Matterport

My main use case for Matterport  is for the 3D scanning of buildings and spaces, whether for work or leisure, as we primarily target companies such as restaurants or offices within our community that would like to broadcast or sell certain products or services.

One of the largest scale Matterport  uses that we have completed is for a university in Nigeria called Nile University, which requested our services to scan the entirety of the college, including their classrooms and other lounges, to help parents easily access and see the resources of the school without physically going there.

I also completed a 3D scan for a restaurant called Taters, a three-star, very expensive restaurant, where we published it on Google Maps for people to have an idea of the ambiance before making a reservation. Additionally, we have scanned for a company offering dedicated and reserved private workspaces for others to showcase their services.

The best features that Matterport offers include the impressive accuracy of the 3D scans and the subsequent floor plan, which accurately reflects the sizes of the scanned spaces. I enjoy the ability to measure lengths and sizes, edit, and create guided tours for presentations without manual clicks.

Our clients often find the most impressive feature is the 3D view after scanning, as they appreciate seeing an entire 360-degree view of their spaces and enjoy the virtual reality experience we provide, which makes them feel as though they are inside the building.

Matterport positively impacts my organization because what you see is what you get, capturing the authenticity of the spaces, thereby cutting down potential client issues since the representation is true to the actual space.

After scanning co-working spaces, we see a 10 percent increase in customer count after publishing those scans, as clients can enjoy the service and make commitments before even coming in. Additionally, a restaurant reported a 1 to 2 percent increase in customer count after their Matterport scans were published on Google Maps.

I personally use the Pro2 version of Matterport, which uses infrared detectors, but I find scanning outdoors frustrating because its accuracy is affected by sunlight. Improvements such as enhancing accuracy between scanning points to require fewer steps would greatly benefit our process.

For software integrations, it would be beneficial if Matterport allowed for easier integration into various spaces without difficulties, as it proves challenging to embed scans on all web browsers. Additionally, increasing the storage space for scans would be appreciated since we find ourselves deleting old scans to accommodate new ones.

I give it an eight because the time required to complete full scans is significant, sometimes taking an entire day, and the integration aspects could improve. With improvements in these areas, I see no reason why it could not be a ten out of ten.

I have not used many of Matterport's AI capabilities, so I do not provide a specific metric on accuracy, though I expect improvements are necessary and I look forward to advancements.

I have been working in my current field for approximately four years.

In my experience, Matterport is stable, with downtime occurring only on one or two occasions, which were due to issues on our end, not with Matterport itself.

Matterport's service is scalable within the right environment, particularly in real estate, making it an impressive solution for our needs.

The customer support is decent; I have not needed it much, but when colleagues have reached out, they received timely and proper responses.

Matterport is the first solution we implemented, discovered through research, and we did not consider other options as we found it to be an immediate fit for our needs.

In terms of return on investment, we have seen time saved and fewer employees needed, making the process more efficient. Although I am uncertain about specific monetary savings, we view our number of completed scans and generated revenue positively.

Overall, the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Matterport are on the expensive side in Nigeria; however, I find the service and features provided fair when analyzing the value we receive.

We did not evaluate many other options aside from Matterport since our discovery was made through random research, but the analysis indicated it was more than sufficient for what we wanted, leading us to invest in the cameras and services.

I advise others, especially in the construction or real estate industry, to use Matterport, as development is occurring everywhere, and its capabilities allow virtual observation of physical spaces.

Using Matterport is very exciting for me, and I would love to utilize it more in construction and real estate, which I am passionate about. It truly represents my interests, and I look forward to seeing further improvements. I gave this review a rating of eight out of ten.

I use Matterport  for insurance claims and in construction for the beginning and the end of the project, including sign-off and end of construction when walls are closed up. This covers key milestones in the construction process. I also use it for maintaining a record for neighboring units and buildings and structures for insurance purposes in case anything goes wrong or is claimed during construction. Additionally, I use it for insurance purposes in general for those dealing with losses and needing to document the current status of their situation.

Matterport  has given me an option to document site progress without having to use cameras and rely on subcontractors who often miss out on imagery. 360 photos are almost paramount at this point because you are never going to miss anything. You are never standing in front of the thing you needed to take a picture of and forgot. Everything is always captured, and the fact that it is automatically merged ensures that there is never a situation in which information is missed, unless a whole area is just omitted for a specific reason.

Outside of that, it is obviously a much cheaper device than to buy, let us say, a bunch of Lidar scanners just to use them for virtual walkthrough purposes if you do not need that accurate point cloud data. So it is just giving me the best tool for the value for the specific workflows that it is useful for.

Fewer employees are needed to document these things. I have brought it all in-house to my reality capture department. There is time and money savings in that because I am in and out to get the job done instead of someone sandbagging because it is a part of their job that they do not really want to do. They would rather do the work than document the work that has been done. So that is the money and the cost savings.

Matterport needs to find a way to do what they are doing with SLAM instead of terrestrial. The biggest drawback to Matterport these days, and why other tools are being used, is that you only have a certain amount of time to capture data, and unfortunately, terrestrial devices do not really allow for that. Second, you have not made it permanent for manually aligning captures in the Matterport app. Every now and then it allows me to do a manual align, but that needs to be a standard feature. Instead of saying, 'I cannot find any alignment, please scan again,' it should give me the option of just moving the alignment myself. I understand that Matterport is built for you to need to do things in a certain sequence, but the reality is that sometimes I have to go back to rooms later on. Sometimes there are rooms that are symmetrical, and in those cases, it can really help if you have some user input.

It saves a lot of time and it saves a lot of capture time. On top of all of that, the actual application itself is very unstable. You reach a certain amount of captures and the device does not work anymore. But then that messes up the entire workflow. If the project is too big to work on the app and I have to build another one, I need to create two projects and then wait for those to merge. And then I have to take both projects individually and align them to each other and let that merge again. So now I am talking about waiting a day for the thing to automatically align, and then I have to merge it manually, and then wait a day for those results. So instead of getting results in one day, I have to do it in two days, and it is all because of the reliability of the application.

I think that Matterport is overpriced. At this point, there should be some SLAM integration with maybe terrestrial as an anchor if needed. And if they want to push all of these products such as CAD  and point clouds from their data sets, then they should truly work on making sure that that data is accurate enough for what it needs to do. The market is oversaturated with people with Matterport devices trying to do Lidar jobs, but the accuracy is not good enough. Getting a CAD  plan exported, but it is not a vector, and it is a locked-down PDF essentially makes it useless. If you want to keep things locked down and not able to be vectorized, then that seems to say a lot about the accuracy, in which case point clouds and vector CAD should not be available at all.

I think that there is much to be improved. There should never be a situation where Matterport cannot find data to match and it asks me to rescan. At the end of the day, if it was using photogrammetry and something such as lighting was the reason why it cannot find any alignment points, that would be one thing, but you have Lidar included. So if you have Lidar, that means there are overlapping points, and if there are overlapping points, there should always be a match. If you cannot find a match, that means that your algorithm is not mature enough or your Lidar data is not actually accurate enough.

The scalability is pretty low, considering the fact that the price to scale up sites is already immensely high, and there is no benefit to having multiple devices at a time. You can capture a site faster, but as I said, it ends up taking the same amount of time by the time it auto-processes it, I manually merge, and then have to wait for that merger to process. Somebody can go and get half of it done in one day, half of it done in another, and it will take the same amount of time. Matterport needs to find a way in its apps to allow me to merge prior to doing the full processing, so that way I do not lose that same time twice.

Pricing is pretty straightforward, but it is overpriced. That is the reason I found a solution to take my Matterport spaces down and put them on a local desktop so that way it can be embedded, shared, or kept locally. The first reason is for security purposes. The second reason is because the price is entirely too high, but I understand that once you are in this ecosystem, it is hard to leave. There is only a tool, I think Doxel, which will allow me to transfer over Matterport projects into their ecosystem so that at least on their site, I can access the scans done for Matterport as well as from their own software. But there is no solution to actually take your data from Matterport and move it somewhere else. So once you join, you are basically locked in. And the unfortunate thing is that it is really set up for real estate tours as far as the pricing is concerned. So if you are using it for anything other than that, you are definitely overpaying.

I have been using Matterport since 2016, so that would be 10 years.

The device is stable, but the app is not.

The scalability is pretty low, considering the fact that the price to scale up sites is already immensely high, and there is no benefit to having multiple devices at a time. You can capture a site faster, but as I said, it ends up taking the same amount of time by the time it auto-processes it, I manually merge, and then have to wait for that merger to process. Somebody can go and get half of it done in one day, half of it done in another, and it will take the same amount of time. Matterport needs to find a way in its apps to allow me to merge prior to doing the full processing, so that way I do not lose that same time twice.

The customer support response time is typically within 24 to 72 hours, so it is pretty standard.

Prior to all of these situations, everyone was either using their personal camera or phones with a camera enabled. I also tried using some 360 camera solutions such as StructionSite, Doxel, and the alike. I cannot remember them all right now.

I do not have exact numbers, but the time saved is astronomical. Think of taking nine or ten subcontractors and having them make their own pictures on a weekly basis to prove their progress. Now someone can come in and get that work done once and for all in about a tenth of the time and the cost. Not to mention that the subcontractors can now focus on other tasks or completing additional work instead of documenting the work that has already been done. From a time savings perspective, it is not really the fastest device out there, but for the quality, it is the fastest device. And I guess for those who have been using Matterport for a while now, going from the Pro 2 to the Pro 3 is a huge difference in terms of time savings.

The cheap cost of the device is really offset by the monthly cost of the subscription to where it almost makes sense to give up some image quality, get a cheaper Lidar scanner, and at least you can have a virtual tour that is a little bit degraded, but the Lidar data is useful if anybody actually needs that point cloud data. And then on top of that, you are dealing with a lot cheaper software licensing fees depending on who you go with.

There are Lidar scanners that create virtual tours that I use, such as the Navis VLX. Obviously, it is too expensive just for that purpose, but I do use it in the cases where I do not have the time to use Matterport and need a virtual walkthrough. Or in cases where sites get too large and there are people walking around, and so the context is shifting as I am trying to capture the data and it makes it almost impossible to get through a site walk. Other than that, a lot of 360 camera options were used, such as StructionSite, Doxel, DroneDeploy, and there are numerous others that are pretty much the same and did the same thing. Outside of that, they have the Real C and a few other options that are made for virtual tours that I tried at CES, but never really did any big trials.

I would make sure that it really aligns with your use case. Really figure out if the image quality is worth all of the other drawbacks, because there are other options with the same if not better image quality that are not industry standard, and there are other devices with slightly less image quality that are going to be better suited for whatever your workflow is. Keep in mind most of those devices or products are utilizing SLAM and any 360 camera. So as 360 cameras improve, who is to say that it will not actually eclipse Matterport. I would give this solution an overall rating of 8.