The dollhouse. A perspective so cool,
and so satisfying to look at,
that it makes you go.... Oooooh Matterport!
And totally forget about the expensive monthly fees
you have to pay for Matterport,
to make one and keep it online.
How cool is it though, seriously?
But, while this feature was made famous by Matterport,
it's not the only platform that can do it.
In fact, there isn't just one,
but there are many alternatives that can do the same,
or a similar effect to the dollhouse.
This includes Asteroom, Benaco, EyeSpy360 and Everpano.
But there's one that is potentially
the best Matterport alternative of them all,
and maybe even better than Matterport itself.
Not only can this software do the same dollhouse effect
and stylish 3D transitions between photos,
but it also generates highly accurate
and downloadable floor plans.
It has a free version with enough capabilities
to use professionally.
And here's the best part, for a small fee per photo,
you can get someone else to make your virtual tour for you
and do all the work.
The software I'm talking about is called Metareal,
and it's only just come out of Beta
as I'm making this video.
But, from what I've seen of it so far,
I think this is one of the best up
and coming platforms out there, especially for real estate.
So if you've used or even considered using
a platform like Matterport,
but you were turned off by
the overly expensive hosting fees,
and over reliability on using
the Matterport platform every step of the way,
then this might just be
the alternative you've been waiting for.
Now, let's take a look inside Metareal,
and at the end of this video,
I'll do a side by side comparison
of the pros and cons of each.
Okay, here's the website, I'll link it below.
I've already made myself an account.
To access the to Tour Builder, choose Stage.
And, Metareal Stage is basically
their lingo for their virtual tour building software.
Which, I thought was called Metareal but, okay.
So I'm going to hit New Project and I'm gonna choose
a few of these options, because I want the capability
to do as much as possible, later on.
So I'm gonna hit Create.
Now I'm going to choose upload, and upload my panoramas.
- A few moments later.
Okay, now that the photos have uploaded,
it looks like a normal virtual tour editor, right?
Well, there's a certain button there,
that no other virtual tour editor has.
And, that is the one at the top right.
Build it for Me.
And, that means exactly what it sounds like.
Someone else, aka someone on the Metareal team,
will go and physically build your virtual tour for you.
Not only will they connect all
the 360 photos together with accuracy,
but they'll also build a 3D model that you can turn
into a dollhouse, that will give you floor plans
and be done to a relatively high standard,
meaning you don't have to touch this tour anymore.
You'll get sent it back.
And when you do, it might take a day or two.
When you get it back, you can send it to your client.
And you're done.
I've honestly never seen this feature before
from any software I've used.
And I love the idea of it, because I'm always
the kind of person that, if I can delegate menial work
or something that's going to take me a really long time
to do to someone else, and it's affordable,
I will always do that.
So, if you are shooting a lot of virtual tours,
all you would have to do, is shoot and edit your photos.
Then you upload them to the Metareal platform,
and then someone else takes care of it from there.
You don't need to do any complex editing,
especially when it comes to 3D modeling.
Which, is integral to platforms
like Matterport, Metareal, Cupix.
Any of them using 3D geometry,
gets a bit more complicated.
So, to be able to give that to someone else, saves a lot
of learning of 3D construction,
and stuff that will go completely over your head.
I know it goes over mine.
I will add a but, and the but is you obviously have
to pay for it, because someone else is working for you.
Think of it like, Metareal have their own team of employees,
and they're renting them to you, to do work for you.
So, obviously you have to pay for physical labour,
but it's actually really cheap, depending
on the Metareal package you get.
It can cost anywhere from $2 to $4 per photo.
And, that is really reasonable.
Especially given the level of work,
they're actually doing inside this software.
And I'm going to show you what they do right now.
And look, this isn't the only way of making a Metareal tour,
you can still do the 3D modeling yourself,
because it's an essential component of using the software,
because it's all about 3D
and creating that beautiful dollhouse.
So, it needs that accurate 3D modeling in order to work.
So, let's say that you don't wanna do that.
You don't wanna take advantage
of one of the best features I've ever seen in a software,
in getting someone else to do it for you.
Let's say, you want to do it yourself,
and learning it yourself, will mean you can do
the 3D modeling completely free.
So, it is a good way of cutting costs.
So, here's one I made earlier.
And by me, I mean, I paid them to do it.
But, you can see the Metareal team's work right here in
the editor, and you can see all of the 3D geometries
and shapes they've added to this space,
and it's broken up room by room.
They do them one at a time,
but they actually do it really quickly,
and with a good degree of accuracy.
So, they've got all kinds of shapes here that you can add,
and once you get the hang of it,
I've seen the tutorials on their YouTube channel.
You can do it quite quickly.
So again, if you do wanna do things really cheaply,
then you can build this yourself.
You do have to do it room by room.
So, here I've done the bedroom of my hotel suite.
Next, you would do the bathroom using
the exact same techniques and link the two rooms together.
But again, you don't have to do this,
and I would probably advise not doing it.
This is such a fantastic feature, of having someone else do
it for you, and it really helps deliver
the best user experience, when your 360 photos
are 3D mapped really accurately.
So, here I am in the Tour Preview window,
and when I click from one panel to another, notice how
the sense of 3D space is really realistic,
just like with Matterport.
There's that sense of parallax as you're walking through
the space, and that just helps the tour feel
that extra bit realistic.
Now the exciting part, down the bottom left,
we have a bunch of options.
I'm going to click this one here,
and there is my dollhouse of the Park Hyatt here in Sydney.
And I found this to be extremely similar
to Matterport, sometimes better.
When using a 360 camera, Matterport actually gets it wrong
a lot of the time, because it's not able
to pick up the depth very well.
Whereas, when they use those expensive Matterport scanners,
they're able to detect the depth of a room a lot better,
with only one shot.
Whereas, with 360 cameras,
you have to take quite a few shots
for it to get a proper sense of
how deep, how high, how long the room actually is.
So hypothetically, if I made this exact same tour
with Matterport, with the same amount of hotspots,
this dollhouse would not be as clean cut
as what I'm seeing here.
There would be all kinds of issues with the geometry.
There'd be curved walls and missing details.
And here, because I got the Metareal team
to really map it out accurately and properly,
I'm seeing this dollhouse with straight lines,
and it feels like it's professionally done in 3D.
Okay, now incoming,
is another really cool feature of Metareal.
So down the bottom left,
I'm going to click that one more time,
and up comes a floor plan of my suite.
This was a pretty sweet suite by the way.
But, if you look closely,
it also has the measurements,
and from what I'm told,
they're accurate within about 98 or 99%.
So that is really good, given the fact that I only uploaded
a bunch of 360 photos, one shot per room,
and it was able to generate this, with accurate measurements
of my entire location.
So, this floor plan will show up down the bottom left,
as people are navigating this virtual tour.
Also, you can download the floor plan
and use it elsewhere if you like.
So, we've also just given ourselves another asset,
that we can use in the marketing of this location.
And I just wanna remind you,
I still haven't even touched this tour at all.
I didn't write bedroom, balcony, bathroom, wash room.
I didn't do any of that.
The Metareal team did it, while I was sleeping
or playing Pokemon Go.
Now I'm going to hit the button down
the bottom left one more time,
and it takes me back into the virtual tour
as you would normally navigate it, with 360 photos.
There are a few basic features down the bottom.
We've got Room Chooser, which is the standard carousel
you see with most virtual tour softwares.
Then it's got a Measurement Tool that Matterport also has,
where you can measure the distance from A to B.
There you go, 4.7 meters,
and you can watch it in VR, and obviously you'll need
a VR headset or a Google cardboard to do that.
Okay, so that was a super quick overview
of Metareal, there's a lot more I could have covered,
they do have their own YouTube channel
if you want to learn a bit more in depth.
Now, let's begin the comparison of Metareal and Matterport.
And, I'm gonna go over the key things
that I think, are big differences between them,
and what each of them does better than the other one.
Let's start with pricing.
Metareal is $0 to $39 a month.
Matterport is $0 to $309 a month.
And a big difference I see here,
is with the free version of both of them.
You can do so much more with Metareal.
Matterport allows you literally only one active space
in one user, which means one tour and that's it.
You can't make a second tour or you'll have to take
the first one offline.
Whereas with Metareal,
you can publish an unlimited amount
of photos, up to one gigabyte of storage.
So realistically, this would be more like anywhere
between 2 and 10 virtual tours.
I really do consider that to be a workable offering,
for a platform that's completely free, at this point.
However, they do have bigger packages,
obviously, both platforms do.
And with Metareal, you're not going up as much
from package to package.
Whereas with Matterport,
there are giant leaps in between the various packages.
The second Matterport package
is also really limiting,
because it only allows you five active spaces.
Which means you can have five virtual tours online.
If you wanna make six, you've got
to upgrade to the next package,
which is $69 a month,
to have six active virtual tours, that sucks.
This was obviously made with real estate in mind,
where a house might be listed online for a few weeks
or a few months,
and then it gets purchased,
and it no longer needs to be online.
But, for more permanent businesses,
that you might want online for years,
this proves to be a big problem for the Matterport platform.
Because think about it,
you make five virtual tours of five businesses.
You can't upload any more,
and you don't wanna take any of them offline,
you then have to pay that $9.99 a month for ever
to keep them online.
The second you cancel or stop paying those tours go offline.
So, it really is a very restrictive platform
in terms of pricing, and all of Matterport packages
are designed, so you keep paying them month after month,
or have your tours removed.
Whereas, I much prefer the pricing system of Metareal,
where you're paying for the amount of storage.
So you can upload as many photos,
and as many tours as you like within that storage.
And they're not going to be removed,
if you ended your subscription.
It will only be sometime in the distant future,
where they may take some really old tours down,
but it's not going to be instantly
after you downgrade your package.
So combine that, with the fact that Metareal
is so much cheaper anyway, for all three of their packages,
then it's a no brainer.
Metareal wins by far when it comes to pricing.
Now, no doubt these prices will change in the future.
So be sure to check out their respective websites
when you watch this video,
to see if they've made
any small adjustments to their packages.
Metareal also has downloadable floor plans,
which Matterport does not.
Metareal, also gives you the ability to edit your shots.
This has been a big limitation with Matterport,
in that you can only use cameras that are compatible
with the Matterport platform,
and you can only use the Matterport app
to capture these photos.
Therefore, you have no editing ability whatsoever.
Whereas with Metareal, use any camera you like,
edit as much as you like, and then you upload.
Therefore, you can also use any phone or any device
to capture these images.
Whereas with Matterport,
you can only use an iPhone or an iPad
that has the Matterport app.
Another pro of Metareal,
is the awesome feature I discussed before,
which is, they make the tour for you.
Whereas with Matterport, you have to build it yourself.
Matterport also does an automate 3D construction
of the space, whereas Metareal does not.
With Metareal, you either have to do it yourself
or get the Metareal team to do it,
whereas with Matterport it does it automatically.
Yes, it doesn't do it perfectly,
and more often than not, it needs some kind of fixing
and shooting, but it does at least have
that automatically 3D render of the space, without having
to do anything in the software.
With that said,
a pro of Metareal is, you need less photos overall
to create a nice looking 3D dollhouse.
You literally only need one 360 per room,
and because you're doing the 3D mapping yourself,
and putting all the geometry and shapes together,
you can get that sense of accuracy instantly,
by doing it later instead of while you're shooting.
Whereas with Matterport, you have
to do that more while you're shooting,
and that involves shooting more shots in each location,
so the camera physically sees everything in the room.
Another thing that I prefer about Metareal,
is they don't automatically blur the Nadir
like Matterport does.
For some inexplicable reason,
Matterport have always blurred the tripod,
or the bottom of the shot, and not giving you an option
to add a logo, or just simply not do that.
You don't always want that big blurry patch at the bottom.
But that's something that's always been there,
and has been a frequent annoyance
to anyone shooting with Matterport.
Whereas with Metareal, firstly you don't have
to have that blurry patch,
but you can also add a custom logo,
or just have nothing there if you prefer.
Now, there are some small things
that I think Matterport still does
do better right now than Metareal.
The first one, is the awesome fly through effect,
where you can connect up several panoramas,
and the software does an automatic fly through
around your area shots in the 3D space,
making it feel that extra bit real.
And it's just like so cool and cinematic,
and it really does have an extreme wow factor about it.
Also right now, Matterport has better looking hotspots.
You can customise them more,
and overall they look more professional.
Whereas, Metareal's are still very basic,
because they've only just come out of beta.
So the hotspot feature is still super basic.
It's good enough, but it's not on Matterport's level.
Now, while both platforms do Google Street View upload,
Metareal does them, firstly free
for 15 photos for it's free account,
and then when you upgrade the $9.95 account,
you can upload as many as you like.
And, that's seriously amazing.
I think it's even industry leading.
I don't know any other software
that allows you Google Street View upload,
for such a low price per tour.
Matterport are also saying that
they're doing free Street View upload for a limited time.
Who knows how long that will last,
but, in the past they have charged $20 per upload,
to Street View, per tour.
So, Street View definitely goes to Metareal.
The only other thing I can think of
when comparing the two platforms,
is that Matterport, has the "ooh Matterport" effect.
You know, if you see a Matterport tour
on a real estate website,
it's just got that clout around it.
Like, it's got that reputation that can't be messed with.
Matterport is clearly an established
and long lasting platform,
and therefore has reputation behind the name.
Metareal, doesn't have that yet.
Personally, I think all the other things
on this list, way override that.
But for some, especially in the real estate industry,
Matterport is a serious name, so I'll leave it up to you
to decide whether that's worth paying all that extra money,
to get the "ooh Matterport" effect.
With that said, I will be making videos
about Matterport in the future,
because I think it still does add something overall,
to the virtual tour industry.
But, I just don't think it's the be all and end all
of virtual tour software,
which it's so often, is referred to as.
It's actually kind of laughable, when you see all
these other amazing effects, that all
the other virtual tour platforms have,
yet Matterport is the most well known one.
Therefore, everyone thinks it's the best.
But, it's actually far from the best.
So, in summary I'd say yes,
Metareal, is the best budget virtual tool platform
for real estate, because of its endless amount
of amazing features, because of the automation
of the building of the virtual tours,
because of the dollhouse effect,
because of the 3D transitions and the overall amount
of value, you get the such a small price.
Yes, I would definitely recommend upgrading
to the paid version, it's super cheap anyway.
But you can try the free one, to get a feel for it first.
So if your focus is real estate,
or virtual tours for businesses at all really,
I would definitely suggest giving it a try.
Again, I'll put a link to Metareal down there,
if you're curious and wanna try it out.
And I'll see you next time.