Matterport: create 3D models of spaces and objects in minutes | Hacker News Reader

Matterport: create 3D models of spaces and objects in minutes

matterport.com

59 pointsleot14 comments

This could be the next big thing in the real-estate marketing - imagine being able to do a random walk-through of the inside of listed properties. Heck, I'd probably even pay some sort of fee for that as a buyer if I were actively looking for a place to live.

Heh, this was my start up plan for last year, yeah.

Except that this version is half-assed; as long as this requires dedicated hardware, it'll never have broad-based adoption. There's no reason you can't do this with a camera alone; take the imagery with your cell-phone cam, process on the cloud.

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df9WhgibCQA

Wow, very impressive! I did not know you could do AR like that without markers.

That is very very cool.

This kind of technology in the real estate market is inevitable.

We would absolutely love this tech on our rentals site (http://www.openrent.co.uk) that just launched. Just need it to be made widely available, and matured slightly. For the time being, we're going to encourage microsoft photosynth's on the site, which is a decent alternative.

It's important that 3D models can be created quickly, and the end product is visually appealing. Right now, Photosynth fills that void extremely well, but I look forward to seeing how this develops.

Looks like a Kinect controller with a gripper handle and some software to build the map in real time. I would have killed for this as an indie filmmaker and would certainly consider minor bodily injury just to play with it now :-)

There are Lidar scanners that can do entire cities driving down the road at 35mph.

Also useful for filmmakers. ;)

Great for previs, and the occasional 3D matte when the background is out of focus enough.

I'd be curious to see what features this implementation has compared to the existing open source software that does this sort of thing. (http://pointclouds.org/news/kinectfusion-open-source.html) It seems to use the RGB data as a color texture for the model, in addition to the depth data, for one thing.

I wonder if this would benefit from the Ceres Solver released a few days ago? (http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-ce...)

Very slick, nice video, and nice rendering on the final product. This reminds me of videogame demo videos which don't show actual gameplay. The lack of extra info on their main page is annoying.

In what format will the data output?

Can you save in common CAD formats?

Will you easily be able to create the fly-throughs shown in the video?

Will you be able to record those fly-throughs and send them to others?

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For the record, digital measuring systems have been out for some time. Etemplate was featured on This Old House several years ago. http://www.etemplatesystem.com/

Here are some of the results we have in my lab:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-cuWmrQA0s

Took me a second to recognize the inside of YC. Fun stuff!

Is this a YC company?

It is http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/27/yc-demo-day-winter-2012-ses...

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