Today I'm shooting a virtual tour for a real paid client,
and thought it'd be cool to bring you guys along.
I've also discovered an awesome virtual tool software
that I'm sure you've heard of.
It's called Matterport.
And it used to be exclusive software
only for those expensive matterport cameras.
But recently, they've opened it up for other
point and shoot 360 cameras,
like the Insta360 ONE X and Theta Z1.
So today I'll be putting it to the test,
on a real paid shoot.
The client is F45 who are a major gym chain
here in Australia and I noticed they had a Sydney branch,
right around the corner from me.
So I pitched them the idea by email and they said yes.
It's only a small, one-room business as you can see,
but I think a virtual tour
is just the kind of marketing material they need.
Because from browsing through their Instagram,
I had no idea what the space actually looked like.
It was hard to tell from all of those fixed perspectives.
So even though it's a physically small business,
I want to help them display it in the best light possible
and help get more customers through the door.
And I know a virtual tour
will be a great tool to help achieve that.
- So F45, it's functional fitness,
it's really effective from training.
You come in 45 minutes session everything's set up for you.
You come in the door, we'll explain it,
we'll demonstrate everything,
we'll get you started with a warm up to work out,
you always get a different workout.
- Okay, that's the sound of a shot being taken.
Now let's edit,
and the first thing I like about this workflow
is when I was on set,
I just hit the upload button within the app
and within the next few hours it processed in the cloud,
it sent me an email saying it was ready and here we go.
It's F45 Mascot ready to edit.
So now let's take a look at the tour
and the editing interface.
So here we have it, we can go explore 3D space,
and straight away it's connected all the photos together
into our virtual tour.
That first viewpoint was really cool.
That's what we call a dollhouse,
and yeah, it's exactly like a dollhouse.
So this gives you an awesome 3D bird's eye view point
of the entire space.
So you can move around like this.
It is very addictive, I have to warn you now.
This is without a doubt
one of the selling points of Matterpot,
is this unique viewpoint.
It's not the only software that can do it,
but no question it does one of the better renderings
of the dollhouse.
Now we just click to go back to the tour.
So firstly up the top left here,
we're gonna switch from viewing mode to editing mode,
and this is it.
This is the Matterport editor.
I know you are probably thinking something super complex,
with hundreds of menus and buttons and options, but no,
it's just what we've got on the right hand side here.
This is so easy to use that, I dare say,
a complete beginner, could become a master of Matterport
within an hour or two.
Down the bottom left, we have our various viewpoints,
so we've got the Dollhouse, we've got View Mesh
and View Floor Plan.
The Floor Plan mode is a good way
to get a sense of the space so you can see exactly
where you've taken your shot.
And clearly, I've got too many here,
so I need to get rid of some of these.
The reason I took so many
was so I could get more detail within the 3D render.
But I don't want my viewers
to be taking like 15 steps around this location,
I just want to give them three or four options max.
So what I'm gonna do is hover over a view point
and click Hide,
and this now removes these navigation points.
I'm gonna get rid of a few more
and now when I go back to preview mode,
I've only got three options for places I can move.
Now going back to the editor,
again, we can change our view point at any point,
let's add a start location
and I wanna start at the front door,
front door's here and I wanna look into the gym
from a zoomed out perspective.
So I think this is good, I only click Set.
When someone opens this tour for the first time,
It'll start with the dollhouse,
and then it will go into this perspective.
Next under 3D scans, we have a list of all their photos.
So I have about 13 as you can see here,
if I wanna see one at any point,
I just click on it, and it'll take me to that scan.
Next, you got an option to take a screenshot,
I don't really see why you'd need this,
but there you go, you've got it.
If you want it, there's a tool here to measure things.
So because it's capturing a 3D mesh,
it's capturing depth information.
So it knows exactly
how far everything is away from everything else.
Next, are Mattertags.
and these are essentially graphics or text
that we can add within the image to create hotspots,
drawing the audience's attention to certain things.
So say I wanna add one to this bike.
I'll go Add, and I'm gonna place it here.
I'm gonna give it a title, bike description.
We can choose the color, and the stem.
This refers to how far this point
is gonna just stick it out from that object.
And when we get back into the viewer,
when we hover over, there we go,
we got information about what it is.
Then as you move around the tour,
you can still see it there and hover over it.
So now I'm going to add another one
to the Free weights over here,
but this time, I'm going to add a link to a photo.
Here's a photo of some weights I found on Google.
Now when I hover over the hotspot,
there we go, we've got a title, a subtitle in our photo.
The next one down on the right hand side
is a highlight reel.
And this is essentially going
to the highlights to the space.
So what are the best bits of your location?
you wanna add them here
because this is going to be added
to the carousel at the bottom
that people will easily be able to click
and navigate between.
I'm going to start at these weights and go Add View.
Now I'm going to move over to something else important
like these bikes,
Add View, and there its added to the bottom.
One more, let's say these exercise balls here,
Add view.
Now we have a carousel down the bottom
you can add as many of these as you want.
And not only are they simple highlights,
where it takes you to the photo,
it positions you the way you want your viewers
to be positioned.
But you can also edit the transitions
to then Auto play.
So it will go from one photo to the other to the other,
and I think this is going to blow your mind.
So what I'm gonna do is select Walkthrough,
and make sure that on each transition,
now you can see this little man has confirmed it.
Now I wanna get back to my first photo,
let's hit the Play button and see what happens.
So it automatically moves between the photos,
is when I prepared earlier.
(upbeat music)
Now find me on the right hand side,
we have a VR icon and this is our VR path.
So if people are looking at this new headset,
this is the path they can take.
If I wanna exclude certain hotspots, I can it's easy,
just Click them like that, and click to re add them.
At the top left,
Matterport also offers different kinds of media,
so here are screenshots that we took earlier.
If you wanna access just one single photo,
you can download these here and save to your computer.
Also, this one is quite cool.
These are automatically generated videos,
where it does an automatic animation
that incorporates the dollhouse effect
combined with the 360 photos.
So it gives that really cool 3D aspect in a 13 second video,
they are for ADP for some reason,
so don't set your hopes too high.
Next, we can go to the Details tab,
and add more information about the business,
that will be added to the virtual tour.
So in the top left hand corner here,
we want some info to pop up
or put in their website and contact details,
or put in their residential address and click Save.
Now when we get back to the tour in the top left,
there we go, we have named the business,
the contact and the address.
We also have our viewpoints down the bottom left,
and we have our Carousel of highlights.
This is essentially what it's going to look like,
When they embed it on their website.
So viewers will have all of these options to click
and navigate between the various viewpoints
that we're offering here through Matterport.
So I'm happy with this.
So I'm going to make this space Public.
And you do that by clicking this button here.
And now if I wanna share this to my client,
I'll click share, firstly, I'm gonna link,
I can copy and paste in a new browser.
And there it is, but also we've got the embed code here.
So here is their homepage.
And what they'll need to do is add a Virtual Tour
section here, that they can then embed the code,
and it will show up in a window on the side.
Now they do also give you the option
to publish to Google Street View
however, you will need to pay an extra $20
or so per tour to do that.
So overall,
my experience using Matterport was a positive one.
and I'm happy with the end result I got.
The dollhouse feature and automatic flythrough
is definitely the main unique selling point.
Look, it's not the only software
that can do for a Photogrammetry and 3D renders like this,
but it does the best job
of all the platforms I've used so far.
So if showing your location from this kind of perspective
is something you see is adding massive value to your tours,
then you should definitely consider Matterport.
Now here are my top few pros and cons,
after using it on my very first paid job.
The first con,
is that currently they don't offer manual uploads,
which means you can't edit your shots
and you're also stuck using inbuilt HDR mode
and can't use raw or bracketing.
I asked them about this
and they said this should be changing soon,
which is why I see this is more of a beginner software
because beginners don't care as much about shooting manually
with raw and bracketing and doing lots of editing.
A pro is definitely the awesome dollhouse
and flythrough feature.
These things are seriously cool
and gave my tour a production quality
that I never imagined I could ever get.
This effect blows my mind
no matter how many times I watch it.
A con is that it's iOS-only.
So when shooting you'll need either an iPhone or an iPad.
Again, this will probably change
when they allow manual upload
since you'll be able to do it through the desktop software,
and not need a mobile app.
A pro is, the app is actually really good
Firstly, it's one of the only virtual tour software's
to actually have a mobile app.
And secondly, the interface and ease of use is really good.
What I most liked about it,
is that it fills in parts of the map as you shoot
and gives you live feedback.
So you can instantly see what areas of the location
have been threading mat and which haven't.
A con is that the software blurs the Nadir,
I guess, since they don't yet allow manual editing.
This is their solution for getting rid of the tripod.
Not great, but also not entirely a deal breaker.
A pro is that you can instantly connect
and upload your tour before even leaving the location.
So it's already processing in the cloud,
While you're on your way home.
A con in my eyes is the pricing system.
And while it's very reasonable
to start with just 9.99 a month,
that allows you five active tours and that's it.
You can't have six or you have to upgrade
to the next subscription tier which is $69 a month
and allows you 25,
which kind of doesn't make sense
because if you started six different accounts at 9.99 each,
then you could get 30 tours for $60 a month.
Anyway, to me matterport is clearly targeted
at the real estate market where you might list a house,
the house gets sold,
then you unpublished the tour to free up space,
not ideal, but real estate listing
seem to be the target market for Matterport.
And I've seen some really stunning real estate examples
that to me, make me wanna say,
- shut up and take my money.
- And if your focus is solely shooting virtual tours
for real estate,
then I'd tell you, you should seriously consider Matterport.
Since it's potentially the best platform
for real estate virtual tours.
For regular businesses like this one where you want to host
and keep your tours hosted there permanently,
It's not necessarily the obvious choice,
mostly because of the hosting issue.
They seem to be updating their overall business model
on a regular basis,
So hopefully we see some improvements with the packaging.
They do also have a free option
where you can host one single tour on the platform.
So I definitely encourage you to take them up on it.
Even if it's the only tour you use with Matterport,
Just say you can have some fun
with some of the cool features you saw in this video.
And if you wanna get started making virtual tours
for your own paid clients,
but don't know where to get started,
then today is your lucky day.
All you need to do is go to the link below
and check out my brand new course of virtual tour pro.
In it I'll teach you all the best tips, tricks and methods,
you can use to get started immediately,
with your very own virtual tour business.
You'll learn the exact strategies I use to land my first,
second, third, fourth, fifth, 10th and 20th paid client.
I'll let you in on a little secret.
Right now there are tons of businesses, just like F45,
who have big marketing budgets just sitting there,
waiting to be spent on something.
All you need to do is figure out
how to get in front of ideal clients like these
and you can easily get paid
for your virtual tours in no time.
In the course you'll learn how to attract your own clients
like this, then you get to steal my entire 360 workflow
for creating professional virtual tours
with a point and shoot, 360 camera, like I used here.
So if you're ready to make the transition
into doing what you love for Living,
then click the link in the description
and starting your own professional 360 journey today.
Alright, that's it for today.
Happy 360ing,
and I'll talk to you soon.