Matterport ShopTalk #35Video: Scanning the George Eastman Museum | Video courtesy of the Matterport YouTube Channel | 7 April 2022

Transcript (video above)

[00:00:02]
Amir Frank: Welcome everybody looks at a couple of people starting to trickle in. Thank you very much for attending our shop talk today. Very excited about this shop talk. I really like to encourage people to see these webinars as a meetup. We're all like-minded and obviously you have questions and part of the same community. By all means, talk amongst yourselves, ask each other questions using the chat window as far as questions to either myself or Elizabeth, I do ask that you put those in the Q&A. Today, super excited to have Elizabeth Chiang with us, who is from Eastman Kodak museum. Great. Elizabeth, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today. Really appreciate that.

[00:00:48]
Elizabeth Chiang: Thank you so much for having me. I am excited to be here today. I'm from the George Eastman museum in Rochester, New York, upstate New York. Feel free to look me up. I love to show off the museum and all of the things that we're doing there.

[00:01:03]
Amir Frank: Can you tell us what exactly it is that you do at the Eastman Museum?

[00:01:07]
Elizabeth Chiang: Sure. Yes. My formal title, I guess is museum photographer and it's a bit of a catch-all. My main goals or my main responsibilities are ongoing digitization of the various collections we have at the museum. We have five collecting departments, the library, the photography collection, moving images technology, and what we call the legacy collection, which is everything related to George Eastman as a person. The museum is actually an amalgam of two buildings. There's the historic house and then attach to that is a museum with the vaults of the archives and exhibition space. I do digitization. I also do a little bit of event coverage for various events that happen at museum. And I do a lot of documentation of the exhibitions that come through of the things that happened at the museum. Part of that, we're just new in these last few years is that we've always done exhibition installation images of various exhibitions, so still images, but recently we've added virtual tours to the mix. This is where this comes into play.

[00:02:24]
Amir Frank: Yeah, very exciting. That's great. Basically we have a lot of photographers and enthusiasts and obviously know everybody in that community knows the name George Eastman. What I would like to focus on today is a couple of things. One, I wanted to share my screen and look at the models that you created for the museum, as well as talk about the use case and how you're using it. Because I think we've got a lot of photographers with us today. And people who are incorporating Matterport into their own portfolio of work, not just using their DSLR anymore. Let me go ahead and do that and just share my screen real quick. Everybody can do this. You don't have to do it now, but I definitely highly encourage going to, you can see it on my address bar here, Eastman.org/virtual-tours, where you can find the different tours. You've got three of them on the site right now, is that right?

[00:03:28]
Elizabeth Chiang: For those of these three ones of non exhibitions, and then for each exhibition past and current, we also have the tours of each accident,.

[00:03:38]
Amir Frank: Very cool, that's great. An archive of the exhibitions that you've had. That's great. I just want to go into the mansion tour. I think this is one that I looked at and really liked. Obviously you've got things matter tags, more information about this. It looks like you've got some audio in here, and some stuff here. That's great. What I wanted to ask you about is obviously as a photographer and one who's been doing these Matterport models for your museum, is there anything that you think about as you're going through the space in what you want to capture and how you want to capture it?

[00:04:32]
Elizabeth Chiang: I guess the first thing that pops my mind is I've been at the museum for coming up seven years so I walked through this all the areas pretty much every day.

[00:04:47]
Elizabeth Chiang: I've had the pleasure of working with a really great team. You might notice here that there aren't any stanchions and it seems like everything's been tidied up and we do a lot of prep work before we record any of our virtual tours. It's not just me going in and wondering around. It involves the exhibition staff, the curatorial staff to certain extent. Also object prep to help move things with facility, the maintenance department to help us tidy and clean everything. It really helps to be familiar with the space beforehand. And they know all of the mixing crannies of the points of interest, I should say.

[00:05:36]
Elizabeth Chiang: I feel like there are some scan points, I should say that wouldn't be typical, but they are spots where we notice that people like to stand to take very iconic images, or like they're just a good point of view to see this space. I like to include those because we think of these tours as, she can't make it in person and you can get the feel of it online. And if you were in person, you'll be able to see all these spots.

[00:06:14]
Amir Frank: Yeah, I know. I like this one, especially right here. It looks like you have this one pushed really deep into the corner so you can have this perspective looking down because I'm sure when people are actually there at the museum, they come up to this area or the other one that I was at close just to have that perspective. To keep that in mind, and offer that to your virtual visitors as well, I think it's brilliant. This is basically how it was decorated for the holiday season. This last year?

[00:06:52]
Elizabeth Chiang: Yes. This was last year holiday season. You might notice it's a little bit different. We didn't go all out with removing statues and everything this time around. But we also did use this particular model for a seek and find. We had little wrapped up gifts hidden throughout in the actual space. And while we recorded, we made sure to record spots where people were walking through digital space that they could find these things. And so it was a nice thing. We didn't give people a chance to visit them, to do a seek and find without having to be on-site. We weren't down employee helping last years.

[00:07:38]
Amir Frank: Is that is that what the QR codes are for?

[00:07:43]
Elizabeth Chiang: QR codes are mostly for the audio tour.

[00:07:47]
Amir Frank: Okay. I actually tried this. I can put my phone up to the screen right now and actually use that QR code, which is neat. I don't know if that might come in handy to include the virtual visitors in some way or another, so they could also partake in the audio tour as they're virtually going through. I know there are ways of embedding an audio tour into the model itself. That's another way, you don't have to do it the same way. And this area in this tour is closed off from visitors.

[00:08:30]
Elizabeth Chiang: Specifically for day to day visitors it is closed off.

[00:08:33]
Amir Frank: Okay. The other tour that I was able to go into this area, I didn't actually show it, but I've been there before. I looked through the models. That's not typical, this is more typical.

[00:08:46]
Elizabeth Chiang: Yeah, what's the standards more typical. We wanted to treat the other one without the standards as not only a tour but also a record of the dimension at the time for our own archives and for document keeping and that kind of thing.

[00:09:04]
Amir Frank: Forget about Matterport for a second. This is to me just amazing. You don't really get to experience mansions from that time period. Very often to see it even even virtually not being there, I can only imagine what it's like there, this is really impressive.

[00:09:32]
Amir Frank: This was his house. This is where he lived.

[00:09:35]
Elizabeth Chiang: It was. Yes.

[00:09:37]
Amir Frank: Let's talk a little bit about your use case and how the museum uses it because I definitely want to encourage everybody on the line to understand that real estate isn't the only play with Matterport. There are so many different use cases in a museum is really brilliant use case in my mind as you can see. You're walking through here and you're really experiencing this history. How are you as a museum benefiting from these models?

[00:10:08]
Elizabeth Chiang: Definitely noticed a huge uptake in online visitors. My numbers aren't super accurate as of today, but it's over 14,000 and counting individual visitors to the online tours page. There's the added bonus of that. I think everybody knows in the last three years have been jarring for a lot of museums and galleries, and archives. This is part of our digital engagement strategy to be able to offer people a chance to see the museum without being on site necessarily. A lot of school groups have used this as part of their learning toolkits too and sometimes difficult to get large groups to travel. This is a chance for school groups or different clubs and groups to be able to visit places that we normally wouldn't have a chance to visit. Insofar as the exhibition spaces too, we've found that it's not just for documenting what's on our walls and what's in the collection and stuff like that, but it's also great for the artists themselves to be able to shares with their fans, with their friends, with their family to show that this is my work. It's part of his son exhibitions currently going on. Again, sometimes not everyone can come visit in person, not everyone can make to the opening, but it's nice to be able to share that to the world.

[00:11:51]
Amir Frank: Yeah. You mentioned also the exhibits that come through, and you've in a way archive them in this virtual space. You can often, for people who have missed it member tours, and we've talked about offering tours of parts of the facility that are not open to the general public. That can also be really cool use case.

[00:12:21]
Elizabeth Chiang: Yeah. Absolutely. We've done, I believe, two behind the scenes member Tours. One was the photo studio where I spend most of my time case, and the other one is one of our off-site facilities. Those locations are there in the staff area, so they're not typically open to the general public to walk around, but instead added benefit of being a member of the museum, we wanted to give something a little more behind the scenes special to the membership. We recorded both of those phases. I'll use the studio things. I recorded the studio, dressed it up, made sure that wasn't anything weird pieces of map board hanging around and stuff like that. Then use that model take people on a tour of the space. It was great because we were able to reach a lot more members who are out of town or upcountry.

[00:13:22]
Elizabeth Chiang: It was just one of those things where typically if we were to do something like this in person being numbers of packing a bunch of people into a working spaces tough too, so we be limiting numbers, but with a virtual behind the scenes tour and had a larger reach.

[00:13:41]
Amir Frank: Just wanted to take a quick peek at the last one. Of course, everybody should take advantage and go here to look at all the models to leisure. This is the lab where you guys are doing a lot of the archiving.

[00:13:58]
Elizabeth Chiang: This is the conservation labs. This is where we do a lot of conservation work. That spans from repairing damages to cleaning pieces too. We do different types of imaging. There's spectral imaging, there's multispectral imaging, and there's a little bit of research too that goes into testing this area, so the conservation lab is called the scientific area. Things like that happen. Yeah. It is fantastic. We've got a head conservative and assistant conservator and they take care of all of the collections, so anything from books to papers to silver gelatin photographs, to daguerreotypes, to things on glass, even cameras. There's leather, there's brass, there's all sorts of stuff. You can imagine with the bulk of our museum's collection, we have a large section that's 19th century and early 20th. As with all collection, there's deterioration that happens over time, so a lot of the work that's done in the conservation lab is about mitigate that type of deterioration to make the object safe to handle to safe to display.

[00:15:26]
Amir Frank: Got it. All of these, but I think this one, especially like you said, would be really great for education purposes taking school, school trips, especially anyone learning about photography. This would be a really cool thing to look at and get a virtual tour through these spaces.

[00:15:49]
Elizabeth Chiang: I don't want to speak too early, but I think there are plans to do behind the stuff fuller behind the scenes tour guided by the conservation labs, so they'll be able to highlight certain things that they're working on or different areas of interests.

[00:16:06]
Amir Frank: Is there more to the lab area than what we're seeing here in these two rooms.

[00:16:13]
Elizabeth Chiang: It's mainly these two rooms.

[00:16:15]
Amir Frank: Very cool. Loved going through these spaces. Great. Thank you very much. That was super-helpful. Let's go ahead and tackle some questions because I do see a lot of them are coming in. First question is, what camera and related tech are you using to capture this? I think correct me if I'm wrong, this was done with Matterport Pro2.

[00:16:40]
Elizabeth Chiang: We're using the Matterport Pro1.

[00:16:45]
Elizabeth Chiang: The Matterport platform, so it's pretty much. It's an all-in-one solution. Let me prior to us getting into virtual tours. We had done some preliminary things here and there, and we talked about developing our own in-house platform and all of that thing. But when we came across Matterport, it seemed like it was given that in many museums and smaller institutions too, there's always that struggle with time and resources and how much you can put into stuff like developing in-house days. We found the metaphor. It's working great for us. It's doing what we needed to do.

[00:17:30]
Amir Frank: Quick question about how somebody, because again, we've a lot of photographers, if they do want to approach a museum with this service offering Matterport and the benefits that you talked about offering education tours to schools and so on and so forth. Who's the right person to talk to in a museum organization? What do you think the best way would be to approach that? You guys are doing it in house, but other museums probably not going to have that ability.

[00:18:07]
Elizabeth Chiang: Good question.

[00:18:11]
Amir Frank: A suggestion.

[00:18:15]
Elizabeth Chiang: I will say as somebody who's within the museum, I worked with all departments. I guess it depends on the goals of the museum. If their goal is mostly towards marketing engagement in a particular time frame, then I would say maybe reach out to marketing and engagement team. But if their goals are more geared towards collection strategies, then maybe reaching up curators, collection managers all possibility too. But if it's say if it's more of an institution that has more conservation oriented goals and it depends on the museum. I guess, as someone who's on the inside, I would say a lot of people who have a stake in how the museum is presented to the world.

[00:19:07]
Amir Frank: Yeah.

[00:19:08]
Elizabeth Chiang: Right off the top of my head though, I think the outward facing want us definitely marketing and engagement since they do have an out most places with it at marketing engagement team have a outward-facing presence. This would fall under that umbrella easily.

[00:19:22]
Amir Frank: Then from there you can say, Oh, by the way, you can also use it in these other use cases, e-commerce in your gift shop or whatever you can start making stuff up that would work for whatever that museums needs on. Like you said everyone has their set of priority levels. Start with marketing aspects, reaching out, expanding your reach, not just with local people who can come in visitors in town, but also anybody online can now really visit your facility. Do you find that you've been able to add members to your member base? People who are not in New York and in the area, are they just virtual? Or do you think that's still too early for that?

[00:20:21]
Elizabeth Chiang: Good question? I don't have a formal answer for that. I know that we have had an uptake in membership, so I don't know if that's entirely based on newly offering virtual tours. I'd like to think that the virtual tours have helped, but we've always had many members from around the globe too, so it might be a little too early to say definitively at virtual towards the driving factor.

[00:20:52]
Amir Frank: Let's see what else we have here. How much do you adjust height of the camera for specific artworks or do you keep it uniform throughout? Go ahead.

[00:21:03]
Elizabeth Chiang: That's a great question. Thank you. Typically I keep it at about eye level, so I guess I level is different for every client, but be the recommended height level that Matterport training is recommended. However, in the case of things in-betweens, particularly, I will lower the camera so that it focuses down into the vitreous so that if someone were to walk into that spot, they would see it as if they were seeing it in-person? Yeah, there's a little bit of adjustment to, I don't want to say confidence, I guess to make it as realistic as possible for someone walking through the digital space.

[00:21:51]
Amir Frank: Normally people would be at their height, but like you said, if they are coming up to something that they would normally ducked down or lower, such as get a better look at it. Will there be any persistent audio tour features so someone can continue roaming as they listen? I know there are third party companies, so we've got platform partners who can integrate full audio tours into your Matterport model. I don't know if that's something that you know actually Elizabeth, but we have a platform partners that as you're walking through, different audio tracks can start playing, so It's aware of your location within the virtual space, and it plays whatever audio needs to be playing. Someone talking about whatever it is you're looking at at the time, which is really beneficial, especially in a museum use-case. Something definitely to think about for anybody who's looking to talk to museums, that's definitely something available. Is there anything you do that can feed it into your SEO for the people who view the tours? Are you guys at Eastman? Looking at SEO and how the tours are and the fact that people stay longer in a tour, that helps. But is that something that you guys are actively engaged in and really trying to optimize as much as possible the level of search engine optimization and marketing value out of their tours?

[00:23:30]
Elizabeth Chiang: I want to say it's a yes and no. We're still pushing the physical activation after main thing. I want to say for now, here's the starting about 2020 or something.

[00:23:50]
Elizabeth Chiang: I want to say at the moment yes or no. It's not the only thing that we're driving forward. The goal is still to bring visitors into museum, to have people on site visit and all that thing. This was a necessary but also a cherry on top of it extra things. I don't know if I have fully answers the question, but that's where we're at. I feel like we are still a little early in the game having only been doing this seriously for about just over a year.

[00:24:30]
Amir Frank: Would you have your virtual tours as a lead into actually coming in? I mean, obviously your end goal is to have them physically come in to the museum and not just become this only virtual space. Do you use it as a tease in a way. Here's a part of what we have to offer. If you want to see more, you've got to come in thing.

[00:24:58]
Elizabeth Chiang: No, I don't think they were using this as a teaser at all. The full exhibitions are online and the full mentioned tour, it's online so visitors, when they go on the site they're welcome to peruse and browse and walk-through at their leisure.

[00:25:18]
Elizabeth Chiang: It's an addition to the way that we're documenting what we're doing in the physical space. The bonus of that is that yes, it does increase viewership in certain ways. I am not 100 percent sure if that's the sole goal of what we're doing with the virtual tours. It's part and parcel of the larger pictures.

[00:25:40]
Amir Frank: Got it. It makes perfect sense. What Matterport, subscription level do you have when it comes to you archive digital twins. Do you host them on your own Matterport account? Or do you outsource that? I think you guys have your own Matterport account. Do not dealing with an outsourced account.

[00:26:00]
Elizabeth Chiang: We do have our own Matterport account not entirely sure what the subscription level is so this would be something by marketing engagement team take care. It didn't work out and they got to deal with the paperwork and such. But yes, we do have our own Matterport account so we are mutating our own access to all of these things.

[00:26:24]
Amir Frank: Brilliant. Sorry Darwin. We want to get to know what level of subscription we have. What considerations went in to the thought of 360 walkthroughs as archived documentation? Have you considered long-term access to the files over decades? Have you guys had any of those meetings about I don't personally see any reason why they would go away at anytime, but archiving any assets may be from the digital twins.

[00:26:59]
Elizabeth Chiang: That is a fantastic question and definitely something especially in a museum atmosphere. We talked about extensively. We're not the first museum to venture into virtual tours, whether with this platform or another one. I think many places have done it before. What prompted us to do it was March 2020, museum be close to on physical visitors, things up a little bit for our community engagement and all that thing. We wavered a lot, I must say, honestly, there are great arguments on both sides. You make these tours, you have to keep them in perpetuity, there's all of these additional assets. There's the 3D model itself, there's the individual scans and all that and you need server space, you need someone to manage the digital assets that come from all of this. We also knew too that there wouldn't be a perfect answer and we could talk indefinitely about the pros and the cons and this and that and we may never come to a great solution. We decided that we were just going to go for it that knowing right after that it started off as we want to get to garbled here. We started off not using the Matterport pro one. We actually used an off the shelf 360 camera and we did a couple of early tours with that, knowing that equality was okay, but it wasn't fantastic, but it gave us something and then from there, we were able to make a case for applying for grant to get a map or camera and then a fuller subscription to continue to do this once we were able to show the museum administration that this is something that is doable, that it's feasible. Again, progress over perfection, I guess we ended up with that is that we need to do something and there's no harm in testing something, seeing if it works and then being also fully aware of that, yes, we have built in more space on our internal servers and our backup service to be able to store the models. We've opened the box for this now, so now we're in it. I hope that fully answers some of the question.

[00:29:39]
Amir Frank: That's great, but it sounds like you did it because of the pandemic obviously, which I think definitely advanced the whole case for having a digital twin of your space or whatever it is that you want probably several years. But now, like you said, membership is up and more engagement and people are spending time in the virtual tours and it's providing interested parties with a way of experiencing it before they actually get there to see it firsthand, they can get a much better idea of the facility this way versus pictures and the blog ways of the past I suppose. This is something that you're saying you're going to stick with. This is not something that as soon as everything opens up and we're officially back to normal, whatever that new normal is going to be. You don't see this is going away anytime soon?

[00:30:43]
Elizabeth Chiang: No, I think we're definitely going to be sticking with it.

[00:30:51]
Elizabeth Chiang: It's actually a wonderful in terms of accessibility for people to preview the space so that they know what to expect when they're here, navigating physically or to know there may be things about the space step are navigable for them physically or something like that. That is one of the other parts of this is that giving people a preview of the spaces is actually a great thing because having random surprises is. Sometimes surprises are good, but sometimes surprises aren't great.

[00:31:30]
Elizabeth Chiang: They are previews, but they're not close previews, they're definitely previews to allow people to experience it and to know what they're getting in.

[00:31:39]
Amir Frank: We mentioned, member tours of areas that are not open to the general public. But also, like you said getting the preview of space and I think just getting you more excited about it, more excited about seeing at firsthand.

[00:31:56]
Elizabeth Chiang: Definitely for sure with the photography exhibitions that are up. There's nothing quite like looking at an exhibition in-person, seeing team print, seeing books, seeing bound volumes, seeing things in-person is something very visceral about that something very unique. But this is enough to say that a digital twin or digital online tour can't try to emulate some of that.

[00:32:35]
Elizabeth Chiang: We're definitely going to be continuing with excess that's for sure because I think we've started and it's hard to stop.

[00:32:42]
Amir Frank: Some folks who would argue and I've definitely heard plenty of counter arguments and I know it's still early to tell because you only started this in 2020 when everything was going down and restrictions and whatnot. To those who say, if I offer this virtual tour of my museum, then how is that? It's only going to take away from the people who come and see it in real life. They see it as a deterrent or somebody that. What would you say to that is completely the opposite of what or is there anything.

[00:33:19]
Elizabeth Chiang: A friend who's been a lifelong visitor to many realities and archives and libraries. I think it comes down to access. It's not just about the people who walk through the doors. It's not just about the people who can see this online, but it is also about people could see this online, and it comes down to this is public space. This is a museum we have historic collections that pertain to the history of film and photography. We have a lot of unique objects that may not always get a big chance to be exhibited or shown or traveled or anything like that. It's part of the history of film and photography and it's something that I think if visitors were keen on coming through the doors, they're already doing it. It helped me be Museum more for everyone. I feel that's what it comes mind.

[00:34:33]
Amir Frank: It's a net positive without you can't say for sure that everybody now is going to also visit. There might be those sector that the few, whatever number of people who I'd be like, okay, I saw the virtual tour. I'm happy to say most people who get a different sense from actually being there, from seeing it, from smelling it. It's a different experience. This should not detract from that. Let's see here when capturing museum space, lighting tone, etc, is very important. Color balance, things like that. White cube space is cold light versus this Eastman museum with warmer tones. Are there any plans to allow for changes in color, temperature, or levels model wide? I don't know if anything, Chris, as far as Matterport is concerned, but there are some tools. There's a free platform partner called MPM bed, and you can go and check it out. A lot of their tools are free to use and I do believe that adjusting the tone and color and things like that is one of those tools. Don't take my word for it. You should check it out yourself. Mpm bed.com, I believe. But they can help you out with that. So you basically feed your Matterport model through MPN bed and they allow you to go, I want to say one screen at a time, but maybe it is an overall global change that you can make as well. I'm honestly not sure, but definitely check that out. Has anyone looked into a polarizing filter? Yes. I actually have personally, that can be placed in the front of the Matterport to reduce reflections and so on photography, as polarizing filters used. Nothing, can't find anything. I've tried to figure out polarizing gels. Problem is the ideal way, as you know, for combating reflections and things like that, is using a circular polarizer and you can't see what's going on with Matterport, you can with your DSLR, but you would have no idea which way to turn it in and what not. That would make things very complicated. If you do just get a linear polarized gels. I don't know how ideal that would be, to be honest, I've never actually tested it personally, but I haven't found anything that can easily be adapted to it. There'll be a lot of customization work, maybe some 3D printing. You would not want to cover the entire camera. It is using infrared. You don't want to block that from being able to be projected as well as be seen by the infrared sensors on the camera. Okay. How many scans do you do for large space like this? Do you know roughly how many scans that dimension was? [inaudible 00:37:38] It's not I mean, we've had scans come in with several 100, 1,000 encouraged, but it's not very high number of scan positions. Do you tend to over scan with your models and then go through excuse me, and hide anything that is relevant and not necessary for navigation.

[00:38:12]
Elizabeth Chiang: Yes, I definitely do. I think I have Interesting in a study for that, that might be relevant to the last question about reflections, in our current exhibition, Joshua shine McFadden, I believe all run on. There's a dual sided projection screen that's part of the exhibition. However, when the projection screen is on, it reflects and it cast light on the artwork that's opposite. What I did in that case was I did that space with the projection screen off. Then I did the same spots again, projection screen on and then when the model was completed, we selectively turned off the different while select ones either with the projection screen off or on, depending on where the main points, where if is the standpoint, what's in front of a piece of art that needed the projection screen to be off. We take the one with the off, but once he turned and he walked and split in front of the projected screen, it would be on again, not a perfect solution by any means, but a workaround I feel like it worked for what we needed it to do so.

[00:39:25]
Amir Frank: Yeah, reflections are tough and certainly in museum, you've gotten a lot of glass that you need to deal with so that is certainly a challenge. I don't know. Maybe I don't even think 360 cameras would have that. I don't even know that. I suppose you know what? With access. That was just announced and I think released yesterday. Your phone has a little accessories and adapters. I don't know about circular polarizers on phones, but maybe in certain locations are areas of a museum where there's a lot of reflection then using that to fill in those spaces. I don't know. I'm just trying to think out loud and brainstorm possibilities. That could be interesting because I don't think there's anything for 360 cameras. There is no way. Before we are over time. Does the museum also have temporary exhibits? I believe, yes, and you scan the entire museum every time, including temporary exhibits or do you have a different scanning schedule for temporary versus permanent exhibits. We talked a little bit about the exhibits that you do scan in archives. When you do that, do you scan the entire museum at one again or just the exhibit.

[00:40:40]
Elizabeth Chiang: We wanted to go in for each exhibition. These would be the ones that have a beginning and an end date. I guess in a sense, temporary. I only do the exhibition space from the entryway to be within that space. We'll scan each time. We've only got, I guess the house in and of itself is considered a permanent exhibition. Permanently there, so far we've only done one full-on scan of the historic mansion and then the holiday ones are like a bonus one. We may do that again. I don't know if we'll do it necessarily anytime soon. It was quite the production to get everything moved and set up. Yeah. I guess within our institution, it's a balance between time and how much things are changing. I mean, if there are grand and extreme changes to the house for whatever reason or who a way that restoring a large section or we end up acquiring piece of that are particularly unique that go into the historic management. Will probably think about doing that in its full entirety. But 40 exhibitions that have been set beginning and an end date. It's definitely the exhibition itself.

[00:42:01]
Amir Frank: Heather says, I work in a museum and we have been using Matterport for the past two years. We have struggled with the functionality of the matter tags in terms of effectively showing the text and are deducted labels, character limits, formatting, etc. Do you have any tips for making effective use of the matter tags? That is a very good question, Heather and probably if you're having issues with the amount of tags, I would be very interested in knowing a little bit more about what that issue looks like and maybe we can come to a resolution. Definitely more than welcome to reach out to support. Support and www.matterport.com mentioned my name and then we can look at those. I'd be interested to see like what exactly is going on. We can take a look at that. Do people use the models on their mobile during live visits? Is that something that you've seen that's interesting. I wonder if there's any AR, ways of enhancing the life is it don't make it. Gamifying it in a way I don't know. I have no idea. I'm not sure. Sounds intriguing.

[00:43:14]
Elizabeth Chiang: I don't know if I've actually, I mean it's hard to tell us, people are on their phones all the time. Maybe they are doing it [inaudible 00:43:23]. Sounds intriguing.

[00:43:24]
Amir Frank: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I don't know that it's necessary, but it definitely would be a way of integrating the audio tour, while they're there. Because I know you can synchronize the model, the Matterport model with the person actually going through. They would be actually able to see AR, but also just here. Based on their location in the physical space, it would synchronize that with their digital twin, and it would know where they are, and play the sound accordingly. Just like I was describing earlier with this during the virtual space, as you get to a location, it plays certain audio. That explains what it is you're looking at, it would be very similar. They can just move their phone around. It takes a couple of measurements, aligns, and clicks in the model, so it knows where you're at, and as you move around, it just figures it out. I don't know how the audio tour right now, we saw the QR codes in your model. I don't know how that works. Is that something that they have to scan at every location?

[00:44:28]
Elizabeth Chiang: They would have to scan or they can just dial in and just follow the punch codes to [inaudible 00:44:34]. To have something that's integrated as they walked through that.

[00:44:41]
Amir Frank: -It's possible. It's definitely something that's certainly possible right now. Not that it's an issue scanning a QR code, but they could either scan a QR code or they could just, like I said, turn on their app and move the phone around, thereby it grabs measurements. Then it clicks that into the model. It's a bit pretty neat actually. There are a couple of platform partners doing that, also something to think about forever be out there. Did you try a number of separate areas or one large area that people could roam around? Also, did you put any Easter eggs in your scene? We did secret surprises in some of our skins. Did you had any surprise, Easter eggs in your Matterport models?

[00:45:31]
Elizabeth Chiang: I mean, unless someone, sometimes there's a person in the way far background, the most of the time. The short answer is no, we don't have Easter eggs. Closest is one that we have, I guess it's the mention at the holidays is that we deliberately actually put physical little gift wrapped boxes. That was meant for people to go through to find them.

[00:45:56]
Amir Frank: That could be cool for holiday scans, just for fun. I don't know. Maybe even Easter. We did that with an exhibition just as the pandemic hit, an artists opened into her exhibition in New York and we did that. We did a gamified the model to look. It was like in Alice in Wonderland theme. Place. Like maybe send it to you. It's pretty neat if you try to find the bunnies. Since using Matterport camera is a pretty automatic procedure, what is the benefit of having a professional photographer completes the process? Yes, it is pretty automated as certainly as far as when you think of photography, it's got a DSLR, you think aperture priority, shutter, white balance, and all these different things that come into play with photography. Elizabeth, as you know, with Matterport, it's a point shoot, but I think you're very familiar with the space. You're very familiar with how people engage in this space. As a photographer, you wanted to bring that perspective to your Matterport models, and so it's not that you have to be a photographer. I don't think you do, but I do think you do want to have, I guess, an idea of how you want people and what you want people to see as they're navigating their way through the virtual space. It's not so much technical photography know-how as it is knowing your visitors and what they're going to want to see and how they're going to want to experience the space.

[00:47:33]
Elizabeth Chiang: I think familiarity with the locations is probably key. It is very much when you click. I didn't get a lot of chances to frame anything because it just captures everything. Well, to a certain extent I can move, travel up and down. It's about being familiar with space and also how did the photography background being a photographer means. You have a sense code, what angles work, and what angles don't, and then where to break those rules.

[00:48:06]
Amir Frank: How much do virtual tours assist you engaging with local education institutions? Do they use the tours as an alternative to visiting or as a follow-up activity? I know we talked about education Tours in schools and whatnot visiting and I'm guessing you're somebody at the museum is hosting those via something like Zoom. Do you know anything about how they continue to use those?

[00:48:32]
Elizabeth Chiang: -We are definitely trying to encourage student groups specifically to use the tours as a way of visiting help being on site. But I don't know if it's necessarily always plays into a before and after thing, because we don't actually take the tours down. We have tours of the exhibitions from way back in the beginning. Sometimes schools don't actually interact with the exhibition until they're long over, for whatever reason. Or they say thematically, maybe they're talking about something that's thematically related to an older exhibition. So we can go back and look for those and use that as a learning tool for that. The timing in so far as the before and after follow-up, It's probably a bit hard to say.

[00:49:23]
Amir Frank: But I mean, follow-up they're supposed to when knowing what they do. But certainly a good use case for archiving all the exhibitions because you never know when the school is going to be on that topic and need to check out this exhibition to backup whatever it is they're learning about. That's cool. Unfortunately we are out of time. Really, really appreciate your time, taking the time to be with us today, Elizabeth. Huge, huge thank you. I really appreciate it, and thank you to all the attendees. I apologize for not being able to get to all your great questions and hope to see you next time. I hope you got some value out of this. We do these Shop Talk webinars every first Wednesday of every month. So do join the next one. Again, Elizabeth, huge thank you. I really appreciate the time.

[00:50:14]
Elizabeth Chiang: Thank you, everyone.

[00:50:16]
Amir Frank: Thank you, everyone. Have a great rest of the day.