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Monday Feb 15, 2021

Save 10 Percent with https://realty.momenzo.com/?fpr=wgan and Momenzo Coupon Code: WGAN10
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Hi All,Whether you are an ...1. experienced real estate photographer spends too much time editing real estate videos, or2. newbie real estate photographer thinking about adding real estate listing videos, or3. Matterport Service Provider wondering how to easily add real estate listing videos as an Add On ...4. Real Estate Agent that shoots your own photos and thinking about adding video... the Momenzo shooting/editing/sharing real estate videos app can simplify the real estate listing video creation workflow to make it super-easy and super-fast to offer real estate listing videos as an Ad On for $149, $199, $249 or $299 per video (depending on your market and listings).What's the Momenzo smartphone app shooting/editing/sharing experience like?Spoiler Alert: You can create real estate listing videos without video editing! You can create branded real estate videos in less than five minutes from your iPhone or Android smartphone. The Momenzo app does the video editing for you!Momenzo Co-Founder Guillaume Taieb was my guest on Friday, 12 February 2021 at 5 pm EST (GMT -5):✓ WGAN-TV Live at 5: Introduction to Momenzo for Real Estate Agents and Real Estate PhotographersThe Momenzo app demo and discussion includes:1. Demo: Momenzo example real estate video (one of two dozen templates)2. Why Momenzo for real estate agents (what problems does Momenzo solve?)3. Why Momenzo for real estate photographers (what problems does Momenzo solve?)4. Demo: how to create a Momenzo real estate video5. Demo: how to change templates6. Demo: how to add existing video7. Demo: how to add property info8. Discussion✓ smartphone stabilizers versus hand-held✓ adding a wide-angle lens to smartphone✓ how long to be proficient?✓ tips for smartphone camera movement✓ changing the length of a segment✓ how to add voice over✓ how to speed up video play✓ How to do mini-lapse✓ Using FiLMiC Pro
✓ Background music✓ Momenzo Pricing9. Special Offers for Momenzo (Dan Smigrod)10. What’s coming soon ...WGAN Forum Related Discussions✓ Real Estate Agent/Videographer Reviews Momenzo App for Shooting Real Estate Videos✓ If you are shooting Zillow Tours, would this be a great Add On?✓ If you are NOT shooting real estate videos because the workflow is too long✓ Save 10% on Momenzo App to Easily Shoot/Edit/Share Real Estate Videos✓ Free! 12 Months Use of Momenzo App to Shoot/Edit/Share Real Estate Videos✓ How to double your revenue shooting Momenzo real estate listing videos✓ How to Make $100,000+ Annually with 1 RE shoot a Day: Asteroom and Momenzo✓ WGAN Forum discussions tagged: MomenzoBest,Dan

Monday Dec 14, 2020

How to protect and transport your Matterport Pro2 3D Camera
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Free Course: WGAN-TV Training U: Four Hard Cases for Matterport Pro2 3D Camera and How to Customize Foam with the My Case Builder AppHi All,1. Need a hard case for a Matterport Pro2 3D Camera?2. Need custom foam for an existing hard case?3. Got questions about Pelican cases versus other hard cases?This free WGAN-TV Training U Course is likely to answer many of your hard case/custom foam questions:✓ Four Hard Cases for Matterport Pro2 3D Camera and How to Customize Foam with the My Case Builder AppPlus ...Special Offer for We Get Around Network Forum Members✓  Free MyCaseBuilder ground shipping in the Continental U.S. on this (and all) MyCaseBuilder cases✓ Private Message me for the Promo Code✓ Free! 12-Months WGAN-TV Training U n Matterport w/ $150+ MyCaseBuilder CaseSpecial Offer for We Get Around Network Standard and Premium Members✓ Free MyCaseBuilder ground shipping in the Continental U.S. on this (and all) MyCaseBuilder cases✓ 15 percent WGAN rebate on all MyCaseBuilder cases (on before tax and shipping price) with WGAN Promo Code✓ Private Message me for the Promo CodeBest,Dan
 
Related WGAN Forum Discussions✓ Transcript: WGAN-TV Top 10 Matterport Pro1, Pro2 & Pro2 Lite Camera Repairs✓ WGAN Forum discussions tagged: MyCaseBuilder

Monday Nov 16, 2020

Struggle with Matterport scans in spaces with subpar or no lighting? Need consistent, predictable lighting?
Hi All,Do you struggle doing Matterport scans in spaces with no subpar or no lighting such as:1. real estate listings2. fire/flood damaged homes and businesses for insurance documentation3. Restoration3. "As-Builts"4. Construction Sites5. Locations without windows6. Basements7. Crawl spaces8. Tunnels9. Caves10 Mines11. Other spaces ....Simsbury, CT-based Matterport Service Provider Tony Healy with Capture, LLC did struggle with Matterport scans that needed additional light - until he helped pioneer a solution that Litra now sells: LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting KitTony @Capture will be my guest on WGAN-TV Live at 5 on Thursday, 12 November 2020:✓ How to (Easily) Add Lights to Matterport Pro2 Camera"The LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit is a professional solution as it has a lot more than simple add on and pointing light," Tony emailed me in prep for this live WGAN-TV show. "It's well thought out to really tackle insurance and restoration but can be simplified to meet the needs of someone just needing light, too. With the LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit, you can easily create consistent, predictable lighting for your Matterport Pro2 Camera."Among the questions that I will ask Tony:1. What lighting problems did you experience as a Matterport Service Provider that motivated you to help pioneer what is now known as the LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit?2. Show us Matterport scans before and after adding LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit3. What's included in the LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit? [I will do an unboxing of the kit.]4. Show how to mount the Litra lighting to a Matterport Pro2 3D Camera (What is a 3M Dual Lock mounting tape?)5. Show how to use the built-in levelers6. Why did you focus on a lighting solution that uses Litra lighting?7. Why did you decide to work with Litra to manufacture and sell the kit?8. Tell us more about the LitraTorch 2.0 lighting (lighting wide/tall enough for Matterport?)9. How long will the LitraTorch 2.0 lighting last on a charge? (How to charge?) (External power?)10. Can/Should the LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit be used during everyday scans?11. What kind of Matterport scans are the LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit a must have12. What kind of Matterport scans are the LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit nice to have13. What about Litra filters?14. How important are these lights for Building Information Management (BIM) projects (and why)?15. Water proof?16. How does the weight of the LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit affect the Matterport Pro2 Camera?17. Pricing for LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit18. Special Offer for WGAN Forum Members for the LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting KitWhat other questions should I ask Tony?Special Offer for WGAN Forum MembersSave 20 percent – and free shipping over $50 in USA –  now through 30 November 2020 on:✓ LitraTorch 2.0 Reality Capture Lighting Kit✓ Litra 360 Mount BundleWGAN Forum Members | Use Litra Coupon Code: CYBERNOVBest,Dan

Wednesday Oct 07, 2020

Asteroom Virtual Staging is $49.99 Per 360 Panorama: 48 Hours Turnaround
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Hi All,Asteroom Virtual Staging Demo and Discussion with Co-Founder/CEO Eric TsaiAsteroom Virtual Staging for WGAN Forum Members is $49.99 per 360 panorama with 48 hours turnaround and available in four different styles, Asteroom Co-Founder and CEO @EricTsai announced Wednesday, 30 September 2020. [Join WGAN Forum (free)]As few as one (1) virtually staged 360 panorama can be ordered, though Asteroom anticipates that WGAN Forum Members will want to order virtual staging for three 360 panoramas:✓ Entrance✓ Living Room✓ Big Bed RoomAsteroom Virtual Staging can be done either for:✓ Spaces without furniture✓ Spaces with existing furniture (Asteroom "removes" the existing furniture and then re-stages the space)Asteroom Also Announced Wednesday, 30 September 2020✓ The first Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle is free for WGAN Forum Members with promo code WGANAsteroom on this special Asteroom landing page - for a limited time - effective today (Wednesday, 30 September 2020).✓ Additional Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundles are now $49.99 each for WGAN Forum Members.The free and special pricing offers for WGAN Forum Members are made by WGAN Gold Member, Asteroom Co-Founder and CEO Eric Tsai.Physical staging is not a cost-effective option for many sellers, with the service’s high price bracket keeping it nearly exclusive to the high-end luxury market. The average cost for physical staging can range from $300 to $600 for an initial consultation, and upwards of $500 for each staged room each month the property is staged, often costing thousands of dollars per month.Virtual staging looks as good as real-life staging and costs much less: about 10 percent of physical staging.According to the 2019 National Association of REALTORS (NAR) Home Staging Profile report:✓ 83% of buyers' agents noted that staging made it easier for buyers to visualize the property as a future home.✓ 25% of buyers’ agents said that staging a home increased the offer between 1% and 5% compared to un-staged listings.✓ 17% of sellers’ agents said that staging increased the dollar value of a home between 6% and 10%.Learn more about Asteroom Virtual Staging in this WGAN-TV Training U in Asteroom Course with guest @EricTsai.Below are Asteroom BEFORE and AFTER examples used during the course. (See bottom right corner for BEFORE and AFTER buttons.)Contemporary Style Virtual Staging1. Bedroom (Shot with no furniture)2. Living Room (Shot with one existing table and chairs to be removed)3. Entrance (Shot with room-full of furniture) Matterport digital twin by North Idaho and Eastern Washington Matterport Service Provider CaptureNW Photographer Jeff NitschkeTraditional Style Virtual Staging4. Living Room (shot with a room-full of furniture that needed to be replaced)Farm House Style Virtual Staging5. Living Room (Shot empty)Industrial Style Virtual Staging6. Living Room (Shot with a room-full of furniture to be replaced)Plus, I included WGAN-TV Live at 5 show (above): Deep-Dive into Asteroom Virtual Staging with Asteroom Co-Founder and CEO @EricTsai.Related WGAN Forum Discussions✓ Asteroom Virtual Staging is $49.99 Per 360 Panorama: 48 Hours Turnaround✓ All WGAN Forum discussions tagged: AsteroomTwo Free OffersTwo free offers for Asteroom 24/7 Open House Virtual Tours incentive taking Asteroom for a Spin:Offer 1 by Asteroom: 1st Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle is Free for WGAN Forum MembersOffer 2 by WGAN: 1st Asteroom Virtual Staging of a 360 is free for WGAN Forum Members in October 2020Best,DanP.S. Please note that the "Player" used to display the BEFORE and AFTER views in examples #1-6 (above) is not presently available as an Asteroom option.LinkedIn: Eric Tsai

Wednesday Jun 24, 2020

Buttery-Smooth HD Videos Created from Matterport Highlight Reels
WGAN-TV - MatterVids: Matterport 3D Tours to HD VideoHi Chris Fraser @MatterVidsThank you for being my guest on WGAN-TV Live at 5 Thursday (18 June 2020) to give the WGAN Community a deep-dive into MatterVids: buttery smooth HD video from Matterport digital twins using the Highlight Reel to create them.For under $20 each - and under $12 each in quantity - MatterVids offers a great service for Matterport Service Providers to offer video of the Tour as a high-margin/easy-to-offer Add On service.A transcript of the show appears below.MatterVids are Created From✓ Matterport Highlight Reel (Walkthrough)✓ Matterport Highlight Reel (Slideshow) - recommended for Zillow Video Walkthrough use (more likely to be compliant)Optional Extras✓ Royalty-Free Music✓ Google Earth Fly-in✓ On-brand, animated logo at the beginning of the video✓ On-brand, animated logo at the end of the video✓ Logo in bottom left corner through-out video✓ Property URL through-out video✓ 4K version✓ raw clone file version (save $$$)✓ Instagram version (square, 60 seconds)✓ Next business day delivery✓ Volume Pricing (as low as under $12 each)Uses for MatterVids Videos✓ Facebook✓ YouTube✓ Vimeo✓ Instagram✓ Zillow listing✓ B-Roll for marketing videos✓ News Media✓ Animated GIFBest,Dan
 
Transcript (Video above)- Hi, all. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, June 20, 2020. And, you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. Hey, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum, our guest today is Chris Fraser.Chris is the Founder of MatterVids, he's located just out of Bristol, Tennessee. Hey, Chris, good to see you.- Hey, Dan, good to see you, thanks for having me on the show again.- Oh, and Chris, thank you for being on the show again, we just love having you, you always have great things to share with us, and I'm super-excited about today's show. MatterVids: buttery-smooth videos created from Matterport Highlights Reel. And I'm just going to almost cut to the chase and say for less than $20 and in quantity, for less than $12.So I suppose you could say let's end the show here, but actually, I think we have so much to talk about on exactly what this MatterVid is. Why don't we start just with what is a MatterVid?- Okay, yeah, that's a great place to start. A MatterVid is really just a high definition video file of your Matterport tour Highlight Reel. So basically, whatever you have set for the Highlight Reel, we take it, we capture it, because a lot of people struggle with capturing it. We capture it as clean as it can be captured and it's almost a perfect clone, then we enhance it and we send it back to you in a video file that you can put up on YouTube or really wherever you want to.- Chris, you're so understated, you have this awesome video solution. Let's take a look at some MatterVids so that our audience can actually see what this is.- Sure. Let's see, let me get one up on here and share my screen.- And there's many iterations of MatterVids, so we'll start out with a MatterVid no audio, created from a Highlight Reel, a Matterport Highlight Reel, and I think Chris will provide some commentary while he's playing that video.- Sure, and it's actually telling me that the host has disabled screen sharing.- Oh, forgive me. We do this by Zoom and Zoom has changed some privacy settings, so let me see if I can change the setting here.- Okay.- Okay. Good, okay, Chris, you're all set.- Okay, cool, let me pull this up here and then I'm going to go share.- And even while you're setting up to share screen, I should say, when I say buttery-smooth, the video, the MatterVids are buttery-smooth. There's likely to be some latency because of how we broadcast using the Zoom platform to YouTube.But that said, it really is quite amazing. Chris, we can see full screen, we're on your, we're on your showcase example screen.- Perfect, okay, cool. And you can still hear my audio? Oh.- Yes.- Okay, perfect, okay. Okay, so this is the video example page. And one thing I want to address ... before I show this. We're all about privacy and white-labeling. So if anybody sees this and says hey, wait a minute, I want to, I want to do this but I don't want you showing the world that you did my video, that's one of the options when you order.People that have made these have given us permission to share them. So let's see here. One without, let's start with this one. Let's see if this, okay, yup. Hold on. That one. Fun times. Here we go, okay.This is, let's go to the sample first. This is a sample that is available for download if you decide you want to promote it and show people, this is one that we embedded on our website and you can actually get the download link, we'll get into it later about how we deliver. But this is the perfect example of the Walkthrough. This is how it, when you set up your Highlight Reel, if you choose Walkthrough from the settings, then you're going to move through the space like this. Is that coming through okay?- Yeah, that looks great. So I think, again, it's not always, I think, obvious to even Matterport Service Providers that have been doing this quite some time.You're creating the MatterVid from a Matterport 3D tour specifically using the Highlight Reel that's been created by the Matterport Service Provider.And the Highlight Reel can either be a Walkthrough, and that's what we're watching now, or a Slideshow, a Matterport Highlight Reel Slideshow. So those are two options within Matterport Workshop. And then Chris, maybe we could take a look at looking at a MatterVid that's been created from a Matterport Highlight Reel that is in Slideshow mode.- Okay. And that's actually, that was my panic a minute ago, I was trying to remember which ones were in Slideshow mode. That was the one that--- Which I think is great, you've been so busy doing this that it's probably overwhelming the number of examples you have and the different kinds of iterations that are possible.- Well, in our, right now, in our upload, we've got, we only put them up for a certain amount of time and then take them back down, and we've got over 1,000 sitting up there right now that need to be gone through.And a lot of people want to keep them private, don't want the world to know. So we're going to just trial and error till we find one, if that's okay. Because this playlist is made up of videos that they approved to share. So I'm trying to be very careful about not sharing people's work and saying, hey, look what we did. And a lot of these have music, let's see.- Even if you show it with music just to show the highlight transition using this.- That's a Walkthrough.- Using the Slideshow.- [Chris] Okay.- So while Chris is finding an example, you'll notice that there's a logo in the bottom right corner, and on the videos that Chris delivers, that MatterVids deliver, there's no branding by MatterVids at all. So just like the, Chris get queued up here so that he can show us an example that's--- That was the Slideshow transition, let's see if this goes perfect. Yeah. A lot of times, when you go from a 360 into the tour, if they've taken 360 outside, then it's going to have that Slideshow type transition anyway. Maybe. No. No, that's a Walkthrough also, okay. I don't think that one's going to be either. Okay. The majority--- I'll tell you what, let's go back to your home page, MatterVids.com. MatterVids, okay. And then in the top is a menu item called examples. So we won't do a deep dive into looking for that one ... so if you want to just come back, click on it, Chris, if you click on examples here for a moment. And then I think you had the list, is that where they can find--- Yeah, they can find it here. Or you can click right here to go to the full page.- Yeah, the full page version. So this is where we were, you can go look at many different kinds of examples.- [Chris] Yes.- So Chris, you started to play one with music. Why don't we talk a little bit about music?- Sure, yeah. So with the music options, we've got a music page up here, and ironically, the plugin that I'm using for my music player is not here, but we can talk about the details and I'll show you where you can browse the music.You got the option to order without music, or get a custom track for $4, or the MatterVids top 20. Over the amount of time we've been offering music, we've had quite a few people asking for the same songs.It's funny because we've got a library that's full of thousands of songs. And we frequently have people coming back picking the same songs, and so we've made a top 20 list out of it. Because if they're going to order over and over and their repeat customers, then let's just give them the benefit of having a discount on the music that they like.Let's make it easier to order and checkout, they don't have to go searching for a song and choose it and bring all the information back. So if they choose one of those, then it's $2. I'm going to get that list updated, and by the time you're watching this video, if you're not watching it live, you'll probably see that information updated.- Yeah, so in fact, when I went to your page this morning, I could click on music and then it would take me to another site. Can you talk a little bit about that other site?- Certainly, yeah. That's artlist.io. It's a company that sells royalty free music. But we bought the license, the blanket license for the entire catalog, so if there's anything on this website that you like, then you just go to, let's say, for example, we come on here and we look and just at a glance, we see, oh, well, I like the song Love right here.So I'm going to click on it and I like. That's great, okay. So I click on the icon. And this particular song has its own URL, because this is pulling up the Love song. So if, or no, sorry, this is the album. So if I go up here and click just the song, then you get the URL--- Let's actually grab that URL and go to the shopping cart so we can show an example of that, so we're going to go back to MatterVids, MatterVids.com, we're going to go back to the home page so that everybody is landed on the home page for MatterVids. This is the page to expect, it's got the steps for how to order.There's a start your order now button, so Chris is going to click on that. Okay. And now we're looking, I'm not sure if you need to put in a Matterport URL...- You do, the Matterport--- Tour ID, yeah.- And that would be the first thing that you put in. And that's just the 11 character that come after the question mark and equals in your URL.- Yeah, I'm probably going to mess you up, because I really wanted you to be able to copy and paste the link. But this is good, let's go back to the add music link, that's okay. If you click down on the, so the first option is no music.- And that's by default.- The price with no music for plain MatterVid delivered within three business days is $19.99 US, so under $20. Now, if you want to add music instead of no music, here are some specific tracks that, ones that are typically popular. Or you can do at the very top the custom track right there. So Chris is going to select that. And then, when we get to the next screen, he'd actually be able to paste in the link for the music.- That's correct, yeah.- So even while we're here, why don't you just tease us with everything else that's on this page, maybe you can take a, you could even call up maybe a Matterport tour.- Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, there we go, 11. That should be enough.- But just for clarification, because again, if you're just starting out with Matterport, it's not always obvious, if you take the URL for Matterport and you stare at the link.- Let me pull one up that I've done recently. Okay, so there we go. So this part right here, if you go in your URL, it's just the, there's 11 character right afterward.And the reason we say that it's right after that is because if you put a bunch of URL parameters and things out here, they're going to be after it, so you just want this right here. And this is how we track your order, this is how we keep track of the progress of your order. If you inquire about something and we say, well, which tour was it, we're not looking for the name of the tour or the address of the tour, we're looking for the tour ID. And that helps us to keep a unique identifier for every project that goes through. And that'll be part of the file name for your deliverable when we send it.- Okay, so let's maybe even copy and paste that and put it in there. So again, we're not taking the entire URL, we're just taking the Matterport tour ID, everything after the question mark and equals sign. And if you're adding parameters, none of the parameters get added.- Right. And just for funsies, since it's, since that's a locker room for a ball thing, let's go with a powerful, uplifting song, maybe something sporty. I don't know, we'll just call it...That's fine. We'll just go in the opposite of that. Pause that. So we're going to take this code right here and we're going to copy it.- Is that for the specific song rather than the album?- That is not, good call, yup. So there's the song, Hold Me Down, and I'm going to tap on it. Now see that the name of the song is right here. So I'm going to copy that, let's see here.Hold Me Down instruments, yeah, instrumental version, okay. So I'm copying that. Then I'm going to go back. And I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to decide whether I want a Fly-in or not. For right now, I'm going to say no.We'll talk about those later. This is where it comes to the permission part. Yes, these are the different ways we can handle it. If you say this one, we're more likely to use it in stuff just so we, like I said, we're careful to follow your wishes with that. Delivery options, we're going to standard three day, we're going to get one..., I'm going to add it to my cart.- Okay, standard three business days. Now.- [Chris] Now this is the checkout.- Checkout, okay. So this was $19.99 plus $4 because you selected the option for custom music.- That's correct.- [Dan] Okay, and then-- Option to add a coupon code, if you have a coupon code that you need to use, then you've got that. So I'm going to go to checkout. And then let's see here.- Very interesting, your payment form is different than what I was looking at this morning, because there was an option to put in a note for you.- It should, I think it pops up on the next step after this. I think it's under review and submit order or... I'll make up, I don't know if it'll let me get through--- Interesting. So why don't we just say this, at some point during the order process, there will be a field where you can paste the link for custom music.- Yes. That's correct.- Okay, so let's take it off screen share for the moment.- Okay. Cool.- Okay. So we're starting to work our way through different examples, Chris. So the first example was no audio, created either from a Matterport Highlight Reel that had a Walkthrough or a Slideshow. Then we talked about adding music. I think one of the things that was a little bit tricky for me is on your order form, I saw a pull down of about 20 songs, but I really need to go, what are those songs?So there is a page, so how about taking us to your page to say, hey, we do have a shortlist, if you don't want to go off to the other site and look at thousands of songs, which is actually pretty cool because you can filter and you can say upbeat, uptempo, low tempo, vocal, not vocal, whatever. How about do the screen share, take us to your website where you have your 20 or so songs that are...- That's actually the problem. Something has happened just this afternoon. The plug-in that I use is not loading for me. I knew I didn't have time to contact the vehicle, yeah, there was a plugin here that--- Okay, so we'll come off this screen, that's fine. So had that worked, what would we have seen on that page?- Sure, yeah, you would've seen a list of the, and it may be, tomorrow it might be working again, if not, we're going to manually add them back in.But you basically just have the name of the artist, the name of the song, and then a play button, and you can actually play it back in a player right there in the browser and listen to it just on our website, so you don't have to go anywhere else to get any information. And then you just choose it from the dropdown, you don't have to copy and paste anything, you just know this is the song I want.- Yeah, so we have no music, some music, here's a shortlist, listen to them, still not happy, go off to another website that you've licensed music and pick out whatever song you want, then come back, actually paste the URL into the order form, and that's ordering custom music, adds just $4 to the cost of the MatterVid.- And one question that I get a lot with that is do I have to have a membership to that Artlist site? And you don't, we've already paid for our license. We do use a referral link, so if you do sign up, then we get credit for it, but you also get two free months. So we figured, if people see it and like it for their other stuff and they want to license it, then there it is.- Terrific. Google Street View Fly-in. What is that, how do I order it?- Sure. Google has a tool, it's a Google Earth tool that's designed for making Fly-in videos. But a lot of people either don't know about it or don't have the computing power to really do what they need to do with it.- Okay, and can you show us what a Google Earth Fly-in looks like, and then tell us how we actually figure that out and order it.- Sure, yeah, let's see here. That is working.Let's see here, go to home page. What is the next page? Examples. So here are two that I did. One, I think it was universal enough that everyone would know, let's see here. Disney World. Just went there last year and was like, hey. This place does look like that. So there we are, zooming in from outer space, flying in.And we're right in front of Cinderella's castle. So the idea with these is that we'll start in space like this. It runs about five seconds long.And as it plays, it just moves its way toward Earth, finding the location, in this case, it's hitting Orlando, Florida. We're zooming in and we're landing. Now, what's really cool about this one is this is a 3D model of Cinderella's castle.Some areas of the Earth, we have 3D data that we can use, other areas, it's just going to be just like looking at flat Google Maps and you're looking at the top of your location, it really just depends on how much data Google actually has for you.- Yeah, that's a crazy exciting example, how about the other one you have below that?- The other one's Alcatraz. But they're back in 94, but I didn't get to actually see it. But there it goes. So that's flying in and landing at Alcatraz.- Cool. If I wanted to see these examples again, where are they on your website?- They're on the examples page, they're right down below the MatterVids examples.- Okay, so we'd go up to the top where it says examples and then simply scroll down. Okay, so--- Yeah, we can do this for residential, and there are some residential locations that are already mapped in 3D. And so I just wanted to show these because I knew they were universal locations people would recognize.- Okay, cool. How about, okay, I like that, I'd like to add that to my video. How do I do that?- Okay, sure. On the order form, and this is a pretty simple, straightforward, well, I say straightforward, maybe not. Do you want to include a Google Fly-in? Select all that applies. So no, I do not want a Google Fly-in, or yes, add a Google Fly-in for $19.99. So you check, let's say you want one. When you're ordering, you check yes.If your tour has the address included and posted and it's inside the info bar and you forget to put it in the notes, that's fine, we're going to go by that. If we get an order and you not include it in the notes, which is the section where you put the music information as well, if you didn't put the address that you want us to zoom into, we're going to go with what the info box says. And so if the info box is wrong, we'll have to figure that out.But ideally, we'd like for you to at least give us the street address. We can use the street address, we can use coordinates. You can go to the location and zoom in on Google Earth and then just copy the whole URL and give us that.- How about doing that? Let's see what that looks like.- Sure, yeah. Let's see here. Okay, so let's go to Google.- Okay, I couldn't see the ULR at the top, what are we on?- Sure. We're in Google Maps. Let's see here. And we're going to go to Disney World.- Okay. Forgive me, but your URL looks different than what I do. So is it google.com/maps?- Maps, mm-hmm.- [Dan] Okay.- Okay, so I just typed in Disney World. And here's Disney World at the bottom down here. And I'm going to move this little panel out of the way just so we can see. And it's temporarily closed. So okay. So I'm going to go to satellite view. And then I'm going to zoom out just a little bit to get my bearings.And so in this case, okay, the park and what we just showed you is down here. Now, if you want to know what your location is going to look like, whether it's going to be 3D or not, for the finished video, then the best way to tell is when you zoom in and you get closer to the location, if you look over here under the compass rows, there's a little 3D.If I can click that and I can zoom in and I can see the location in 3D, then your finished video, Google Fly-in, is going to show you this perspective, like a 45 degree angle downward view of your location.If you don't have that option down there and you get yours back, it's going to come in more like this type of a view. So that's the difference, we're going to cut out all of the graphics and all of the overlays, it's just going to be almost as if we had a drone in the area that made it through outer space and came down.- So let's say I click on that 3D button. Now, what URL am I copying and pasting to give to you? Am I copying the short URL or am I copying that very long string at the very top?- Well, if you can tell me how to find the short URL, then that would be awesome.- Let's try the pull-out on the top left.- Okay.- And I am looking for the share button.- Share, got it. Look at that.- And then copy link.- Copy link, perfect. Well, let's throw it into a new thing and see what that does. If it takes us to the right spot, then we're good. We are good. Well, Dan, do you want to work in our R&D department? That would be awesome. So okay, there we go. Yes, short URL, that's the new standard, thank you.- You're welcome. I know personally, I have lots of problems with that really long URL, 'cause it's got all kinds of crazy symbols in there and sometimes it seems to break, and that copying the short URL seems to be a little bit easier for me.- That's perfect, thank you.- So literally, it's super-easy to order a Google Street View Fly-in if you want it. And it added a little bit more to the video, but it was a pretty exciting effect that it added. And for my part, to order it, all I really need to do is go grab the link.I'm presuming, Chris, that if I wanted it in 3D, I needed to grab the link and copy for 3D, if I had clicked on that 2D button, I would've actually delivered to you the 2D version of Fly-in. So I really do want to take advantage of the 3D, look for it, and then copy it.- Yeah, that would be ideal. Really, one thing that we're all about is managing expectation. We want you to know, with Google Fly-ins, with the tours, with everything, that's part of why we have you build your own Highlight Reel. We want you to know what you're getting back before you get it back.- Okay. Cool. Is there an opportunity for adding a logo?- There is, yeah. We've recently paired down a lot of the menu options just to keep up with demand. We're leveling back out as far as being able to keep up with everything. And so we're going to be adding that back in.- Can you show us an example?- Sure, yeah. Let's see, let me go to share and jump back here to Disney World and get that out of the way there. Here we go. Okay, so examples. And we're going to go to the examples page. I believe it was...- Even your first one I believe might've had a piece of artwork on it and a logo maybe.- Okay, was that the first one? Okay, let's see here. This may have been... Yeah, that's it. This one, the client wanted to have the logo come in before the video.- That was a fancy Fly-in as opposed to a flat logo, so did the client provide you with that piece of video or did you actually create that?- No, that's the part that we created. So we, and we're actually, right now, we handle this all through email and setting all the details up. Soon, it will be part of the ordering process.But we have a situation where you can either pay $19 per video that we add it to and then there's, you don't necessary own the video, you don't have a copy of the file, we just plug it in.Or you can pay $49 upfront, we'll send you a copy of the video that you can use in your other projects. And then we'll use it in any of your future videos for $2 per video. So we're basically asking you to pay $2 for the extra work for incorporating that logo into the video.- Okay, and is that, what are my options, is it at the beginning, is it at the end, is it both the beginning and end, is it burned into one of the tours, what are the options there?- By default, it's at the beginning. And so it'll be an introduction to the video. Usually, they're really nice professional quality, the way we do them. We'll talk to you a little bit about your brand, we'll check out your website, we're going to find a way to make it fit into your brand and be on brand.And so if you say to us, hey, you know what, we'd really like to have it at the end of all of our videos, then we don't mind adjusting to that. And it's really, at the end of the day, it's just to make your stuff look better, so that's not a problem.If you come in and say, I want it at the beginning of this video, at the next of the next video, and in the middle of this one, then we might have to work out a different pricing structure, but we try to keep things as scalable as possible.- Okay, and if I want to have the URL for the property?- Yeah, we do, that is, we don't have that as an option at the moment that it's coming up. But we've had it in the past. And again, that was one of those things, let me see, I'm trying to find one here that's got it. Well.- That's okay. So I think the point is, it's not part of your standard offering to offer a logo at the beginning or logo at the end or logo burned into let's say bottom left corner, or to have a URL with the property address.But all those things are possible, there is an additional add-on charge for those. In the notes field, I would image, just put a note, say hey, this is what I would like.- Well, and actually, if you're wanting that, probably the better way would be to use the contact page. Because a lot of the times, we've designed, we've really designed to try to streamline the ordering process for--- Ah, if you would take us to your contact page just so everyone knows where that is. So again, we're going to go back to MatterVids, MatterVids.com ... And then on the MatterVids page, I'm going to imagine it's going to say contact us.- It's right here.- Contact. And then from that contact, then you can put in questions even before you place an order, and I could imagine that as this evolves, Chris will start to add options for adding a logo and then where do you want it located.Just as a quick thought, I'm going to jump ahead here, but I'm going to imagine you're going to recommend not putting it in the bottom right corner because YouTube puts some stuff over it, so keep away from that right side. Left side okay?- Yeah, left side would be okay. And that's the thing too, is we'll incorporate it all into the order form in time. We had it all in the order form to begin with, but I think it was overwhelming new clients.And they were just like, I don't have a logo, what am I going to do? And we just want to people to be able to get the simple base product and then build from there.- Yeah, that's a good point. Because many people may be just perfectly fine to get a video without music created from the Highlights Reel for less than $20 and it's done.- Yeah. You'd be surprised how many people are ordering those.- Yeah. And I can image there's lots of uses here. Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo. But Instagram has a different format, so how do we deal with that?- With that, there's an option that's going in, actually going live tonight, so it'll be there by the time anyone's watching the replay. For $4 extra, you can get a setup for Instagram.So it's just a square video, 800 by 800 pixels. It's designed to loop just like all the other videos are. Because this one thing is going to happen on Instagram, if people land on your page, then, and they watch the video and it's looping. It'll be less than 60 seconds, so you can drop it right on your feed and it's going to keep looping over and over.- Okay, so in the case of your, excuse me, for Instagram, that is an Add On, so if you order a basic video or anything else, then you'll pay an extra...- $4.- $4 to get the Instagram version which meets the Instagram specifications of a minute video. In your case, it'll loop. And it's sized properly, it's square.- Yeah, that's correct.- Okay. I can imagine another use case would be perhaps Zillow, could you speak a little bit for Zillow meets MatterVids?- Sure, yeah. When we first started offering the latest version of MatterVids, the one that was almost exactly a clone of the original Highlight Reel, we had a couple of clients that ordered a back-to-back-to-back. And I just asked them, are you shooting all of these now or are you, what are you doing?And they said, we're putting them on Zillow because our client wants to put a Walkthrough on Zillow, but we're not wanting to go in and produce a Walkthrough video. And I said, Zillow is letting you do that? And then they said, yeah. And I said, okay. So then, a few weeks later, they switched up, they were doing them all in Slideshow mode. Then they switched up and they got one in Walkthrough mode and came back and said, whoa.They told me no, they said it came from a 3D tour, I can't do it. And I said, huh. I said, now, you switched over to Walkthrough mode. What if you went back to Slideshow mode, would that work? And they tried it and they apparently had success with it.So I've not had anybody else tell me they couldn't get it on Zillow, but there's still a possibility they could look at it and say, that came from a Matterport tour. But there are some things that you can do, there are some best practices when you scan the property and when you set up the Highlight Reel that will minimize the feel of being in a 3D tour and make it more like an actual video production, I mean, it's never going to be exactly the same. But it'll make it smoother and it's less likely to get flagged for that. So Slideshow mode is one key way to be more likely to get it on Zillow.- Okay, so I presume you don't promise that it'll work with Zillow because these other third party platforms sometimes have rules that vary and get interpreted differently, even depending on who's moderating a platform. But if you want to have the most likelihood that your video is not going to get flagged, then create it from a Slideshow Highlight Reel.
- Correct, yeah, that's what's had the most success.- Chris, so there are some best practices in terms of creating a Highlight Reel in order, and in fact, I guess we should say, well, can I just send you the Matterport tour? Why do you need this Highlight Reel anyway? And then why don't we start there? Why is it a Matterport Highlight Reel to create a video?- Sure. We've been working at it since 2016 and looking at different ways to do this. And one of the early ways that we did it was with a video game controller plugged up and navigating.We tried it with the keyboard and we've tried it, tried to think, mind control it, that didn't work. So we tried to figure out the smoothest way possible to navigate the tour and capture it at the same time. And the Highlight Reel is just designed for that.And again, going back to the whole idea of managing expectation. If a client comes to me and says, hey, I'd like you to do my Highlight Reel. I'm honored, that's great, and I wouldn't mind doing it, it's actually pretty simple now with the new interface.But if I do it, then I'm likely to highlight a feature that looks great to me, but it may not be what your end client wants to highlight. So you know the product better than I do.So if you create this Highlight Reel and you showcase it, then you've shown me, this is what I want to show the world. So it really cuts a lot of the ambiguity out and makes it easier for us to process it and know that we've giving you something you want instead of spending time making a Highlight Reel going, I hope that's what they want to show.- Yeah. I mean, hey, it's less than $20. You've automated the process. It runs from the Highlight Reel. No one needs to be, they don't need to invite you as a Matterport Collaborator.Literally just send you the Matterport tour ID with the Highlight Reel that you've created. Highlight Reel needs to be able to show on screen. And then you have everything you need to create a MatterVid video from a Matterport tour.- And actually, to touch to something you just said, just recently, just in the past I guess two weeks, we've had a new discovery in how we're doing it. It's not even necessary that we publish the Highlight Reel.So let's say you've created, or it's not necessary that you publish or make it public, it used to be. But let's say you've created the Highlight Reel, and you don't want your client to see it, because a Highlight Reel for your client would be an up-charge & they don't want to pay the up-charge.Then just make sure that you have the Highlight Reel created and just don't choose to show that in the thing. And we've got a way of working around to access it. So as long as it exists.- But a Highlight Reel must have been created before it gets to you.- Yes.- I think I would say, hey, if you don't have a Highlight Reel, you don't enjoy making Highlight Reels, there's a company called CAPTUR3D. I would say go to the We Get Around Network Forum, on the front page, WGANForum.com, is a logo box, it says CAPTUR3D.And when you click on that logo box, you'll get six free Matterport tours with Highlight Reels with scans hidden that didn't add to the experience.They'll set the beginning screen. And if you decide to go past six, it's a la carte, super easy to order them. So there is a third party company.While you're sleeping in whatever time zone, you can upload your tour, wake up the next morning, and you'll have a beautifully created Highlights Reel. Voila. Then you can send it to Chris, so again, if you go to WGANForum.com, click on the CAPTUR3D, CAPTUR3D, the logo box on the front page, by using that link, you'll get six free CAPTUR3D, six free Matterport tours with the Highlight Reel added. I think I've said that okay.- And I've personally used them and they did a great job. In fact, the demonstration tour that I showed you earlier, they did the Highlight Reel for that one. And so I refer people to them all the time. So I definitely recommend doing that.- Yeah. Anyway, and six free to start out. So it's so easy to use a third party to outsource, have the work done while you're sleeping, and then wake up next morning, place your order with you. Best practiced for creating a Highlight Reel as it relates to knowing that you want a video created. Do you have some thoughts on that topic?- Yeah, there are actually, there, for a while, there was this whole focus on getting a good solid mesh. And when you're scanning, making sure that you have a really dense mesh.And then some people said, well, I'm not going to show the Dollhouse, so I'm not really worried about the mesh. You still need to worry about the mesh.Because when you go through a tour and you're watching a Highlight Reel and you see little fragments of things flying by your head or things are stretching and distorting out of whack, that's because the mesh that makes up your Dollhouse wasn't very dense, so your scans weren't very close together.And then, if you go through a doorway and you end clicking through the side of the doorway, then that piece of stuff's coming at you. Those are things that make people go, wait a minute, what just happened? And those are things we can't control in our process.So if those are in there, we're going to capture them. So to fix that, I would just say make sure that your scan density is really tight.And you don't go overboard, but just stick within the guidelines. Just try to feel all the black spots in your map when you're scanning. When you go to a doorway, make sure that you've got sweeps that are outside the door, in the doorframe, and inside the door. And then when you're publishing, just disable that one in the doorframe.That's going to help connect the two rooms together, and so when you transition, when you're setting up a transition from room to room, don't start outside in the hallway and then have a spot inside the wall right beside you, or you're going to tear through that wall. You want to go to one of those spots at a doorway opening and then work your way in.Same thing with a couch or a big piece of furniture, unless you want the experience to be that you're flying through furniture and through things, just map out a normal walk path. And then, the way that it's set up now, at the time of recording this, it's pretty simple to go in, pick a spot, mark that as a point in your Highlight Reel and set it.And then go on to the next one, and if you don't like it, it's really easy to change it compared to what it was say two years ago. So if you've not tried making a Highlight Reel in a while, jump in there and give it a shot and you'll be surprised.- I would add that one of the things that I've done in the past when we've ordered MatterVids from you, Chris, is that we've used the Dollhouse View as the transition between floors.- Yes.- So in fact, let me see if I can show you how We Get Around has done that. So that's, in this particular, this is the We Get Around Network Forum.This is the particular example I'm using, MatterVids: videos made from Matterport 3D tours. On this example here. If I go take a look at the Highlights Reel, this, this is a three story town home. This is the first floor. This is the second floor.And this is the transition from floor to floor. So I thought I'd show how that actually looked. So you can see that. So we're going to transition from the first floor.And now we're at the top of the stairs. So that's one way that I personally would recommend building the Highlights Reel, is either using the dollhouse view or the floor plan view to transition from floor to floor.- I like that.- I guess what I'm thinking, Chris, is to say there's likely some viewers that are saying, hey, I can do that with Ice Cream, I can do that with OBS. I'm on a Mac, I can do that with QuickTime. What are your thoughts on that, why should I be doing MatterVid rather than doing this myself with one of those tools or other tools like that?- Sure. Well, if you can do it and you can do it without lag and without catching jumpiness and without tons of headaches and aspirin and everything else, then you're really not our ideal client and that's okay. It's good because you've got a grasp on it.But we've yet to find any other recordings that have been as accurate and without glitches and without dragginess. We've tried all those apps that you're talking about, in fact, I've thought about going ahead and creating some tutorials on how to use them to the best of their abilities.But then you're still limited by hardware, by Internet connections, all of those things. And we've made the investment in the hardware, the Internet connections needed, and then some code work that we've done, some different things that we've created to enhance the images.A lot of it's proprietary, but we've created a technique that pretty much is perfect world, with perfect Internet, with a perfect machine with no lags, this is what your tour would look like. So if you can pull that off, by all means, do it, and that's awesome, and give me a call, because you'll help us grow.- Yeah. So you're so giving to tell people that, if you can pull it off using QuickTime or OBS or Ice Cream or whatever it might be to do it, and I personally would say is, even if you're really awesome at that, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's 20 bucks, don't--- Well, that's the thing, you're buying time. We've been, we started in September of 2016 doing this in some form or another, in fact, we've got the history section on the website, you can check it out and see where we came from and how we got here.But yeah, I mean, we spent so much time just focused on, and we're still focused on up and around the corner. As good as it is, we've got ideas in place for how can we get it even better.- So I would add to that, I mean, this is, there are things that you can outsource. Creating videos from a Matterport tour is one of them.It's so inexpensive, less than 20 bucks, we'll talk about pricing, in volume, less than 12 dollars, that, if you're spending time creating a video, two things.One, it's never going to look good, as good as MatterVids. Chris has spent four plus years perfecting the process with a proprietary process of how to create silky smooth, high definition video for Matterport. It doesn't show any Mattertags, it doesn't show any of the signage, the logos and Matterport stuff and Mattertags and all that stuff disappears. If you can do that, that's great.But that second thing is, your time's valuable, and if you're creating video, then that's time it's taking away from you to do business development and it's time taking away from scanning.- Yeah. And well, I mean, and Matterport's even sent us clients. So it's like, and they got lots of technology. So I'm thankful for them.- Yeah, so it really is not worth your time. I have so much to visit with you about, Chris.You've been talking about a little bit of the history of creating MatterVids. I think it's probably important to know a little bit about you, I think, pre-Matterport, and then even when you got started with Matterport, and then maybe what problem you've been trying to solve with this video stuff. Chris, before Matterport, what were you doing?- That is, as far back as 92, I've been editing video. So it went from a hobby to a full blown professional career. And I did broadcast work for ESPN and stuff, and so video is pretty much my second language forever. And so when I got into doing the tours, it--- You bought a Matterport camera.- I bought a Matterport camera.- 2016.- Yeah, 2016, and I think it was September, August to September 2016. I got started. I looked at the industry and I said, I'm going to become as proficient as I can in everything, learn how it works. That's how I am, I like to learn everything I can about something and then think outside of the box and then throw the box out.And so I got into it and started looking at it, and I constantly saw people asking, how do I make a video, how do I do this? And I kept asking the same thing myself, because I thought, this is a great player and it's awesome if people know what they're looking at, but--- The Matterport player.- Yeah. The interface itself is really cool and in fact, my clients were still calling them videos. And then I had clients asking, why can't I put this on YouTube or how do I put it on YouTube or how do I do this? And I had to tell them no and I was like, we can't, that doesn't work that way.But they couldn't understand that because they had an interface that they could work with and it would play. And so using my video history and understanding how video works, I thought, there's gotta be a smooth way to capture this and do this.We went through everything, from taking an iPad and screen capping inside the showcase app and everything else. Early, early years, that's how we did it and then we cropped it down to a third of its size to get rid of stuff, it was horrible.- Yeah, I won't take you through all that, you have this great history on your website. So if you want to know the history of MatterVids, go to the site, it is actually super interesting.But I think for today's purpose, what I really want to emphasize is you as a Matterport Service Provider intimately understand Matterport. And with your professional history in video, a deep knowledge of video.And so you've been able to take your deep knowledge of video, your deep knowledge of Matterport, put that, mash that together and create something super exciting and simple, which is the ability to order a silky smooth, high definition video from a Matterport tour and not have it junked up with all the distractions of Mattertags and Highlight Reel and everything else.So that that video can now end up on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, the Instagram version, any other social media channels that support video, a blog, a website, in case of real estate, Zillow.- I even had some clients that were working with the local news department, they were doing the feature on them, and so they sent it to them for B-Roll. And then had some that used them for local advertisements for the business that they did the tour of. So yeah.- Yeah, just awesome. You're almost like a gift to the Community, because you've created an Add On that is super-easy, again, super-easy to order, it's extremely high quality, it's less than $20. It's almost a gift to the community.And I think the way I look at it is, if you're a Matterport Service Provider, that video that is created by MatterVids might sell for, pick a number. $49, $99, $149, $249. Just because you pay Chris $20 or maybe you pay him for some music and maybe you pay him for the Google Fly-in and maybe you're paying something more than that, but you may very well find that you're able to offer it as an Add On.Let's call it $249. It may literally be nearly as much as what you charged for a Matterport tour. And in my view, so what? I think it's really important when we're talking about pricing, and I'll ask you to comment on this, Chris, but from my view, pricing is about value and it's what's the perceived value of that service or that product from the prospect that wants it.And if you offer it and somebody really wants video and they really want a nice video and they want that Google Earth Fly-in and they want the music and they want their logo on it, they want the URL of their property address for that property, that MatterVids can deliver that.And from the service provider's point of view, it's not a whole lot to do to place an order to be able to pay X and maybe be able to charge 5 or 10X of what it actually cost. Do you have any thoughts on pricing, on retail pricing for a service provider?- Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, not in exact amounts, but just to echo what you said, I mean, we don't, we're not sticking our brand on it anywhere. We're delivering you, when you get the delivery, when it's finished, you've got a download link where you can download it and it's just, it's the video, it's not going to have anything tying back to us.So I tell clients all the time, I say, if you're telling people about it, you don't have to even mention our name, you don't have to say anything.Take the examples and have some of your tours converted, show them to people. You can even leave it to sale, you could show the video and sent it to somebody and say, hey, get one of these videos, you don't even have to say 3D tour.Maybe it's an ice breaker. And then, when they ask, well, hey, I did not fly through the couch, how do you do this stuff, then they can look at it. So the pricing is, I mean, different regions have different price points, different clients have different things, I mean, I've heard people selling them, like you said, way up there, and then some low.We just try to keep the price low enough that, if you just wanted to get it done as a marketing piece on your own website, it wouldn't really be too big of a hit for you. And it's a happy place where you win, we win, everybody wins.- Yeah. Personally, I think it's a high margin piece, it's got a high perceived value, a low cost, and it's super-easy to order as an Add On.And every Matterport Service Provider should be using MatterVids as part of their service offering. Period and a paragraph. I mean, it just, to me, it just seems that obvious. I do have a whole, I still have more questions for you, a lot of questions. I think what I want to just mention is, later in the show, we have two special offers for WGAN Members, and I'll talk about that.So stay tuned for that. Chris, how about in terms of challenges when people place an order, are there some tips when placing an order so to make sure that the order doesn't get hung up in queue for some reason?- Sure, yeah, there are actually a couple of things. There, it's interesting, because we've started getting a steady stream of orders coming in, a lot of them repeat customers, a lot of them new people. And we're thankful for every single one of them.But when an order comes in, the first thing we do is we check the URL, make sure, one, that the tour ID works as the first thing, and so if it works, great, that's out of the way. If it doesn't, then you're going to get an email saying, we're appreciating your order, thank you, but we got a problem. So then just to make sure that you've published the tour.That's the first step, is making sure it's published, the next is the Highlight Reel, make sure that the Highlight Reel exists. Used to, we would say, you may have a Highlight Reel, but it's not showing up. But now we just say there isn't a Highlight Reel. So make sure the Highlight Reel is published, make sure the tour is published and unlocked to be public.And then the, that's good, Highlight Reel, that one. And then, I think those are the main ones. The other one too is if you have a spam filter on your email, you will want to go, and I don't usually type it in on the website because I don't want tons of spam.But orders@MatterVids.com is our delivery email address. So when you get your finished link, it's going to go there, we've had a few people contact and say, hey, where's my order? And we have to reply and say, well, we actually sent it, have you checked your spam folder, here's the link just in case.And so that is the email address it will be coming from, make sure that that's white-listed in your spam folder. And I think those are the main things, but those are the main things that cause us to have to set it aside and then, instead of three days delivery, if the client hasn't had it ready, then we're looking at a longer delay.- When I place my order, what do I get as a deliverable? Are you putting a video in a Dropbox, are you emailing me a video? What is it--- Let me show you. Let's see here. Because I actually got one on the website for a sample. Because that was a very common question. Okay, so if we go to, I think it's on the order page. Yeah. So at the bottom of the order page, again, this is the sample video. Feel free to do exactly what I'm doing right now. Go follow the link and download it.And then you can use it on your website if you want to and offer it to your clients that way.- All right, so let's click there, that's on the word here. So this is how it's delivered, you get a URL. And now there's a download button.- That's correct, and this won't be up here, this is just because I'm logged in from the backend. But this is all what you'll see. And then you've got options.You're going to have the original file, which is a pretty large file, it's 531 megabytes, sorry. But that's 1920 by 1080.Then you've got the HD, and this is where Vimeo has converted it for us to a more streamlined, optimized version.So if you want the original to do whatever with, you click this button, it starts downloading and it's all yours. We can't take it away from you, we're not going to whatever, you just edit it up, chop it up, send it like it is, whatever you want to do.- Why might I use some of these other versions?- Sure. The 1080p, if you're going to put it on your website and you want it streaming, then this is already optimized for that. And so you don't have to worry about it lagging as much, the top one is going to be the highest quality, the original file that we sent.It's also going to be higher bitrate. So this is going to be optimized for streaming, so will this one. And these others are, if you're going to be putting them somewhere that you need to send them smaller, let's say you're going to convert it to an animated GIF or something that needs to be in an email attachment or some type of a file, a lot of people have really strange uses, which by all means, go for it.But these are just available options for you to download it as well.- I'm confused, your website says something about 4K?- 4K, yeah. We do offer 4K, we did offer 4K and we still do. But it's not as perfect as the perfect, which is strange, you'd think 4K would be better than the 1080p HD. But we found that, we had a handful of clients that were ordering it.But the return on investment for creating it made it so that we couldn't really offer it at the same price point. And it still wasn't the same quality, it was still subjected to lags and glitches and things. So if you're interested in that and you want that, give us a shout, we're going to set up a place where you can get to order it automatically.But right now, we just wanted to focus on what was selling and what was good.- I guess I could imagine 4K sounds like it'd be nicer, but if someone doesn't have a 4K TV or a 4K device, then you're ... it's wasted.- And unless you're doing it for purposes of trying to, say archive or get footage to chop into something else, yeah, it's not, I mean, some people specifically wanted that, and then I was feeling bad when they would order it, because I was thinking, we've got, for much less, we have an option over here that we can do that's going to be smoother and nicer and most people are going to see it.So it was overkill. It was our goal for a long time until we realized that we can pull this off.- Okay. If I have a website that provides other services to our clients, can I incorporate your ordering process using an API or something similar?- We've been approached with that a few times.And we can use webhooks, we can develop a process that will do that. We just really need to meet and talk about it, maybe do a Zoom call or a few emails back and forth and get it lined up, but we can make it work to where you're not having to constantly go to the website and type in all that information every time, yeah.- Excuse me. So it's a possibility, you'd like to have a conversation.- Yeah. Just depends on the situation, and as long as it doesn't affect our ability to scale and it's going to be a win-win. Any type of partnerships like that, anything that anyone's interested in I'm willing to talk about, as long as it's an equal win, then we're good.- Okay, awesome. How about taking us back to your order page and let's go over pricing.- Sure. Order page, yeah, there it is. Okay.- Let's, take us through everything I can possibly spend money with you.- Okay, sure. Let's say we're going to get a, well, short of ordering a custom edit, as far as being able to check out here.- So the basic MatterVid was $19.99.- Mm-hmm.- I can then decide to add music, that's, do I want to add music? Music, adding music is going to be either $2 to $4, literally. So the most I could spend on music is $4. I presume I can't send you a track, I can only use music that comes from this library.- That's correct, yes.- Okay. Now I, whether or not I want a Google Fly-in or not, if I'd like that Google Fly-in, $19.99. Then standard delivery is three business days or less. So if I order on a Monday, I guess three business days would be a Thursday.- Yeah, if you order before 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, then I believe it's Monday to Tuesday, Tuesday to Wednesday, I believe it's Wednesday or Thursday, yeah, Thursday--- Would be three business days.- Yeah. So you'll have about Thursday, about 5 p.m. Eastern Time, we're doing all of our timing based on Eastern Time, 'cause it's where we're located.- Okay. And if I order on a Thursday, then there's Friday, Monday, Tuesday.- Yeah, Tuesday.- [Dan] Tuesday?- I believe that's right, I've got a chart--- Thursday to Friday, Friday to Monday, Monday to Tuesday. Sounds like three days.- Yup, that's right.- And there's actually a chart. So we can go, you could go onto his website, MatterVids.com, and it'll actually summarize.- Yeah, there it is, this is an example. Well, it's the example on it, but yeah.- Yeah, okay, great. Then I notice there's an opportunity for rush. So rush delivery, one business day. So if I order on a Thursday for Friday, or I order Friday for Monday, business days, then it's $68.99.- Yes.- Sounds like a lot. So how do you deal with those in the real estate business that, I imagine you have some other option.- Yeah. We've actually, we're developing an option. It's, we offered it before, called the raw clone. And we're going to go back to that as an option.Because if you noticed, all MatterVids, here are some features with MatterVids, they're unbranded, they're loop-able, and they're enhanced.So we have a step in the process where we've created a proprietary plug-in for our editing suite that makes some enhancements that will, in some cases, actually make the tour look better than the original. And so we incorporate that, we also make some edits so that if you were to say, go to a trade show or somewhere and put your video on loop, it would be a seamless loop.And so if we can cut that out of the process and we just give you just a straight up screen capture of your tour, we're working on a way to get that to you faster and at a less expensive price. And that's going to be coming in the very very near future.- Okay, great. So let's go back to that pricing page.- Sure.- And so I want this, I get it. I decide, okay, I want a MatterVid, I want music, I want a Google Fly-in, I'm going to have a separate conversation with you about a logo, whether I want a logo at the beginning, a logo at the end. Whether I want to burn in a logo at the bottom left corner, whether I want to have my URL or my single property website or my property address up here on the video. I've started to do a lot of volume with you, do you got special pricing for me?- We do, yeah. The way that our volume pricing works now is, once you've gotten, once you've ordered 10 tours within a calendar month, then you can approach us through the contact page or email us and then just say, hey, I just ordered my 10th video this month. I'd like a VIP code. That VIP code is going to be good for $8 off of every tour for six months.So over the course of the next six months, if the next month, you only order one video, you're going to get it for $11.99. And you can order as many of them at that rate as you want to. At the end of six months, we're going to go back and re-evaluate your account.If you've averaged 10 tours in a calendar month through that time, then we'll extend it another six months. If you've not, then we'll just have to go back until you've gotten 10 in a month again. Basically, the reason why is we had a lot of people that would say, hey, we're going to order a bunch of volume. And then they disappear.And then we'd get things set up and they'd be gone. Then we'd have some people that would come along and they would order volume. And it would be pretty intense. And so the only way that I figured logically to keep it streamlined for us, for them, make it easy is let's all use the same interface for ordering.But we'll give you a code and it's your custom code and it's just for you. And when you plug that in, we know that you're VIP, so we're going to knock $8 off per tour. And so you can, you have more markup margin.- Yeah, so it's awesome. So from as low as less than $12 in quantity. You're doing 10 tours a mo., you're going to be paying less than $12 for your tours after that first of 10 videos within a month.- Yeah.- And it's actually an $8 off coupon code. So if you still want to add the music, you want to add the Google Fly-in, you want something else, then just apply the $8 off.- Correct, yeah.- Okay, awesome. Chris, I mentioned that We Get Around Network has a couple special offers, I thought I would talk about them in terms of pricing.- Sure.- Let's see if I can call up some pages I have. Called up. Okay. ... Let's see. Okay. So I'm going to share a page, Chris.- Okay.- So if you go to the We Get Around Network Forum, the short address if you're watching on our YouTube Channel or elsewhere is WGANForum.com, WGANForum.com. So if you go into Forum and you search for the tag MatterVids, this will be one of the Forum posts. How to get the free use of a MatterVid, or how do you get a free MatterVid of one of your tours?If you are a We Get Around Network Standard or Premium Member, you get a free MatterVid every year using the WGAN Rebate Form, simple as that. So you simply order it with Chris and we will reimburse you through PayPal up to $19.99 cents. We want you to try, first of all, we obviously would like you to be a Standard or Premium Member of WGAN There's 40+ Membership benefits. One of those Membership benefits is you do get a free MatterVid. And that's handled with a WGAN Rebate Form.Also, from this page, this will take you to this page. And if you are a Basic, Standard, or Premium member of the We Get Around Network, you can get sample videos, sample Matterport videos to incorporate in your website. So we literally have 16 Matterport tours that MatterVids turned into MatterVids. And those same tours, MatterVids created 16 Instagram samples. So if you are a WGAN Basic Member, you can include up to two of these on your website.And if you're a Standard or Premium member, you can include up to five of these samples on your website as a membership benefit. And then, as Chris said, you can still go to the MatterVids website, and there's one that he has available that you can download as well.So those are the special offers. Where does the Matterport teaser videos fit into this conversation? Because Matterport does create free teaser videos automatically from Matterport tours.- They were actually part of the inspiration for moving MatterVids forward. I've actually got a sample of what happened to me when they first came out, I got so excited. Let me go to the history page here.- I imagine your heart might've sank a little bit that Matterport was offering free videos where you were charging for MatterVids.- Well, at that point, I wasn't fully offering it as a service, I was offering it individually to some people like Sherry Rennick that actually, she put a lot of faith in me early on and put up with a whole lot of stuff to figure out a lot of the working through things, figure out how to make it work. But yeah, then this came out and I did, on some level, I thought, oh, okay, well, there goes doing that, they're going to take it over. But then this was the first one that I got back from them. Was nice and started out and smooth. But then it decided that it wanted to land right in the middle of the garage. And I was disheartened. So yeah.- I think you're pretty lucky. Most of us, when we first started it out, it landed on the bathroom.- Yeah, yeah, that was the big complaint that I heard in the Forums, and I thought, okay, well, I've got to fix this. And so that's actually one of the ways that we started, was offering custom teasers that you control. And you could still do that with this.The way that you would do it would be to just take your Dollhouse View, start at the Dollhouse View, well, wherever you want to start, really. It's just three frames. You make a starting frame wherever you want to start.And then go to a Dollhouse View. And then copy that frame back to the end, so you've got frame one, frame two, and frame one again.And you've got exactly the same thing, it's just you control where it went. You could do it with more if you wanted, but the idea would be that you just, if you want to make a longer one, maybe four of them. But it really just gives you just a little sample or two to show people.- Yeah, I think Matterport actually did you a favor, Chris. First, when they came out with these teaser videos, and I think we were all initially like, wow, that's awesome.But as soon as we started downloading and we go, oh, they're ending up in the garage, they're ending up in the bathroom. It's a five million dollar property, it's ended up in the worst possible room. So it, these Matterport teaser videos tease us about the possibility of getting videos from Matterport tours.And I guess that was probably a good inspiration for you to say, hmm, there seems to be a demand for videos created from Matterport tours, but they gotta, fast forward today, MatterVids, high definition, silky smooth videos from Matterport tours created from the Highlight Reel.- Yeah, that you control and you get to choose where it starts, where it stops, and where it goes in between.- Awesome. Chris, we've covered a lot of ground today, are there questions that I should've asked you that I haven't asked?- Oh, oh, yeah, I thought you were telling me there were and I was like, no. Not that I can think of, no, I think that pretty much covers it.- Gotta be something else to cover about MatterVids.- MatterVids, let's see. Basically, I just want to let everybody know to keep your eyes open. We're constantly looking, like I said, we're constantly looking around the corner and we're always trying to get better. And really just feedback. If you're a MatterVids client, I mean, some of our clients we hear from regularly and we get feedback.Some of them just order and we never really get to talk to them, we've got, it's increased about 400% just in the past few months, the ordering. And so we're just trying to keep it scalable, but we want your feedback on things that would make it easier to scale.I will say that response to messages and things, questions is probably, it gets pushed to the back burner for production's sake sometimes. So if you've ordered from us, your order is going to get our attention.And if you've asked a question and I've not responded or somebody's not responded to you, then just try again or be patient, we'll get with you, but we don't want to put anybody on hold, but once you've placed an order, we want that to take priority over trying to sell more people on it, if that makes sense.- Yeah, cool. Is there anything else that's coming, anything to tease us about MatterVids that's coming in the future? I know you mentioned that one process for--- Oh, the raw clone.- You mentioned that. Is there yet something else that's coming? I think what I did here is, there's some shopping cart features that are coming that you'll incorporate some extra field probably for capturing perhaps logos or something else or some other order forms that you'll have, even if it's not on the website, there'll probably be some other, oh, you're asking for those solutions, let us send you a link so that you can efficiently send us logos and artwork, et cetera.- Right. We've been working on an assistant so that, when you show up on site, if it's your first time there or whatever, you can tell us, okay, I'm looking for a logo on it, I'm looking for the stuff. And then it would route you to the right place to check out. And now we don't have to go so much back and forth with emails to try to say, hey, what logo are you using, what's your style, what do you want to do, yeah. So we'll streamline it.- Cool. I could imagine this COVID-19 pandemic has affected your MatterVid business?- Yeah, yeah, it's actually increased dramatically, I think the world's starting to take note of the importance of what we do, yeah.- Yeah, I think that's good for all of us, certainly, you started out with, as a Matterport Service Provider, probably like many of us thought that the armored cars would be showing up with tons of money. And it's taken a lot of time for all of us to tell the story and then maybe four years of how long it would take for adoption has been done maybe in three or four months. And I could imagine now that there's all that ordering of additional Matterport tours and it's creating additional requests now for the video from the Matterport tours. So I think, if I could say there was one takeaway for me from our show today, is that it's super easy, super fast, super affordable to order a silky smooth, high definition video from a Matterport tour using a Highlight Reel that I, a Matterport Service Provider, creates and has control over. And it's an awesome Add On or up-sell or whatever it might be.And if you're a Matterport Service Provider and you're not offering a video solution, this is the easy, fast way to offer a video from your shoot that requires no effort on your part.Super affordable. And because it has such high perceived value, depending on your market, it literally could be, I mean, and I would imagine a range all the way from charging 49 dollars as an Add On to charging $499, depending on which feature sets you're using and what the perceived value is and what sized market you're in. For me, it's just, there's money sitting on the table for Matterport Service Providers that are leveraging MatterVids.- I agree.- Of course you agree, this is, it's like send business to Chris, MatterVids.com. I'm so grateful that you've been on the show today, I know probably today sounds so commercial, talking about your business, but to me, I just see this as what a valuable contribution that you've made to the Matterport ecosystem, starting out as a Matterport Service Provider like the rest of us in 2000, in your case, 2016.You figured out that clients wanted video and somehow, some way, there would be a way to, in fact, they thought it was video, so why can't I have it as a video I can put on Vimeo or YouTube or whatever? You figured out how to do that and turn it into a business.And kudos to you, because you've created value for the community while creating a business for you that lets you live in a nice rural setting near Bristol, Tennessee. How awesome is that, to be able to, I imagine you have Matterport, MatterVid customers all over the world?- Oh yeah, yeah, we've just gotten our first client from Tokyo, or yeah, just Tokyo last week. And so it's literally every continent, and it's been really wild.- How awesome is that, just awesome. So Chris, thanks for being on the show today.- Thank you very much.- We've been visiting with Chris Fraser, Chris is the Founder of MatterVids, he's active in the We Get Around Network Forum Community. His Member name is @MatterVids That's @MatterVids You can also reach Chris on his website, MatterVids.com.Super excited, thanks so much for being on the show today, Chris. If you've missed any portion of today's show, we have been recording it, we will publish it in the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, June 18, 2020. We'll publish it by tomorrow, Friday, June 19, 2020.And thank you all for tuning in, and I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. And, you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.# # # # #

Monday Jun 01, 2020

Swiss Army Knife for Property Websites, Digital Content Delivery, Invoicing and Getting Paid
Hi All,✓ Seeking a Single Property Website for your Matterport (or other 3D/360 Tour)?✓ Wondering how best to deliver your digital assets?✓ Need to display more than one Matterport digital twin within the Tour?On WGAN-TV Live at 5 on Thursday, 28 May 2020, my guest was Kansas City-based Josh Mais, owner of Sherpa Media.Our topic:✓ Show & Tour Property Websites and Project Delivery Demo and DiscussionBackstory Provided by Josh MaisShow & Tour is a cloud-based software built for:✓ real estate photographers✓ videographers✓ virtual tour providers.The purpose? To help you deliver projects in a more professional and client-friendly way, as well as help your clients get the full value out of your services.5 Reasons Why Show & Tour Will Help Your Business Thrive(1) Look more professional. Show & Tour is designed to promote your brand and make it the central focus, building your client’s trust and confidence in your services.(2) Provide a better customer experience. The interface is clean and simple, ensuring your clients can easily find what they need (because I too have received calls at 10pm on a Thursday night from a frustrated agent trying to find the Google Drive download button).(3) Make your life a little easier. I’m always looking for ways to streamline processes and eliminate unneeded tasks. With Show & Tour, you can eliminate day-to-day frustrations and hassles such as: invoice reminders, late payments, the need to export multiple file sizes; inconvenient customer service calls, compiling long emails, and using multiple platforms for delivery, payments, property websites, storage, and streaming.(4) Become more valuable to your clients. By providing property websites, flyer templates, and social media tools, you help your client get the full value out of your services.(5) Become harder to replace. With all of these tools, you become more than a photographer. You become a marketing partner and trusted adviser.Top 10 Show & Tour Features (List provided by Show & Tour(1) Easy & Professional Project Delivery. Provide a better client experience by making payment, image downloads, and link/embed sharing a breeze. It will look really good too!(2) Visual Drag & Drop Property Website Builder. Endless layout possibilities for property websites. No need to be locked down to a few themes.(3)Revolutionary Media Player. This unique tool combines many different forms of media (photos, video, virtual tours) into one single player to embed on any website.(4) Fully White Labeled. We think your brand should always come first. Integrate your own domain name, logo, and brand colors.(5) Payment Integration & Pay before Download. Never get paid late again by locking downloads, links, and embed codes until your client has made payment. Integrate with popular payment gateways and accounting systems to streamline your bookkeeping process.(6) Add You Own Domain Names. Easily add your own custom domain names from ANY registrar at no additional cost.(7) Unlimited Property Websites, Unlimited Projects Delivered, and Unlimited Clients. We don’t think it’s right to charge for every project, property website, or client.(8)Integrate Any Virtual Tour or Video. YouTube, Vimeo, iPlayerHD, Matterport, iGuide, NodelView, Zillow, RoundMe… to name a few.(9) Security & Password Protection. Every property website and project delivery page you create is secured with an SSL certificate and has the option to be password protected.(10)Intuitive Project and Client Management. Clean and simple dashboard makes it easy to find and create new projects and clients.---About the Founders (Provided by Josh Mais)Hey community, I’m Josh Mais, owner of Sherpa Media in Kansas City. Like many of you, I’m a photographer, videographer, and virtual tour provider. While I am an industrial engineer by education, I have been an entrepreneur and photographer for most of my life.I’m passionate about creating products and services to help others achieve success in their business… which is what led me to create Show & Tour.Brian Schwabauer is my partner in crime and a coding wizard. Most developers only care about making functional buttons and knobs, but not Brian. He is obsessed with creating beautiful and speedy websites and apps that fundamentally change the game for users. His degree in Electronic Arts combined with his years of experience as a developer has helped craft Show & Tour into a tool we hope is useful and beneficial for your business.

Tuesday May 19, 2020

Part 1
In this free WGAN-TV Training U in Zillow 3D Home App Course, you will learn:✓ How to shoot with the Zillow 3D Home App - Part 1✓ How to do post production of your Zillow 3D Home Tour - Part 2The course is taught by By Virtual Tour Expert and Zillow Certified Photographer Emily Olman. Emily is the Founder of Hopscotch Interactive and is a WGAN Member (@Hopscotch).WGAN-TV Training U Related Course✓ WGAN-TV How to Make Money with Zillow 3D Home ToursOther WGAN-TV Training U Course by Emily Olman✓ WGAN-TV | A Beginners Guide to Matterport Scanning✓ WGAN-TV | A Beginners Guide to Matterport ScanningFor more free and paid WGAN-TV Training U Courses, please see:✓ WGAN-TV Training UPlus ...✓ Are you a real estate photographer researching Creating Virtual Tours?✓ Are you a real estate agent researching DIY Creating 3D/360 Virtual Tours?Best,Dan

Friday Mar 20, 2020

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as applied to Matterport Digital Twins
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WGAN-TV How and Why to Create ADA Compliant Matterport and Other 3D/360 Virtual Tours
Hi All,✓ What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?✓ How does the ADA apply to Matterport and other3D/360 Virtual Tours?✓ How do you create ADA compliant Matterport and other 3D/360 Virtual Tours?✓ What should every Matterport Service Provider and other 3D/360 Virtual Tour Service Providers know about ADA?My guest on WGAN-TV Live at 5 (5 pm ET Thursday, 19 March 2020 is Barnes Creative Studios Founder Steve Barnes (@BarnesCreative). Barnes Creative Studios has created an exclusive ADA compliant player to make Matterport and other 3D/360 Virtual Tours - accessible to Americans with disabilities.The WGAN-TV Live at 5 topic is: How and Why to Create ADA Compliant Matterport and Other Virtual ToursIf you have enterprise clients or prospects, it's likely that you will be asked about how to make the Matterport Digital Twins ADA compliant. Over time, it's also likely that other existing or potential clients of your Matterport Tours will ask about ADA compliance.“Under the current law, there is an incentive for plaintiff’s lawyers to file ADA access lawsuits: hotels may be required to pay a disabled person’s attorney fees even if the hotel agrees to correct any problems right away," says FindLaw.Even if you do not have enterprise clients such as a major hotel brand or cruise line brand, this is a "must watch" WGAN-TV Live at 5 show.Here are questions that I anticipate asking Steve:1. What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?2. How does ADA apply to Matterport 3D Tours?3. What is the Web Content Accessibilities Guidelines (WCAG)?4. How does the Website Content Accessibilities Guidelines apply to Matterport 3D Tours?5. Why should I care about making Matterport 3D Tours ADA compliant? Enterprise clients and prospects?6. Can you speak about this from a disabled person's perspective?7. Can you speak about this from a lawsuit perspective?8. How and why did you decide to build an ADA compliant virtual tour player9. Please demo your ADA compliant, custom-built embedded virtual tour player10. Please demo the Video Guided Tour Button11. Please demo the Audio Description Button (Screen Reader)12. Please demo the Read Transcription Button13. Please demo how to return to the standard virtual tour Button14. What does "level double A" compliant mean? Other levels?15. Does ADA compliant virtual tours super-charge SEO? How so?16. How does the Barnes Creative Studios ADA compliant player address issues about disabilities related to:visualaudiospeechcognitivelanguagelearningneurological17. [I will explain the exclusive free offer for WGAN Forum Members and how to receive.]18. Barnes Creative Studios Pricing for ADA client Matterport Digital Twins19. I understand that you are no longer a Matterport Service Provider. Why does that matter?20. Your website to reach out to you? (www.BarnesCareativeStudios.com)21. What questions have I not asked you that I should ask?22. Anything else?--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[The following is reprinted with permission of Barnes Creative Studios (BCS) from this BCS blog post.]--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Barnes Creative Studios ADA Compliant Matterport - and other 3D/360 – Virtual Tours for Hospitality
Barnes Creative Studios (BCS) has developed a solution to make ADA compliant virtual tours. ADA (The Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance means making your service or product accessible to people with disabilities and it was amended to include websites in 2008. Hotels are increasingly aware that non-compliant websites make them potentially liable for lawsuits and fines, and many have implemented standards to comply.Up until now, there was not a streamlined solution to make virtual tours compliant. BCS has created a solution. Introducing an embedded player which not only provides AA compliant virtual tours, but also can be used for older virtual tours you already have in your catalog. Also, as an added bonus your search engine optimization will be amplified.See a list of past and current lawsuits on the ADA website that includes many hotels and resorts.BCS Has an Exclusive Player that Adheres to Accessibility GuidelinesBCS exclusively provides our custom ADA compliant virtual tours that adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG define how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Accessibility involves a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning and neurological.BCS offers a solution which directly adheres to the “WCAG 2.0 guidelines 1.2 for time-based media: providing alternatives for time-based media”. This includes “audio and/or video combined with interaction”. The accessible alternative version of our ADA compliant virtual tour contains:✓ Alternative Pre-Recorded Video Guided Virtual Tour✓ Transcript✓ Audio Description (Prerecorded)✓ Live CaptionsAll of the above is delivered in a custom-built embedded player that hosts both media items. Firstly, it includes the standard virtual tour and secondly the alternative accessible version that is ADA compliant. For example, below is an ADA compliant virtual tour from the Four Seasons Punta Mita Mexico.
Added SEO value for ADA Compliant Virtual TourAs a result, for having compliant virtual tours on your website your search engine optimization (SEO) value will be supercharged. SEO is successful when you have contextual elements attached to rich media, for instance, like transcripts and detailed descriptions. With our ADA compliant virtual tour the added context from the WCAG 2.0 guidelines makes your content fuel your web page resulting in successful SEO.Barnes Creative Studios looks forward to help your hotel reach compliance with ADA standards. 360 Virtual tours are a unique user driven media and BCS is dedicated to making these experiences available to as many people as possible.Private Message Steve Barnes at @BarnesCreative for more information.Source: Barnes Creative Studios Blog Post

Wednesday Mar 11, 2020

WGAN Forum Membership Benefit: Free Branding and More Digital Assets
Watch WGAN-TV Live at 5 on Tuesday, 10 March 2020 for: Matterport Virtual Staging from Imagineer. My guest will be Matterport Virtual Staging Value-Added Reseller Peterborough, England-Based Imagineer Consulting Founder Angus Norriss (@AngusNorriss)-------------------------------------------------------Imagineer Offers Matterport Virtual Staging powered by VRPMHi All,As a Matterport Service Provider, you now have a new Add On to offer:✓ Virtual Staging of Matterport SpacesYou can now order virtual staging of Matterport digital twins of empty spaces from WGAN Premium Member Peterborough, England-Based Imagineer Consulting Angus Norriss (@AngusNorriss).The sweet-spot for virtual staging of Matterport digital twins likely includes:For Matterport Service Providers, virtual staging of Matterport digital twins is a great Add On and may result in properties being scanned twice: after drywall installation and once furnished.✓ multi-family rentals and senior living communities✓ multi-family home communities✓ commercial office spaceVirtual staging can include:✓ adding furniture✓ changing wall colors✓ adding walls✓ adding lightingVirtual staging styles available include:✓ Traditional Interior Style✓ Modern Interior Style✓ Contemporary Home Decor Style✓ Shabby-Chic✓ Industrial Interior DesignImagineer Valued-Added Services for Matterport Digital Twin Virtual Staging Include:✓ Project Management✓ Priced Lower than Ordering Direct from the Developer (VRPM)✓ Exclusive for WGAN Forum Members: free branding in the nadir (tripod patch)Three Steps for Virtual Staging of Matterport Digital Twins by ImagineerStep 1: Share the Space – "You will need to transfer your tour to us, we will stage it and once complete, we will transfer the tour back to you."Step 2: Pick the Style – "Pick out the interior theme you wish to have included in the different rooms. We will then manage the entire process of the production for you."Step 3: Approve – "On completion we will transfer the Matterport space back to you. You can use this on any website, just like a normal Matterport tour."For an example of "Before" and "After" virtual staging by Imagineer Consulting Founder Angus Norriss, please see above. For additional examples, please see the Imagineer Consulting Landing Page for Matterport Virtual Staging of Digital Twins.Questions about virtual staging of Matterport digital twins? Please post to this WGAN Forum discussion or Private Message: @AngusNorrissImagineer is a Value-Added Reseller of Virtual Staging by UK-based VRPM.Best,Dan

Wednesday Feb 12, 2020

Transcript: Pilot One is a Contender for Real Estate PhotographersTranscript (video above)- Hi all, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Monday February 10, 2020 and you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. Our topic tonight; my review, my beta testing of the Labpano Pilot One.What's my conclusion the Labpano Pilot One 360 one click camera is a contender for real estate photographers that want to offer 360 Virtual Tours and do Google Street View map updates for storefronts. Those two things. My recommendation is based on loaner of a Pilot One camera, it's a kind of a beta hardware and software but I been loaned a Pilot One camera Labpano sent it to me, it arrived on Thursday January 23, 2020.And my recommendation is also based on a discussion that I had with some super successful Google Street View subject matter expert photographers at the 2019 Google Street View Summit in London. These are power users of the Labpano Pilot Era: and that's the big brother of the the Pilot One.Labpano is presently accepting Pilot One pre-orders through the first week of March 2020 and I have a link for you that you can get a free GPS module that's valued at $129. So free with the link WGAN.info/Pilot One. PILOT One, excuse me, P-I-L-O-T O-N-E, Pilot One. WGAN.info/pilotoneWith the Labpano had previously announced that the Pilot One would begin shipping in late February 2020, it has since updated the shipping schedule to March 2020 and that's at the soonest as a result of the CoronaVirus affecting staffing at its China based manufacturing facility. Okay so, what did I hope to do? There were three reasons that I accepted LabPano's invite to beta test and review the Pilot One.First, I was super excited about creating Google Street View map updates and creating new Google Street View "blue lines" ... Essentially Google Street View where there is presently no Google Street View, that's the first thing that I was super-excited about testing. Second, is to create a PilotTour using the Labpano new Virtual Tour platform in the cloud, featuring auto creation of tours, that's using a process called V-SLAM.Super-excited to see how Labpano new Virtual Tour platform in the cloud would automatically create Virtual Tours without a photographer having to create a constellation or organize the 360s into the tour. So I really wanted to create PilotTours with the Pilot One camera.And the third reason that I wanted to accept the Labpano's invite to beta test and review the Pilot One was to create EyeSpy360 virtual tours using the 360 panorama shots from the Pilot One. Unfortunately or fortunately Labpano is having so much success with pre-sales, I have not received the GPS module and their recommended backpack as of [10 Feb 2020] in order to create Google Street View with Pilot One.And, also unfortunately PilotTour is still in very early development and I'll talk more about my PilotTour testing and recommendations later in my review. I did successfully shoot 360 HDR panoramas with the Pilot One to create multiple EyeSpy360 virtual tours.If you'd like to see examples of my EyeSpy360 tours, come to the We Get Around Network Forum, WGANforum.com and just use the search box, search for EyeSpy360 or search for Pilot One, either way you're going to end up seeing examples of EyeSpy360 tours that I created using the Pilot One, 360 degrees spherical panoramas.In particular I think, two of the tours, two are the We Get Around Network Forum discussions to look at that include examples, one is titled; My Third EyeSpy360 Tour Workflow for furnished Apartment in Atlanta and the other is entitled My EyeSpy360 tour Example Of a Senior Living Apartment: Easy, Fast and Affordable Tour Creation.So my initial thoughts from using the Pilot One as an Apple fanboy, the highest recommendation, the highest compliment that I can make for the Pilot One is that the is that the user experience strives to be Mac-like.And while the user experience is not there yet, I can imagine that the that the Labpano team will achieve a great Mac-like user experience with firmware updates. Well, I have not taken 50 plus 360 cameras for spin, literally there are that many 3D and 360 cameras today 50 plus cameras. That said, I can't imagine that the Pilot One, 2.2 inch touchscreen with logical menus ...I can imagine that the Pilot One 2.2 inch touchscreen with the logical menus is a huge differentiator particularly when it comes to overriding the automatic modes to change camera settings.So it's very easy using the menus to change exposure compensation, the EV value or the WB; the white balance value or focus distance. So not things that you have to remember and press a button and it's a mystery that literally having a touchscreen with menus, it's super-easy to change settings.So that makes a lot of sense for me. I shot with enough 360 cameras to say, it would be really hard for me to go back to using any other 360 camera that does not have a touchscreen as large as the Pilot One; does not have Mac-like menus, it's really, it's a terrific advantage as part of the 360 Virtual Tour creation process. So about shooting 360 spherical panoramas.When I shot three Atlanta Senior Living Apartments using the Pilot One, again these examples are in the We Get Around Network Forum, I kept the settings on automatic with HDR enabled.The in-camera stitched image quality is excellent and I like that the images are typically 11 to 14 Mega Pixel, mega byte, MB JPEG images.They're just big deep files that if you do need to do some editing on I'm just happy about that. So it may be helpful for context that nearly 10 years ago I was using a Canon 5D Mark III with the Sigma 8 millimeter fisheye lens and a Nodal Ninja R1 rotator to shoot 360s.A lot of money, a lot of gear, plus then using two different software's PTGui Pro and Pano2VR to both stitch the images together and clean up the patch where the tripod is located.So important, for the vast majority of professional real estate photographers that require an easy, fast and affordable workflow for shooting 360s, the Pilot One fulfills this requirement.It's so important, I have to say it again. For the vast majority of professional real estate photographers that require an easy, fast and affordable workflow for shooting 360s, the Pilot One fulfills this requirement. I'm going to defer to others to debate the quality of the 360 panoramas, versus other 360 cameras versus the price of the cameras and related accessories.As I just shared with you the Pilot One touchscreen with the Mac-like experience for shooting 360s really are the deciding factor for me.I could imagine that what you look at my 360 images shot with the Pilot One, again the examples are in the We Get Around Network Forum, WGANforum.com, you might conclude that the HDR is not so great or that the color saturation is not the best I would say blame me first for not changing the exposure compensation, the EV, and not doing any post-production to tweak the color saturation and white balance. That said the images are good enough for me straight out of the camera, to use them in the tours without tweaking a thing.I did get a little taste of the Labpano Pilot Tour Virtual Tour platform.Again it's an early, early, early beta. I recommend that Labpano abandon offering Pilot Tour Virtual Tour service and instead focus on third-party integrations with as many of the 130 plus 3D/360 Virtual Tour platforms as possible. I consider the Labpano Pilot Tour Virtual Tour platform in the cloud more of a proof-of-concept to show what is possible with deep integration between the Pilot One camera and other platforms.When possible using the Pilot Open System to create a much shorter and easier workflow for creating 360 Virtual Tours. I could imagine that camera manufacturers like Labpano are obsessed with incremental improvements in the hardware and software and actually the greatest value add Labpano could add is seamless integration with Virtual Tour platforms and software that already exists. It's obviously headed in that direction with the Labpano Pilot Open System.So I can see the potential when the Pilot Tour platform is working that isn't that awesome, because it automatically places and connects the 360s. That said, there are other platforms that already do that such as EyeSpy360. And the EyeSpy360 platform is far more advanced. They've had a, let's call it a five-year head start on deeply understanding Virtual Tours for real estate agents and brokers.And Labpano really needs to come to the conclusion that it's in the camera business, it's not in the tour business.It's really difficult to do both and as I'll talk about in a moment, well, offering, I'll get to the point. (And I should say parenthetically when I'm asked for a recommendation regarding which 3D or 360 camera to buy for real estate photographers or for real estate agents, I always recommend determining the use case first, then to look at the Virtual Tour platform or platforms that are on their short list of the 360, excuse me the 130 plus Virtual Tour platforms and software that exists today.Only then look at which camera or cameras have easy, fast and seamless experience, have an easy, fast and seamless experience with those Virtual Tour platform or platforms.)So at the very least, Labpano should prioritize deep integration with the following eight 3D/360 Virtual Tour platforms with the Pilot Open System allowing for this easy, fast and seamless experience. Those eight are in an alphabetical order, Cupix, C-U-P-I-X, EyeSpy360, Google Street View, Matterport, Panoskin, ThreeSixty tours, T-H-R-E-E S-I-X-T-Y Tours, RICOH Tours, Zillow 3D Home.I've written a related WGAN Forum post titled, Are You a 3D/360 Camera Manufacturer? The Must Have Killer Feature Is ... So I go into great detail on this very point. For clarification, if the Labpano objective is - PilotTour: Indoor and Outdoor 360 Virtual Tour Made Easy" - that's their tagline, I would suggest that they study the EyeSpy360 Virtual Tour platform. For example, the EyeSpy360 workflow is much, much, much easier than the vision of Labpano's PilotTour even when PilotTour emerges from beta, even in its likely future state of what that might be.So for example, EyeSpy360 Virtual Tour, if you take a look at it one of the examples that I've posted to the We Get Around Network Forum that use the 360s that I shot with the Pilot One, it is a much faster workflow than it would be using the Pilot One Pilot Tour feature.So the integration of the Pilot One camera with the Pilot Tour Virtual Tour platform, that's because EyeSpy360 for example, creates a 360 Virtual Tour and a 3D tour and interactive floor plans and hotspots and so fourth.So as a residential real estate photographer or a residential real estate agent or broker, if you're looking at two things; one is the camera the other is the platform. You might say well, even when Labpano Pilot One platform is firing on all cylinders, wouldn't it make sense to have a camera that is deeply integrated with the platform? And I would say yes, but unfortunately I don't believe that Pilot Tour will ever be as good as or as the platforms that I've just, the eight platforms that I have described.Given that, as much as I give Labpano props for a creating a this V-SLAM process essentially that a way to organize 360s in relationship to each other, in my mind it will always be a proof-of-concept that will never be as good as either the eight 360/3D platforms that I've mentioned or many more of the 130.So, and that becomes problematic because I could imagine that the Labpano Pilot Virtual Tour platform could inhibit other Virtual Tour platforms from wanting to integrate with the Labpano camera. So if lab, and that's because the perception may be that and perhaps true that Labpano is planning to attempt to compete with them by offering a free Virtual Tour platform.My feeling is any professional real estate photographer would likely choose a different 360 Virtual Tour platform from the Pilot Tour platform.I can't imagine a professional real estate photographer in a or real estate agent paying $1,200 for the Pilot One and being satisfied with the free Pilot Tour Virtual Tour platform. It's just, it's too basic, and even if Labpano's intent is to have a very sophisticated Pilot Tour platform for real estate agents, let's say they're at least five years behind trying to play catch-up.So there's two issues here for four Labpano; one, is trying to play catch-up with platforms that have five plus years of experience and then two, is having a platform that competes with the very thing that really gives the most value to the Pilot One is the ability to have easy, fast and seamless deep integrations with other Virtual Tour platforms.And, as I've shared, if the platform's feel that Labpano is going to compete with them by having this PilotTour Virtual Tour platform, it may mean that other virtual tour platforms will be super hesitant about providing integration knowing that it essentially is now perhaps helping the camera compete with it on the virtual tour platform side.So I'll come back, I want to talk a little bit more on this topic towards later in my review but I did want to cover some other points.Labpano Pilot One live-streaming. I did find it super easy to live-stream to Facebook. My Pilot One live-stream to Facebook, I've archived that, I've recorded it. It's available on my Facebook feed Dan Smigrod. S-M-I-G-R-O-D, easiest way to find it, come to the We Get Around Network Forum, go to the topic of Pilot One and you'll see that I write about my Pilot One live-stream on Facebook so that you can actually go see an actual Facebook live-stream that albeit recorded.Plus I was presently surprised about the excellent quality of the Pilot One streaming video. So, given the ease of use and the quality of the video, I challenge real estate photographers to imagine how we can offer this Pilot One Facebook live-streaming feature, as an Add-On for real estate clients. I think that something probably really new and only because it's so easy to do and the quality of the video now is really awesome.I could imagine using this feature for example, for amplifying an Open House and for doing a live walkthrough with the agent, that then continues to be available on the agents Facebook page. So any other Add-On opportunities is a real estate photographer that you see.My Labpano Pilot One beta testing recommendations are as follows; as a Pilot One beta tester, again I was given a camera, I was loaned a Pilot One camera and the good news is I would say is nearly everything that I would suggest that Labpano change or fix is likely a firmware upgrade.So here my following notes for Labpano but I think it's probably helpful if you're deciding about buying a Labpano Pilot One camera, any early concerns that I had.But again I think the vast majority of these could be fixed with a firmware upgrade. First, touchscreen keyboard. The letters and numbers and symbols on the Pilot One are simply too small to be practical.So you're presented with a keyboard, while this implementation of keyboard may work on a larger Big Brother Labpano Pilot Era camera, using the touchscreen keyboard on the Pilot One camera is extremely difficult and frustrating to enter the passwords for Wi-Fi.It's super hard. The good news is that the Pilot One has a great way that you set the date and time with a wheel that's kind of like a slot machine and you just keep aligning the wheels. So the process for entering passwords and tour names would be far, far easier with this wheel approach.So first let's identify the problem is that, I sometimes I think it's analogous that when first there was newspapers, then came along radio and radio first began reading the newspaper.Well, that wasn't exactly taking advantage of the medium and then came television and then television was like radio without picture and that wasn't taking advantage of the medium. So probably over stood to say the translation of a large keyboard that would work on a larger screen, simply does not work in to my level of satisfaction on a Pilot One camera.The screen, is the the touch screen is really big but a touchscreen keyboard simply does not work. In my opinion, it was super difficult to enter Wi-Fi, particularly my Wi-Fi where I have very long names for passwords and then for naming tours, it was super impractical being on location, trying multiple times to get the series of letters and keystrokes properly.So the good news is I think Labpano already has a great solution in its approach to the date and time that feels like a slot machine of rotating wheels to pick the date, pick the time. I think that would perfectly work for passwords and tour names.Next, the transitions between menus. It really needs to be obvious that you swipe left or right to move between menus. It needs to be obvious when you can swipe left or right and it needs to be obvious when and how to exit a menu. So Pilot Tour is so close to being awesome, but these things just weren't obvious to me and I even though there was documentation that documentation for us beta testers was somewhat limited and perhaps the documentation for when the camera actually ships will be much better.But again I don't even think that's something you should have to look at the documentation, I think that's one of the Mac-like experiences, is that it just works and it works as expected and I was at a loss about how to transition. So I found myself constantly pressing the physical home button to get back to the main menu, that's not a great workflow.Next is hemisphere shooting. Well, I found the timer hugely helpful for staying out of a shot. It's just not always possible to hide.So I'm sure you've probably been in this position particularly outside where there's just no tree or object to hide behind and if you get too far away from the camera using an app and Bluetooth then you lose the connection. So I could imagine either Labpano or a third-party offering a solution for staying near the camera, but not in the shot and then stepping around to the other side of the Pilot One to complete the shot. About the image gallery in the camera.Well, I'm so sorry, I didn't even bring my camera into the shot, but let's see if I can just turn it on to show this point here.So right here in terms of the image gallery, so I think you can see I think I have some videos that have showed up there. I found myself shooting a blank shot. Essentially I would hold my hands over the four lenses to separate tours. So it would be nice if a separator could automatically be added to separate tours and to separate groups of 360s.So for example, if you were doing or I was doing more than one apartment in the same day. So, in order to separate those groups of 360s, I'm holding my hands around the four lenses, I suspect that it wouldn't be that hard for Labpano to say, okay, there's the algorithm says there's so much time between the time this tour was done and this tour was done, certainly if it was separated by hours then just automatically insert a blank shot to differentiate the groups of 360s and then certainly it would be way easier to delete a blank than to try and figure out which apartment 360s were part of apartment one versus apartment two.Apartments looked the same. Where they certainly look the same when you're looking at a small screen.While I found uploading to my Dropbox super-easy, I would have liked for the videos to be checked that it was uploaded successfully. Now this feature was included, how to say this? In the midst of my beta testing, there was a firmware upgrade and so once I, when I began testing and I uploaded to Dropbox, I didn't have any way of knowing that it was updated to Dropbox, the good news is that feature was added to a firmware upgrade. And that's true for the following. ...I had made some notes to say, there are times when I need to upload some of the 360s but not all, I'm changing priorities of what needs that, I might have shot three tours in a day but the one of those tours may need to be uploaded before the others.In my beta testing, it was hard to keep track of which 360s I still needed to upload, plus, I would like to be able to select which 360s to upload if I did not want to upload everything to Dropbox at once, I had to upload 360s one at a time and it was hard to tell which ones I had already uploaded.For example, I could select multiple images, I was limited to deleting the multiple images with no option for uploading the selected multiple images. So anyway, the good news is I did do a firmware upgrade version 5.0.10 and that actually solved that problem. Of knowing what had been uploaded and what hadn't though I still think I'm having a little bit of difficulty recognizing which videos have been uploaded or not uploaded.I think the check mark has been added to the videos as well. Again, the good news on this list that I've described, they're all likely firmware updates.So if Labpano is an agreement with my recommendations, all these recommendations might be implemented even before the camera ships in March or later.And again, ... I updated to version 5.0.10. The firmware update was an easy Mac-like or iPhone-like experience. It just works as expected. That may seem obvious but I'm sure all of us had, had times where updating firmware was attaching it to a computer and finding the program and then transferring something to a folder.No, you just, the camera indicates that it's got a, it needs a firmware update, you accept and it does the upload and you're done. It's no connecting to a camera, really nice. There's a feature for adjusting a photo, let's call it a photo sphere or 360.It's an interesting feature but I couldn't figure out how to do a batch change. So the good news on the adjust photo which says it's in beta lets you change the brightness, gamma, the shadow, highlights, saturation and temperature, all that's good.But again, I couldn't figure out how to do a batch change and I would say unless I could, it's really super-unlikely that I would just want to edit one 360, I really want to edit one 360 and say Apply All and Apply All actually means, so for example, if I'm doing a tour and there's inside and outside, I'd want to apply the changes let's say, just to the indoor 360s, then edit one of the outside 360s and apply that as a batch change to the outside one. Now that said, I think most photographers are going to bring the images or either going to not do any adjustment or bring them into Lightroom and do the adjustments or a different software program. But that said, I think Labpano is super-close to having this Adjust Photo feature.All I'm looking for is to add the option of batch change and let me select which images I want to add to that batch. About Facebook, I would like an option to save the video to the camera, perhaps it's there and I couldn't figure it out, but I did some live-streaming to Facebook and while Facebook saves the video, I haven't figured out how to extract a Facebook video from Facebook, short of doing screen scraping, I don't really want to do that, I want to have it something that just works.So I'm not sure that I, if when I live-stream to Facebook, if there is an option for saving the video I didn't see it.So essentially I live-streamed to Facebook and I didn't get a video that was saved on the camera. I can only go to Facebook and have the video live there.Now, and one other I think item on Facebook is I would like to be able to set the countdown timer to go live. So when I hit, when I physically hit the button on the camera, I'd like when I go live to really mean I want to go live in five seconds and that way my hand is not in the shot.Now, I'm sure the Labpano Pilot Go App for iOS and Android, probably addresses that issue but I didn't spend enough time with the Pilot Go App to properly review that and frankly I would rather do it on the camera where I'm not guessing whether or not the app actually launched the camera. So, what else? So, I look forward to shooting 360 video. Now 360 video again somewhat outside the scope of a real estate photographers needs, I was really wanted focused on 360 photo spheres for Virtual Tour.Again I talked about Google Street View and unfortunately I did not get to test that. Hopefully Labpano will send me a GPS module and their recommended backpack so that I can do the map updates, the Google Street View map updates and add some blue lines in Atlanta.I do look forward though to shooting 360 video in March 2020 when my wife and I will be taking a week-long Western Caribbean cruise and I will also plan to shoot a 360 tour of our Miami hotel room. We'll be in a Miami hotel for the night before the cruise as well as our cruise ship suite.So my wife and I are celebrating our 25th anniversary, we've splurged on a suite on the ship and I would really like to capture that as a 360 tour and I'll plan to share this additional Pilot One content in the We Get Around Network Forum when we return.Labpano was gracious enough to extend the loan of the camera to me to accommodate our travel plans. Probably get some really nice beauty shots on the ship and on some of the islands and in Mexico. I did have a couple hardware improvements and these hardware improvements may be addressed even before the camera commercially ships but I'll point them out.The home button, Labpano stressed that the Pilot One camera that I received, hand labeled number 22, is beta hardware. So in their production run, Labpano may have already addressed the home button which feels like it's a tiny bit loose when I touch it. So I just felt like I didn't get the tactile response that I was expecting, it just feels a tinge loose.Again I'm using beta hardware, this may have already been addressed in the production run that begins shipping as early as March 2020.And then the next hardware is actually related to the case. So I found that this soft case it's very nice and it's a nice edition.I'd recommend two things to improve it. First, make it easier to put the soft case on the camera, I struggle with that, it's a snug fit and I think that's good, but I think it needs to be more like a funnel so that it starts out really wide and that makes it super-easy to pull it over the camera and then using the drawstring close the top big part of the funnel, I just felt that there wasn't enough material at the top and when I grab it and I put it over the, here let me see if I can just do this for you. So you get some sense of what's going on here.This is, my hands are near the lenses I don't like that, I suppose it went on, but I just felt like if it was wider at the bottom that, that would be a much better. Make it super-easy, make sure I'm not touching the lenses and there's always goes on easily and again it has a nice drawstring, I think that would close it nicely.Let's see, ah, and the second thing on the soft case, is it comes with a carabiner. So it's got this little carabiner here, it's attached to the case and I like this because there's a loop here and I can carry it on my pocket. The only problem is this is a $1,200 camera, this is not a $1,200 worthy carabiner, I would like to see a real substantive carabiner plus one that has a loop for closing it, so I don't have my carabiner open by accident and lose my $1,200 camera on my belt.So those are kind of the two hardware suggestions, obviously really small things in the scheme of it. Again, I think everything else can be addressed in firmware.So I did get some, I got some pushback on my original review in the, We Get Around Network Forum today in the Labpano community, Jocelyn Trowelburst, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly in the Netherlands Antilles. Let me read what he wrote and then let me see if I can respond to that.And so he writes, in part "Completely disagree with your point of view that Labpano should forget about the PilotTour platform. To the contrary the one using V-SLAM, the Pilot One using V-SLAM technology to determine camera position in virtual space is groundbreaking.It is a good proof of concept and further turning to make it work," and excuse me, and it says further, probably means, "In fine-tuning to make it work in practice will result in a huge time-saver for tour creators. What is the integration with other virtual tour platforms, Labpano surely is not going to give away its V-SLAM advantage, other platforms won't know how to handle the data." So respectfully Jocelyn I completely disagree with you, completely disagreeing, so let me see if I can break this down.So I'm going to read through and then kind of break it down. Completely disagree with your point of view that Labpano should forget about its PilotTour platform to the contrary the Pilot One using V-SLAM technology determine camera position in virtual space is groundbreaking.I absolutely agree with that, for a $1,200 camera to have this V-SLAM technology that lets each 360 know where it is in relationship to each other, that's amazing. And incidentally I think what happens is when you do the PilotTour, there's a message on here that says rocket this way and then rocket this way and so that calibration is probably making that V-SLAM possible.Again Jocelyn writes, "It's a good proof of concept and fine-tuning it to make it work in practice will result in a huge time-saver for tour creators." Jocelyn I absolutely agree with you on that.This is a amazing solution but again in my opinion and even as you write, it's a proof of concept to show what's possible.Where we start to verge is when you write, what is deep integration with other virtual tour platforms. So that's essentially saying the the Pilot One camera should be able to work with other platforms to take advantage of the V-SLAM advantage.So when you write that other platforms, when you write Labpano surely is not going to give away its V-SLAM advantage, other platforms won't know how to handle the data, I would suggest that Labpano should absolutely give away its V-SLAM advantage essentially powering as many of the 130 3D and 360 virtual tour platforms to work easy, fast and seamless with the Pilot One. Again the, we all shoot not because we want to shoot, we create these 360s because we want to share them.And it turns out that many of us are using all kinds of different platforms, literally if you come to the We Get Around Network Forum, we have a post where we list in a Google sheet a 130 3D and 360 platforms. And by the way, we also have a post in the We Get Around Network Forum on 50-plus 3D and 360 cameras.We maintain both those lists and Google sheets. This is such an opportunity for Labpano to knock it out of the ballpark to say, okay, one we showed all the platforms what's possible with PilotTour. We can do the constellation configuration automatically with your platform. So they demo how it's possible.Now, first beginning with those eight platforms that I've identified earlier, but then all the way right up through the list of a 130 3D and 360 platforms. Imagine how Labpano Pilot One and it's bigger brother Pilot Era will do when they crush the competition of the 50 other 3D/360 cameras by an offering to make it easy, fast and simple for every 3D and 360 platform to leverage the V-SLAM technology that's integrated in the Pilot One camera.So where you write that this is a competitive advantage that they'll never give up, there's two reasons they must give it up. One, is so that other platforms can take advantage of it and if you go back to my original thinking here that when a photographer is making a decision about which camera, they really need to make a decision about which platform first.And before you make a decision about which platform, about what the use cases are. But a real estate photographer, a residential real estate photographer and commercial real estate photographer are likely to zero in on a good chunk of those eight platforms.And right now, Pilot One is at a disadvantage because there's only a couple other cameras that actually check the box of those eight that I identified. So it's really important for Labpano to have Pilot One easy, fast and seamless integration with those eight platforms.And it's really important that they not, that Labpano not compete with its own Virtual Tour platform.So by Labpano offering Pilot Tour, it's essentially saying to other platforms, hey, we got something that's better than you have, we're going to compete with you and by the way we'd like to still have you deeply integrate.And that's the part where Pilot, where Labpano may shoot itself in the foot by competing with the other platforms. If it simply says about the Pilot Tour platform, this is a proof of concept but we're going to enable this and all these other tour platforms, it'll sell more cameras if it eliminates the competition of having Pilot Tour that will greatly accelerate third party camera integrations with the platform.And oh by the way, at the big picture level in the forward thinking, even if we all looked at Pilot Tour platform at its best case scenario that when the camera actually gets shipped the Pilot Tour worked, remember I've tested it in beta and it doesn't work, but I'll give it, I'll make the concession that I'm sure it will be working at the time that the camera ships commercially.The point is, there are there there are many other platforms that have five plus years of experience in residential and commercial real estate what a Tour looks like. Including a 3D view, the 360 Tour view, the floorplan view, the hot spots. And so, Labpano could make a decision to say okay, we're going to put a ...technical resources into Pilot Tour and once it does that, it's spending a lot of time and a lot of money on building out a platform that doesn't have a competitive advantage with other platforms. Now I suspect that Jocelyn would probably say, well, yes it does it has this vSLAM advantage.No, nom, that's just the technology of how the other platforms get to the final resolution. So for example, the EyeSpy360 Tour, they build the tour for you. Never mind if there's people in the background and it's a tour as a service business and it's presently done manually. The point is as a photographer, it is the tour is created for me and it was super simple to take my Pilot One shot 360s and upload it to the EyeSpy360 platform and have them build the the tour for me.If you were to take a look at EyeSpy360 versus Pilot Tour for example, you would, even if PilotTour was firing on all cylinders in its first year, it's still five years behind in all the bells and whistles that make EyeSpy360 resonate for virtual tour service providers in the residential and commercial real estate space.So Jocelyn respectfully, I disagree and I completely see how important it is for Labpano to have this PilotTour proof of concept but then to abandon it in favor of offering that feature to the 130 3D/360 Virtual Tour platforms and that's where the real value will come to Labpano as well as to residential and commercial real estate photographer and and Google Street View photographers because then we're not asking a photographer to both change for existing photographers in this space to change cameras and to change platforms.Best that they can still stay, that we can still stay with the platforms that of our choice and we just switch to a different camera to achieve that result in an easy, fast and seamless manner. So that's kind of my comment for Jocelyn and that's made with all respect. I think this is just, this may be one of those where we respectfully agree to disagree.Anyway that's kind of my review of the Labpano Pilot One.We have started a number of discussions in the We Get Around Network Forum, WGANforum.com, I hope you if you're watching on our YouTube channel or Vimeo channel in the WGAN-TV Training Academy, in the WGAN-TV Podcast, in the Apple Podcast app, wherever you're watching that We Get Around Network Forum, it's totally free, you don't need to be a member to read anything in the Forum.But if you want to join the conversation, totally free to join the forum, plus you get 50 plus membership benefits including the list of 50 3D/360 cameras, the list of 130 3D and 360 Virtual Tour platforms plus special offers on whenever there's products or services.So for example, on the Pilot One camera, you can get that free GPS module using our affiliate link WGAN.INFO/pilotone ... That's WGAN.INFO/pilotone ... WGAN.INFO/pilotone WGAN.INFO/pilotone WGANForum.comAnd we have offers like that all the time we automatically put them in an email that when you join the We Get Around Network Forum, you automatically receive an email from me that lists the 50-plus membership benefits with all the ways to redeem them simply for joining the We Get Around Network Forum.Anyway thanks for tuning in, I'm Dan Smigrod Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum, you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5:00.

Wednesday Feb 12, 2020

Free GPS module (valued at $129) with this link
WGAN-TV Unboxing the Labpano Pilot One by WGAN-TV Founder and Managing Editor Dan Smigrod on Thursday, 23 January 2020 and embargoed until 10 am EST Monday, 10 February 2020. Labpano Pilot One pre-orders through the first week of March 2020 ($1,199 64GB | $1,249 128GB) with a free GPS module (valued at $129) with this link.
Pilot One 360º 1-Click Camera is a Contender for Real Estate Photographers
https://forum.we-get-around.com/topic/11003/page/1/pilot-one-360-1-click-camera-is-a-contender-for-real-estate-photographers/

Wednesday Sep 12, 2018

How to make money with Bluetooth Beacons Meets Matterport 3D Tour Pros
Hi All,Imagine that a prospective home buyer drives by a house for sale and automatically receives a link on their smartphone to a Matterport 3D Tour – or single property website.How is that possible? Find out on WGAN-TV Live at 5 (5 pm EDT | GMT -4) on Wednesday, 22 August 2018: Bluetooth Beacons Meets 3D Tour Marketing for Matterport Service Providers.Our guests will be Allan Retail Group Founder – and Matterport Service Provider – Dorothy Allan. And, how can you leverage this knowledge to differentiate your Matterport Service Provider business to get more business while helping your real estate agents win more listing presentations?Plus, imagine the same scenario in retail – with an expert in the retail space collaborating with you. Live in a tourist destination? A must watch show.Here's some of the topics we will cover during this WGAN-TV Live at 5 show:The key to growth is diversification, bolt on services are the key (Add Ons)✓ Real Estate is a warm market any agent can use a NFC device-- Link to a single page website-- Link to a landing page (creates SEO backlinks)-- Link directly to a Matterport or CUPIX tour-- Real time analytics-- Easy to set up landing pages✓ Bluetooth enabled / Google Nearby (investment)-- Makes Wi-Fi as a delivery irrelevant-- Very easy to use-- Back office analytics-- Newest Androids come with Google Nearby on out of the box and every time the phone is powered up✓ Proximity messaging as a service can expand Reality Capture professional 360 market-- Retail, service, tourism, event marketers can leverage proximity marketing-- Is great lead for a 3D/VR Tour✓ Learn-- Order one and try it yourself-- Get your own account, learn the ins and outs-- Shared LearningPlus, join the Virtual Studio Audience and ask your NFC questions.Best,Dan

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