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Matterport has announced that a recent firmware upgrade has reduced the amount of time it takes to capture footage when creating an immersive 3-D listing tour.
The firmware update increases the speed at which the camera rotates, allowing more square footage to be scanned in less time.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company published a comparison video that shows a new Matterport scan finishing 50 percent faster than it did prior to the upgrade.
In an email to Inman, Matterport vice president Mark Tepper said, “real estate agents who own a camera and choose to do their own scanning can now save time, getting in and out of a property listing in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously.”
Tepper also said that customers using a Matterport Pro2 and an iPad Pro should be able to capture a space in half the time it previously took.
Customers wanting to try the update can register on Matterport’s website. The update is free for current customers and requires no new equipment.
Tepper said the new version should be out of beta by mid-February, or possibly sooner.
“Overall, in being able to get a Matterport 3D immersive tour [done] faster, agents will have more time to focus on other tasks, like winning more clients and scaling their business,” Tepper wrote.
In addition to the firmware upgrade, Matterport has also rolled out a new way for customers to disseminate tour content by integrating with Google Maps and, specifically, Google Street View.
A typical case study for this new feature would find a prospective homebuyer scrolling through a Matterport tour, then selecting an option to exit the home and tour its street-level surroundings, as well as its curb appeal.
Source: Matterport
Matterport tours will also be accessible from Google Maps and Google Earth, allowing users to dive down from space to a city, a specific street, and then directly into a listing’s breakfast nook.
In a press release, Matterport CEO Bill Brown said, “Google Street View publishing and faster space capture are two of the many initiatives that greatly increase the value of Matterport for camera operators, as well as businesses that want to use Google to drive people to their websites.”
The company is hoping that this Google collaboration will also entice Street View photographers to use their solution.
Matterport is the industry’s leading 3-D tour and virtual reality (VR) content creation platform.
The company has standardized what it calls the “dollhouse” view, an exterior overhead perspective allowing users to rotate and tilt images and fly into a home’s various interior spaces.
Competitors such as iGuide and Transported have seized on Matterport’s large, expensive cameras and previously slower scan times by creating solutions that use iPhones, digital single-lens reflex cameras (DLSRs), or agent-friendly 360 cameras, like the Ricoh Theta V.
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