Detailed 360° site capture has transformed project documentation and now streamlines insurance claimsMatterport needs to find a way to do what they are doing with SLAM instead of terrestrial. The biggest drawback to Matterport these days, and why other tools are being used, is that you only have a certain amount of time to capture data, and unfortunately, terrestrial devices do not really allow for that. Second, you have not made it permanent for manually aligning captures in the Matterport app. Every now and then it allows me to do a manual align, but that needs to be a standard feature. Instead of saying, 'I cannot find any alignment, please scan again,' it should give me the option of just moving the alignment myself. I understand that Matterport is built for you to need to do things in a certain sequence, but the reality is that sometimes I have to go back to rooms later on. Sometimes there are rooms that are symmetrical, and in those cases, it can really help if you have some user input. It saves a lot of time and it saves a lot of capture time. On top of all of that, the actual application itself is very unstable. You reach a certain amount of captures and the device does not work anymore. But then that messes up the entire workflow. If the project is too big to work on the app and I have to build another one, I need to create two projects and then wait for those to merge. And then I have to take both projects individually and align them to each other and let that merge again. So now I am talking about waiting a day for the thing to automatically align, and then I have to merge it manually, and then wait a day for those results. So instead of getting results in one day, I have to do it in two days, and it is all because of the reliability of the application. I think that Matterport is overpriced. At this point, there should be some SLAM integration with maybe terrestrial as an anchor if needed. And if they want to push all of these products such as CAD and point clouds from their data sets, then they should truly work on making sure that that data is accurate enough for what it needs to do. The market is oversaturated with people with Matterport devices trying to do Lidar jobs, but the accuracy is not good enough. Getting a CAD plan exported, but it is not a vector, and it is a locked-down PDF essentially makes it useless. If you want to keep things locked down and not able to be vectorized, then that seems to say a lot about the accuracy, in which case point clouds and vector CAD should not be available at all. I think that there is much to be improved. There should never be a situation where Matterport cannot find data to match and it asks me to rescan. At the end of the day, if it was using photogrammetry and something such as lighting was the reason why it cannot find any alignment points, that would be one thing, but you have Lidar included. So if you have Lidar, that means there are overlapping points, and if there are overlapping points, there should always be a match. If you cannot find a match, that means that your algorithm is not mature enough or your Lidar data is not actually accurate enough. The scalability is pretty low, considering the fact that the price to scale up sites is already immensely high, and there is no benefit to having multiple devices at a time. You can capture a site faster, but as I said, it ends up taking the same amount of time by the time it auto-processes it, I manually merge, and then have to wait for that merger to process. Somebody can go and get half of it done in one day, half of it done in another, and it will take the same amount of time. Matterport needs to find a way in its apps to allow me to merge prior to doing the full processing, so that way I do not lose that same time twice. Pricing is pretty straightforward, but it is overpriced. That is the reason I found a solution to take my Matterport spaces down and put them on a local desktop so that way it can be embedded, shared, or kept locally. The first reason is for security purposes. The second reason is because the price is entirely too high, but I understand that once you are in this ecosystem, it is hard to leave. There is only a tool, I think Doxel, which will allow me to transfer over Matterport projects into their ecosystem so that at least on their site, I can access the scans done for Matterport as well as from their own software. But there is no solution to actually take your data from Matterport and move it somewhere else. So once you join, you are basically locked in. And the unfortunate thing is that it is really set up for real estate tours as far as the pricing is concerned. So if you are using it for anything other than that, you are definitely overpaying.
