Matterport Announces our Limited VR Beta
With the introduction of the Galaxy Note 4 and the first-generation GearVR Innovator Edition headset last December, Oculus and Samsung ushered in a new age of virtual reality experiences. Matterport was one of the first to create content for this new platform, in the form of the Matterport VR Showcase demo app. Suddenly, the VR world is untethered and accessible to everyone.
What’s coming next is a much broader VR community, which will drive creativity and innovation in the space.
That’s why we’re excited to officially announce a limited beta program for our customers to convert their Matterport virtual environments into a format viewable on GearVR.
This beta involves a semi-manual conversion process, and some work on the customer’s end to load models onto individual GearVR headsets. Because of the totally immersive nature of VR headsets, not all models will be ideal for conversion. We are currently converting models on an individual basis based on model quality and resources.
This is the next step toward our ultimate vision—a future where all Matterport models are automatically available on all major VR platforms and for use in a variety of apps.
If you’d like to learn more, contact us at [email protected].
We’ve got big plans for the future.
Matterport content is already changing the way people experience remote places by providing an in-browser experience that is more immersive, and informative, than any other format.
VR is the next step in immersion, and as a creative medium, it’s perhaps the greatest leap forward in communications since photography. Popular VR, in the form of headsets and other immersive hardware platforms, will touch every aspect of our lives. Journalism, art, travel planning, shopping, education, medicine, and advertising will all be transformed.
We view Matterport’s real-world capture as a key component of this revolution. It is already digitizing the real world into virtual environments that can be explored, shared, and manipulated for various business and consumer applications.
More specifically, we see personal and professional use cases for real-world virtual environments already being adopted by businesses. Matterport is being used professionally by real estate agents, architects, museum owners, and more to make it easy to pitch work, properties, or projects; enable remote collaborators to review the same space; and keep records of projects for later sharing and review. Putting those virtual environments on a GearVR enables clients to experience these spaces even more immersively, from anywhere. In fact, Real estate professionals are already using our content on GearVR to show prospective buyers homes from the convenience of their office.
Going beyond B2B, upcoming mobile devices will give consumers the power of 3D capture right from their phones and tablets. With millions of content creators scanning amazing places, we’ll soon have a YouTube-sized collection of real-world spaces, available to everyone to browse and experience on platforms like GearVR and Google Cardboard, in addition to our current in-browser player.
Just as YouTube gave people the power to share their videos with anyone, anywhere, we hope to empower users to create virtual environments from real spaces and share them on current and future VR platforms. We have already done the former with our in-browser media player, 3D Showcase, and we expect to achieve the latter with the release of our fully-featured consumer app for VR headsets, slated for late 2015.
We hope the prospect of a virtual representation of the real world, and all the possibilities it encodes, is as exciting to you as it is to us. We look forward to building the future together!
*The Matterport VR program is still in closed beta. Models will be evaluated for their readiness for VR on a case-by-case basis. Depending on demand, we may not be able to honor all requests at this time.
