map of the home, and each one of these red dots represents where a spin was taken.
And you'll notice that the density of the spin stations is probably a lot less than what you're used to with a 360 camera. InsideMaps doesn't need to scan every 10 feet.
Really, we just instruct our photographers to scan two scans in each room, one scan from the center because it's the best place to observe the room and another scan from a corner that has the best angle for a photograph, basically the place where you're going to see the most stuff.
So if I was going to take a still photo of this kitchen, this angle is much better than if I was right in the center of the kitchen trying to take pictures of the cabinets closeup. You'll notice InsideMaps works very nice, inside and out, including being in the sun.
And then you can toggle between floors up and down. So what'd you notice with InsideMaps is you get a high quality 3D tour and we feel that's important. There's a certain standard that needs to be met for 3D tours for our customers.
And we noticed that some tours that are captured with the 360 camera, you just can't get the resolution that is required for a high quality 3D tour, and InsideMaps is able to achieve that with our iPhone, and Jörgen will talk about that a little bit later.
Next, HDR photos. So from the 3D tour, we can capture high quality HDR images. We have this tool for both the photographer or customer to capture their own images, but we also procure the images for our clients.
And so if you choose a package that has procured images, we can deliver this package of 25 still photos or 15, whatever you require to you, the customer.
- So Gabe, for clarification, does that mean InsideMaps does the selection for you?
- Exactly, one of our trained operators will go through the home and select the best photos and capture them and deliver them in the listing page or API for enterprise customers
- I'm probably getting a little ahead of myself, but does the photographer have the option of choosing the pictures themselves?
- Certainly.
- Okay.
- Next, we'll look at the floor plans. So InsideMaps floor plans, you'll notice that they have furniture in them.
And what I mean by that is they have the toilets, they have the sinks, the cabinets, the names of the rooms. You can see where the windows are, where the doors are. This isn't just a floor plan, these are actually 3D models that are collapsed to the 2D representation of the floor plan.
These models are semantic, everything that you see here has attributes to them. The doors are doors, windows are windows.
The names of the rooms are generated by the scanner, they can be edited after the scan. InsideMaps is really smart, but we're not smart enough to know the difference between a family room, a living room, and a den.
And so we rely on our photographers to name those rooms. But if a room has a door and wasn't named, we infer that that's a closet. Okay. You'll notice here that we also have...
- I see an account of square footage on here?
- Yes. And so InsideMaps is very good at capturing the square footage of the home. We decoded the logic of GLA, Gross Livable Area, understanding spaces and rooms have certain attributes like a garage is a non-livable space, it would not be counted towards the Gross Livable Area of the home. Understanding void spaces, like when we think about the foyer on the second floor, right?
This particular house has a chandelier that comes down from the front door. This space would not be considered a livable area in the floor planner in our totals, but it's still shown on the floor plan.
And so we've decoded all of that logic to be able to deliver a very accurate GLA for our customers. Going back to the listing page, we also can capture videos from the 3D tour. I call these... Go ahead.
- Excuse me, I know you're about to play a video, and I just want to let our viewers know that frequently when we play videos through all the technology that we're doing to run WGAN-TV Live at 5, the video, which is probably silky-smooth on your end can be a little bit herky jerky on our show, so it's not a reflection of InsideMaps video that's a reflection of our technology used to do the show.
- Yes. Thank you, Dan. So yes, this video does play very smooth. And so we call these turbo tours, we liked them because they're fast, we try to keep them under a minute. They're very relevant, they get to the most important parts of the home.
They are definitely not a slide show, the viewer gets the experience of walking through the home because they are captured from the 3D tour.
Everything is in HDR, so we're not getting the issues like with typical video of poor lighting or the windows just blowing out the rest of the room because it's a video and you're changing the lighting environments.
They're also no, "Blair Witch Project," effect here of the shakes that you may get through a normal video. It just gives you what you really want to see.
We also liked these because our clients can download them in an MP4, which gives our customers a lot more options in how to share this content. They can put it into their social media, on their YouTube page. It isn't content that has to be hosted like a 3D tour on our website.
- When you began, I guess I would call that a single property website or a property website. Is that offered both in a branded and unbranded version, unbranded version for MLS?
- Yes, exactly, and so if you see like our share button here, you can copy and paste the branded link or the unbranded link.
And when we say branded, really, we mean taking the REALTORS' brand off of the content or not, but being able to brand these edit and brand right to your customers is a feature that our photographers really like and so does their customers.
- I see a location button, was there a map in this as well?
- Yes, there is. There's just a widget here with the map of where the property is.
- Okay. Is there anything else that you wanted to show on the front-end?
- That's our core deliverable.
- Okay, so maybe you or Jörgen can show us a little bit about the capture process of how this tour was created.
- Yes. Sure. So let me introduce you to our HERO as we call it, our rotator. It hosts your iPhone. So you slide your iPhone into the HERO it has a rechargeable battery that runs the two motors and the phone connects to the HERO using Bluetooth.
I will show you a quick demo, how it looks when it's turning around.
- Okay, Jörgen, it's a little bit off camera, if you could just maybe bring the, yep, that'd be great, thank you.
- Yeah.
- Even before you just take one more word, I have to say because I obviously have one too that you sent me, $1,000 plus iPhone, I just want to let you know that I felt like, okay, how am I going to feel when I put that phone in there and am I going to lose it?
And I felt like when it felt really secure, it fit tight. And I didn't feel like there's a risk that when this thing's rotating around that I'm going to lose my iPhone on a stone floor. So I just thought it was very well constructed and snapped in place.
- Yeah, it's one of the things we've been working on, making sure the motors are working, and making it really robust.
There's practical things too like you can charge your phone from the HERO while you're scanning, so that you can keep your phone up-to-date, so you're not losing too much juice on your phone.
Well, yeah, the app that we have, it controls the HERO using Bluetooth, while it's doing that, it's taking the pictures. So we're of course using the very good camera from Apple, taking advantage of whatever thing they have done for the cameras.
We're really standing on a giant here, all the noise reduction and auto-focused and things that they're doing with their cameras, color processing and so on. So, that's the practical thing.
- Let me just jump in here, I feel like this is something that we should talk about what the user experiences with this motor. So you see how it spins around, and one of the nice things about a camera that spins around is you can walk around with it.
You don't have to run away from the camera, hide, take a picture and then run back. And so the time that it takes for that phone to spin around, you really don't feel it as much because you're not having to leave the room and come back. You just simply walk around behind it. Good, Jörgen, sorry to interrupt.
- No problem. So I'm going to try to share now how it looks from the app point of view when you're scanning. So I hope you can see my screen now.
- [Dan] Yes.
- This is a screen grab from, I did just a short scan to demonstrate some of the features that we have in the app to speed up the scanning procedures.
So here's the scan I did of the living room, and it shows the panel that was processed on device. What you see here is what our machine learning sees.
So you can see a number of things here, including that they detected a few of the doors and that's key then to make sure that we can scan in a really efficient way.
This is like somewhat of a glimpse behind the scenes of what the app is actually seeing from the scanned data. And what you do with the app is that you tell it somewhat where you're going, at least approximately where you're going, and then you're adding new spins to the procedures. In this case, I'm adding an office here to the already scanned positions.
This is an interesting learning experience from us. We ask if the lens is clean, it's something that happens with our iPhones, but it's things that were figured out using the iPhones, but you probably in some cases need to clean your lens.
So let me go back here. Yeah, so here it shows you where you're placing to try and put from what position you told the apps.
This is just to verify that you're putting the tripod in approximately the position where you told the app to position,
Actually, it's going to align the spin here with the rest of the spins. So it processed the pano, and it also figured out the structure of that office that we just added. And you can click then and go into, and look at this office.
And here's then, you can see the previous count position here, and you can like test the drive the tour already on the device.
So here the app actually then connected the rooms, not using line-of-sight, but actually using the doors that were shared between these two rooms.
Yeah, another thing we have in the app is that you can look at this information in different ways. If we scroll back a little bit, I can highlight that these circles you see on the screen are recommendations that the machine learning engine has detected our good scan positions to continue.
So all these green fans you see are doors that have been detected. So the app is helping you to guide you through the scanning procedure. And there's help, how close you should space the spins. If there are occluded walls, it's going to help you on that.
- In that menu, on the top right that has five or six different options while scanning, why would you choose one versus the other options and then why would you pick one versus the other while you're spinning?
- Yeah. So the color shows the type of rooms. So this can be good to make sure you identify the rooms correctly and choose the correct type like bedrooms and kitchens and so on, so it gives the color coded version of the rooms. The outline is just showing the different rooms.
- I'm sorry, you're going a little bit fast for me. So I'm going to say the reason it knows that it's a bedroom - as the photographer - I've actually told - when it's asked me - what kind of room is this? I've said it's a bedroom.
- Correct, that's correct.
- When you're color coding, it's not that it figured out that it was a bedroom. I actually identified as a photographer. That's a bedroom that I'm about to do with 360.
- Correct, but you can self-test yourself. You'd be surprised how many times we get scans for everything, it's an office in the whole scan.
The outline shows the wall, so you can get a rough floor plan view of all the things. This one it's called covis, it's a short for co-visibility.
So what you can see here is how machine learning has connected these two rooms. So there's not the straight connection between those two spins, but actually through a door in this case. And yeah, that's actually the last one I have on the video.
So the last one shows a textured mesh instead of the point cloud actually, the mesh that you would expect.
- I guess I should point out for the purpose of show and tell today, you're actually doing this off of the video, but this is kind of a simulation of what a photographer would see while scanning, and then have a choice of whether to look at it as all solid, or mesh, or outline view, et cetera.
- That's correct. So if we look at that tour that I just grabbed, this is how it would look then with the connection through the door, so instead of having a connection through to spin, it's actually going to go through the door.
So you would click on the door to go to the living room. And this is one of the key things we have done is really to make the scanning experience really fast, to more or less be able to capture a whole house using one spin per room, maybe two for the larger rooms.
We don't put a limit really on the number of spins, you can put as many spins as you want to make a really smooth or many different vantage points. But for certain customers, you can really get in and out of the property really fast.
- Jörgen, we could just go back for a second where you were showing that door. And again, for clarification where perhaps with another platform, I might shoot in the middle of the room, shoot at the doorway and then shoot at the middle of the other room.
If I hearing you correctly, what you've done is to say, no, no, you could really just do the shot in the middle of this room, the middle of the next room, but the locator for showing the next scan is not going to show up where the thinness, it's going to show up where the doorway is.
- Correct.
- Essentially, I'm going to select the doorway to go into the next room, but I'll actually land on the 360 in the middle of the room.
- Yeah, so you don't have to put the spin, within some apps, you don't have to put the spin every six feet or in the doorway.
So you can make a tour that is connected through the doors without actually having to put the spin there. But if you want the spin in the door to make the transition even smoother than you can, we gave you more options, so to say.
- Okay, so if I want to be able to shoot a 2,500, 3,500 square foot house even faster, I don't have to have line of sight, I literally can just put the scan in the middle of the room of each room and that'll be fine, and then if I'm using the tour for the purpose of HDR photography, then I'll put the camera in one of the corners of the room for that purpose.
- That's correct.
- Okay, is that 360 that I take in the corner of the room going to show up in the tour is an option for someone to stand there as well, or is that just used for the HDR photos?
- So once you have done the tour, it will be shown in the tour, but we do have the option of hiding spins in the tour as a photographer, you can go in and hide individual spins. So it's up to you if you want to customize that and hide those spins later.
- Okay, in this mode, can you also look at the dollhouse view?
- Yes, this is done using machine learning, so this is not LiDAR. So this is more of a rectified dollhouse view of this thing that was processed on the iPhone and that same information is used to, yeah, you would see a cursor here to follow the walls and also used to create the transitions between the rooms and within rooms if you have multiple scans in the same room.
- I'd like to add, well, Jörgen has shown us a lot of the behind the scenes and the different functions of how the machine works.
Most of our customers are not sophisticated photographers, photographers, I think are such a unique balance of an artist and a technician. They have to handle really tricky equipment sometimes. Most of our customers are thinking more like an inspector, which might be a non-digital native who at first rejects technology altogether.
And they have to be able to pick InsideMaps up and very quickly learn it and go through a home and be successful with complete consistency.
And that's the real feel that you have for this app. It is super-fast and really easy to use and very difficult to make mistakes or get lost in.
And so basically, I say that your first home you're figuring it out, the second one, you're a little awkward. And by the time you've scanned your third home, your rate just trains a workforce and replicates yourself.
- Okay, cool. Gabe, can you show us the back-end, the content management system as a photographer? Jörgen mentioned that I could hide a scan for example ... where I pick out the HDR pictures, et cetera, is that something you could show us?
- Sure, sharing my screen back with you. Okay, back to our same project here, we can go into the edit listing mode and everything that you see in this listing page, you can edit, so I can click on the agent information.
And right now, we see this as branded to the agent. You can brand this for your own photography company if that's the brand that you want to put forward, same thing with changing the address or even the title of the project from the 3D tour, just hitting our edit button.
We can go into the 3D tour tools. I can set a new starting point for the 3D tour. I can set a floor start point, I can even change the splash screen for that should be. Okay, going back from that. I can also edit my HDR photos. So going to my photo capture tool.
- With these pictures that are here, these images, were these, let's say that procurement process you were describing, they were automatically selected by InsideMaps, and that was the default as the tour was delivered?
- Actually, I selected those ones. But, if you choose the auto procure photos, you'll just pick a package of how many photos you want and our team will select those for you. And then as the photographer, you still have the ability to come in and capture additional photos and, or even delete ones that you don't like.
- Okay, so you're showing us how to actually take a photo or a snapshot within the tour itself.
- Exactly, exactly, so from right here, I could say, this is the photo that I want to take and just click and boom. And now, that'll be added to your carousel on the bottom, see where the photo is, it's uploading and on the bottom.
And so now, that's a photo that will be in a carousel that you can deliver to your client. All right, and then in your edit mode, you can also reorganize your photos to see how you can change around which photo you want to see first or last.
- And I imagine this is a little bit snappier when you're not tying up your wifi doing WGAN-TV Live at 5.
- Yeah, and, or under pressure. But yeah, by the way, this is a heavy tool. I mean, these are high quality images that you're moving around. And so, it works really well. And yeah, it is slowed just a bit over our video conference. And then you can save that.
- Do you have a choice of files of image size?
- Yes, you can change the image sizes when you capture them with your aspect ratio. And then when you can download these, and so you see a download all or download all, no watermark for your branded and unbranded.
This is really important for our property management customers.
There's a lot of scams out there, where they'll take a rental property photo and put a Craigslist listing and start collecting deposits for that property. And so our property management groups want to watermark all of their photos and then have the option of having non-watermark photos if they do wish to list on MLS.
And it's really great, this is like an org setting, once you have uploaded a watermark, it'll stay with all of your photos and any customers that you put in that organization. And you can even watermark it for your own photography company if that's what you'd like to do.
- Okay, is the video automatically generated or is that something you order?
- You order it from us. And so you'd say, "We'd like a video," and InsideMaps makes that video for you. We do that because the tool itself to make the videos, it can be a little bit tricky and we just want to control our customer experience down the line.
We may want to open that tool up to the photographer, excuse me, photographers because I think they would be comfortable using that tool. But for the everyday user, we don't want to confuse them with that much technology right now.
- Okay, on those floor plans, I have a choice of metric US inches and feet fitting.
- Yep, can change it from metric, US. You can change the fonts, you can change the labels. If you would like to hide the room dimensions, and you just wanted to show the names of the rooms and not rep to the measurements, you could certainly do that as well.
- So do I have control over renaming a room?
- Yes, you do. And so just from that room itself, you can click on the room attribute and then rename it. And you can even do where that label actually exists in that floor plan, and so you can drag it.
- And so I imagine I could add a logo to this if I wanted, if I had a different disclaimer text I wanted to add, I could select, can I select a color palette for the agent, the brokerage?
- For the logo, everything in the floor plan is black and white right now.
- [Dan] Okay.
- All right.
- Anything else to show on the floor plan?
- Nope, that's most of the floor plan tools right now, and I'm trying to figure out how to escape out of this and not my Zoom because my Zoom is good.
- [Dan] Yes, Gabe. Thank you.
- Great, all right.
- Okay, how was the address set for the map?
- Through geolocation.
- Lemme ask it a little differently, so it was a photographer when you begin creating a tour, I imagine you add an address for that property and that address is carried through to Google Maps. And so if I put the correct address in, when I begin creating my tour, then that map is going to end up being correct.
- Exactly
- Actually, yeah, that turns on GEO location when you're scanning, so you don't even have to enter the address in most cases.
- And I have an option to override that...
- You do, yeah.
- ...in the InsideMaps Content Management System. Okay, cool.
- Exactly, so sometimes the first scan is in the middle of the road and you don't know if that's the property behind you or in front. And so yeah, you do want to check that address and make sure. And if you edit it, it'll carry through to the type project.
- Okay, was there anything else on the back-end that you wanted to show us?
- I think that's good for the video now, but I can tell you that we have a full, what looks like a CRM view that if you're an enterprise user, you can have organizations and sub-organizations and view all of your projects. And I can actually give you a little glimpse into that right now.
- Okay, so as a photographer, I have multiple clients, so I have a way to keep a logo for one particular agent a logo, a photo, et cetera, for one agent, so I can quickly apply it going forward to her tours versus...
- Exactly, and I can show you what that looks like here. Let me make sure I'm sharing my screen back to you.
- So Jörgen, it looks like there's a lot of magic that's going on behind the scenes to make all this happen, so congratulations, this is really, I imagine it's hard work to make it look so easy of how you're doing that back end to assemble all these 360s that are getting captured.
- Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that we have been doing.
- Okay, Dan, are you seeing my InsideMaps homepage?
- Yes.
- And so if I'm logged in to InsideMaps, I can look at my organizations and see all the different organizations that I have. Okay, I can go and look at...
- So an organization might be, it's this brokerage, it's that brokerage, it's that agent, it's that client?
- Exactly, exactly. Or it's this client in Atlanta and this client in Dallas, right?
And so each one of those organizations can have their own rules and standards for how the floor plan should be formatted or what the logos are. And then you can see all of your projects in a thumbnail or lists and search for individual projects, check the status, update the permissions.
- Okay. Other things to show us on the back-end?
- Not that I think the user group will find it very interesting on this call, but we can have it in trying breakout.
- Fair enough. You were showing us this with the, an iPhone is the creation tool. Can you use a Ricoh Theta Z1 and Insta360 One X2, any other 360 cameras?
- Yes.
- So we support 360 cameras. So right now, we support the Theta cameras. We're using the open spherical API to grab the picture. So we might expand it, but we have tested, and we are officially supporting a Ricoh Theta Z1 and a Ricoh Theta V.
- V as in Victor, yeah?
- Yeah, we support that one. And also SC I believe.
- Okay.
- So that's a part of the cloud processing, we offer it out.
- Okay, at the present time, not the Insta360 line of cameras.
- We officially don't support it, it might still work since they're probably using the same protocol, but we officially don't support it yet, we haven't tested with that camera yet.
- Okay, I just like to weigh in a little bit with a kind of an editorial opinion here because I think is probably going to fall into two camps. There's going to be photographers that say, "Hey, I have a Ricoh Theta Z1, that's what I want to shoot. Why would I want to shoot with an iPhone?"
And I guess I should probably turn this back to you. But I certainly, my impression is if you're rotating an iPhone and taking whatever it was 16 or 18 pictures, the quality of the photography is actually going to be exceptional.
- Yeah, so I mean, first of all, the camera on the iPhone is very, very good now, it has three lenses on the new phones, and it has a lot of magic that Apple is adding to it.
There is noise reduction, there is all this optical stabilization and auto-focus, and of course we stand on top of that, and we add our own magic to that.
And one of the things we do is of course, to create the 360 from all these pictures that we take. And actually, it's taking more than the things that you see because each time the HERO stops, we take multiple exposures, normally exposed and overexposed.
And we use those images to create the final 360. There is also an overlap between them, and just so when we're choosing a pixel for the output, there's actually more than 12 pictures to take from the raw data so to say.
So we use that to pick the best color from those, but also to even reduce the noise even more in that we can see the same information, the same sport in the real world we see from multiple pictures.
Yeah, and then we add our own magic, which includes this, getting the best colors from the images.
We also do some optical flow stitching to really bring the images together without too many stitching artifacts. So there's a combination of picking the stitch point, so where the crossover happens, so that happens in less obvious areas if we need to.
And then we also have the flows, which tries to minimize the stitching errors. We have a choice to when scanning what resolution you have, so you can actually go up to 8K and what that means, it's the final output has six cube sites with 8k times 8K, so that's more than 300 megapixel.
It's a bit heavy-weight to do that, but you have the option to go up really high. The regular resolution is around 25 megapixels when delivered in the final content. There are intermediate representations to which we use when we do photo capture. So if you do a photo capture behind the scenes, we're using a little bit higher resolution too.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, so to answer the question, like, why should you use the iPhone? We have, I think, much higher quality, less noise, so you get better pictures. And we also feel that the whole platform relying on the iPhone, it's a more future proof thing.
You can quickly switch your iPhone. And historically, it's taken us only one week or two to support the new iPhone, and actually produce a new holder for those iPhones. So when you're switching to iPhone, you can rely on having InsideMaps support for those new great cameras.
- I want to speak to the We Get Around Network Forum Community specifically on this point because there's probably two camps.
One is using a Ricoh Theta Z1. Your workflow is probably going to be faster, you can zoom in, take that shot, pick up and move. On the other hand, if you're using an iPhone with this rotation and everything Jörgen has described, your image quality is actually going to be phenomenal.
And I think if you put the image quality side-by-side, and maybe Gabe, you could work on coming up with, this is a Ricoh Theta Z1, this is a iPhone 12 Pro side-by-side: same location to be able to see the difference, I think that would be actually tremendously helpful for our Community if that's possible. Because I think sometimes we get fixated on gear and we say, "No, I have a Ricoh Theta Z1.
I bought it to shoot 360s, I'm going to shoot it to use InsideMaps." And certainly you can, but just pause for a moment because even though this rotator, this InsideMaps HERO rotator, it's not a big clunky camera, just the simple thing that kind of rotates, it's going to end up producing a phenomenal image quality.
And I think just to take that pause for a moment and say, if image quality is something that's really important to you, your workflow may be a little bit slower, but you'll end up with phenomenal 360s. And then I imagine Jörgen and Gabe; photographers if they want to edit their 360s, and load them back up into the platform, that's an option?
- Yeah, that's something we are supporting our customers today. So we're also planning to offer it up for this type of projects, marketing projects, they're able to edit and we have heard that that's something that they want to do.
There will be some restrictions, they need to keep the same file name and they can rotate things around because otherwise things will be weird.
Another thing I want to highlight though, in the scanning, even though you're scanning with a Theta, there's still time where you're running inside and outside of the rooms, you still need to hide. So yeah, it might be a little bit slower, but it's not super-dramatic.
- Yeah.
- Another reason I just want to mention too, we didn't get the chance there. The new iPhone with the LiDAR is also another reason to go with an iPhone. And if you allow me to share the screen here, I can show you what we have been able to do with the LiDAR, which...
- That would be great. While you're setting up, Jörgen, I just want to mention one of those things that's just so amazing is by building your platform around an iPhone, I don't know about other photographers, but every year, I upgrade to the next phone.
So that means when you get your next phone, you essentially are updating your camera that you're using for InsideMaps.
And you're not buying a separate camera and making it, it's just, no, you update your phone every year or every two years, and that means you're getting the benefit of whatever improvements come to the iPhone are ending up paired with InsideMaps.
So I have this very big bulky camera and it's used for one thing, and I don't really have a reason to update it. But if I do, it's totally separate from my iPhone. So then I got two devices to update. No, no, I just naturally update my iPhone every year. And so I get the benefit of that with InsideMaps.
- Yeah, I think that's a very good point.
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