Matterport Dollhouse Upgrade

About a decade ago, country music artist, Alan Jackson, sang, “The best keeps getting better.” Well, that is certainly proving true today. Matterport, a leader in spatial data capture, recently announced an upgrade to their world class 3D technology, making the unrivaled Dollhouse view in a Matterport space even easier to navigate.

What’s new with the Dollhouse view?

A defining feature of a Matterport showcase is, in addition to a traditional floor plan view, a full three-dimensional overview of the entire space. “Dollhouse” view is just as it sounds: a view comparable to that of an actual, physical dollhouse, where viewers can peer into every room from a bird’s eye perspective. When a virtual visitor to a Matterport space engages the Dollhouse view, a holistic overview of the building appears on screen. The Dollhouse image can be zoomed and rotated, and a visitor can select any room on any floor to enter the virtual tour.

If you are familiar with a Matterport showcase, you know that Dollhouse view is not new. What is new, is the addition of a couple elements that were missing. If a visitor was viewing the Floor Plan overview of a virtual tour, they could see labels for rooms and other areas. But labels were not available in Dollhouse view. That made it tricky for visitors to navigate from the Dollhouse to specific places in the tour. And the lack of labels made it virtually impossible to direct their attention to important areas in the tour from that view.

Now, Matterport has made major upgrades to change that. For one, their Labels feature has been amended with a new look and feel that is compatible with Dollhouse view. In addition to using the traditional floor selector tool, visitors can now select floors directly in Dollhouse view simply by clicking or tapping on their desired location. Even the touch controls in Dollhouse view have been improved.

According to Matterport, these new features are available for all previous Matterport spaces. They simply need to be turned on in settings. Newly created spaces will show Labels in Dollhouse by default.

What is Matterport?

If you are not yet familiar with Matterport, they are a premier spatial data capture platform for creating lifelike virtual tours. Compatible with 3D cameras ranging from their own Pro2 (the “gold standard” for 3d Capture) to a smartphone, with a host of other cameras to boot, Matterport helps you create a “digital twin” of any space.

Creating a virtual tour of a home or other space is made simple with Matterport. Once a home has been prepared, the photographer (whether that is you or a professional photographer) carefully scans each room inside the house (and area outside the house) from multiple positions with a compatible camera and the Matterport Capture App. When the scan is complete, the data is uploaded to the Matterport online platform where their Cortex AI assembles the 360 degree panoramic images into a comprehensive, interactive, and immersive 3D tour that can be submitted for professional editing, trimming, labeling, and tagging (with callouts called Mattertags). If you were unable to stage the home before scanning, that’s okay. You can also hire a virtual staging service  after the scan. 

Why consider a Matterport “digital twin” for your customers and your business?

In the year and a half since COVID-19 became a worldwide pandemic, virtual tours have become a new way of doing business. They have essentially become the “new open house.”  As a result, many consumers in the real estate market are coming to expect virtual tours as part of the home buying process. Fortunately, Matterport makes it easy to offer virtual tours to your clients. And there are some good reasons you might consider adding them to your list of real estate marketing strategies. Consider some of the benefits once you have created a Matterport digital twin. You can:

• Generate 4K print-quality photos, videos, animated Gifs and more
• Share your space simply and securely through email and on social media
• Embed a virtual tour on your website
• Publish a tour of your business on Google Street View
• Publish on VRBO, Realtor.com, and other platforms
• Create and send schematic floor plans
• Boost your brand identity with virtual tour technology
• And a whole lot more…

It only makes sense to consider a virtual tour for your clients and your business. Now, with Matterport, the best is better than ever.