Matterport has just released a mobile version of its scans! This means you can do 3D virtual tours without needing to purchase an expensive camera – you can simply do it from your phone! We purchased a Matterport camera several years ago and until COVID and home open restrictions, it wasn’t a particularly popular product. However, we have seen a jump in demand for our 3D virtual tour services as well as a jump in the purchasing of Matterport Cameras. But now that it’s mobile, naturally we thought we would put it to the test! We got one of our staff members with no past Matterport experience using the latest iPad. A one bed, one bath apartment took 30 minutes and contained 8 scans.
Here is what we found: Pros
Much more cost-effective
Quality isn’t bad given it’s not a ‘proper’ camera
Can be more time effective
Relatively simple and user friendly for very basic scans + provides thorough instructions initially
More flexible as agents can do it for themselves without needing to outsource
Cons
Crashes a fair bit especially if you have an older phone/iPad
Even on newer devices, it can glitch which means you have to start certain scans again
When it crashes/glitches, it deletes that scan you are working on so you have to start again
Not very user friendly and can take a while to get used to, especially when marking our mirrors and windows and doing slightly more advances things
Quality is nowhere near as good as the actual Matterport camera
The stitching of images isn’t great so there are lots of errors where things don’t line up
People will be in mirror reflections
You need to take a scan roughly every metre or so – so is a tedious process as one scan is 3 rotations, taking around 12 images per rotation
The cons list may be a bit longer, but we are still pretty impressed with this product! It’s amazing what you can do just on your phone. However, it does realistically only have quite a niche market due to how fiddly and time consuming it can be. So sales agents or people on tight marketing budgets and rentals would be one of the few categories that would really benefit from giving it a go! This would also be handy for doing a quick rental property condition report on the go. See below links to compare the quality difference: COMPLETED WITH IPHONE/APP: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=ncZ2nF1r3xH
COMPLETED WITH MATTERPORT CAMERA: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=VS3ShTZC7n6
Have you tried it yet? What are your thoughts? We’d love to know!
Click the below link to check out and download the app and try it out for yourself. All you need is a hosting subscription and to download the app and you’re good to go!