Florian Wagner (MESH IMAGES) - Openhaus Pro Podcast #4 #matterport

TRANSCRIPT:

Carson Clement: Hey everyone. And welcome back. We're really excited to be joined today by Florian Wagner. He's actually joining us from Berlin, Germany, which is awesome. We're actually been really surprised with the international interest in Openhaus up to this point. You may not know this, Florian, I don't think I mentioned this, but about like 50% of kind of our initial Openhaus Pro beta testers for us have been from outside the U.S. so it's been really fun to meet people from across the world. Florian is obviously joining us from Berlin. He is from MESH images. They do a variety of 3D tours and different 3D services that he's going to tell us about and then just kind of get into his background experience with Matterport, his opinions about the Pro3, what he's excited about in Matterport, its future. And we're just really thankful for for Florian joining us on this on his Friday evening over there Florian how are you and feel free to kind of introduce yourself.

Florian Wagner: Yeah, thanks, Carson. Yeah, I'm fine, thank you. It's 8 p.m. here, so we have a small time shift. Yeah, my background.I am 48 years old, so there is quite a lot to tell. I could probably talk two hours, but I will try to make this short.I was born and raised in Munich, then studied business administration in Frankfurt, Germany, and then started my professional career in the end of the year 1999 in the Broadcast and Media Business in one of the largest media groups in Germany, called Kirch Group. This was right at the beginning of the rising of the first Dot-Com bubble. This media group became famous for having one of the largest film libraries and archives in the world. But it was active in TV, Sports, Entertainment and Technology. I was assistant to one of the members of the group board of directors, Dr. Karl Mauthe „Karl, if you here this, thanks a lot for everything you taught me and I hope you are fine.”

Our office was responsible for the group administration and all technical operations within the group, which was the end-to-end workflow from production, to post-production, to enryption, to playout center to receivers. The group had about 10.000 people and in our technical division were about 2.500 people directly working in the group in about 25 Tech daughter companies.This is how I came into the field of Media and Technology.Then came 9/11 and the bursting of the DotCom Bubble and the group came into trouble and had to file for insolvency in 2002.After the insolvency of the group I started working for the insolvency lawyer and his team for the next 5 years in restructuring companies and supporting the sales processes of the assets of the group.And then End of 2006 I took the chance to make a Management Buy Out of some of the leftovers, which was the technical operations around the huge film archive, which carried about 2.000.000 unique physical media assets. All unique media assets. Hundreds of media types and formats.

Our small company - I think we had about 20 people - specialised on the physical archiving and re-mastering and logistics of film, video and audio material. We had the Know-How and the unique machines to digitally re-master historical film, tape and audio material, mainly Movies and Series - originating from the 20s to the 90s. The Content Master itself was then stored on special Tape Material called HDCamSR. This special tape material was able to store those huge amounts of data, that we created in the re-mastering process. We did the upscaling from SD Video to 4K.

Our company had a good start with the business but then came another incident, that changed everything and this was the Fukushima incident.The Tsunami over Japan in 2011 destroyed all the factories that manufactured these special tapes and from one day to the other, there was no tape-supply worldwide and the whole industry had to change the workflow to file-based delivery. This radical change caused trouble in our company as we were heavily invested in the old, tape-based workflow and so we went through another restructuring and the business perspectives for our people and know-how were shrinking. A Mac Pro with some software automated processes and could easily handle the worklow from 5 people within a couple of hours.

The Media-Postproduction market collapsed and so it was time for me to go through another change.I founded a family, bought an appartment in Berlin and moved to Berlin end of 2013.I had some money on the bank and decided to take a break.I wanted to make something more future-oriented. Go somewhere, where the sun is shining. A prosperous business perspective in a growing market. I knew, that this had to be somewhere in the online business.Then in 2014 - during by break - I bought the Oculus DK2, the early VR headset Development Kit and this media experience had blown me away. I was so impressed by the 360 immersive experiences, that I have decided to go into this direction. I listened to all talks with John Carmack and I tried to learn and understand. I am very good at analysing, understanding and self-teaching me new skills.From Carmack I have learned that VR and the new media will be more about 360 and 3D.

So I started to dive into 3D.I did some research online.And in 2015 I founded my digital production studio and I named it MESH IMAGES.The initial concept for MESH IMAGES was to be a Production Studio for VR content, because after my experience with the DK2 I was assuming, that the market for Virtual Reality Content would go through the roof. At first, I tried to sell VR productions to German TV stations, but this was very difficult without the reputation and without some of your own content in your hands.And this is how I came to Matterport.

Carson Clement: That is awesome. Yeah. Well, hopefully we hope, you know, history doesn't keep repeating itself for some existential, you know, catastrophe knocks Matterport out. We have to switch careers again.

Florian Wagner: But I hope, though, I'm really very, very confident that Matterport is on a very good track now.

Carson Clement: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. Thank you so much for sharing that background. That's such an awesome, awesome story about how you came to be where you're at now. And with that first client that you said is from Munich, what what kind of client were they? Were they in the real estate? What? You know what?

Florian Wagner: In 2016 my first large Matterport project was a convention center for Messe Muenchen - the ICM convention center. 25.000 m² with a Foyer space of 8.000 m² - captured with Pro1 without Fast scanning.This job took two weeks scanning with some of the spaces taking 14 hours scantime. It is a great project, still today. For the Matterport experience we had to combine a total of 18 individual models to create a walkthrough through this convention center. And one of the captured spaces was later picked by Matterport for the Matterpak Demo Material.In the second step, I was asked how much it would be to capture the whole exhibition area measuring more than 2.000.000 ft² and after I showed them my calculation, they decided not to do it ;)But Messe Muenchen wanted to continue the cooperation but more in the 3D space, modeling, rendering, virtual tour in 360 software and so on. So, I diversified my business and went more into the 3D space. But I did also Matterporting. And in the meantime I had acquired some customers here in Berlin, most of them property agents - mainly for residential. Also some of the big players here in Germany - Engel and Voelkers, Dahler & Company etc.And this went good, until Matterport started to talk and sell directly. And this was also the time, when Matterport changed the business model, raised prices and - well - I lost some of my loyalty and trust in the company.And then came the Pandemic.In the last 2 or 3 years I was focussing more on 3D and on self-hosted experiences mainly in 3DVista. And I decided to dive more into E-commerce with Shopify and digital Marketing. And this is where I learned a lot about many online tools for communication, analytics, 3D, photogrammetry, VR and also Augmented Reality. We have built a lot of know-how in this field and are now using this Know-How also in our Matterport showcases.During this time I have learned to start to think mainly from a user and from a customer perspective. To start from “Why”.And this is how I came back to Matterport. Now I am really bullish about Matterport. I have joined the RCE Network, the reality capture experts network. And I am now making the bet again on Matterport.

Carson Clement: That's awesome. That's very cool. So with Match Images, what would you say? What how is your business kind of split up right now? Like your time? Is it spent? You know, are you guys doing a lot of Matterport stuff now or at what? How does kind of gear your current personal time in business time with mesh images split between kind of these different categories of what they did?

Florian Wagner: Yeah, the German market is a little bit different because Matterport is not so easy to sell over here because it's hosted in the United States and in the EU. We have this in the European Union, we have this this privacy and and data restrictions and many of the corporate clients are not allowed to use. Matterport So this is where you need self-hosted solutions because they have restrictions. They cannot host their data in the U.S. and thus I cannot scan a BMW factory space for example, because it's restrictions that they cannot post the data and use they. So this is this is kind of difficult, but I think.

Carson Clement: Sorry too sorry to cut you off. Have you spoken with Matterport about that issue? Like what's what have they think?

Florian Wagner: They they know it themselves, but and now they is they are listed on the stock market. And I think they will also change. And is this this talks between the European Union and the United States about how to find a way to to to get along with this. But I think we are waiting for five years now that these questions come to and resolved.

And it's a result. And and yeah, it just it takes an awful lot of time. And yeah, this is just privacy restrictions and hosting restrictions and data protection and so on. This is it's a bit difficult in Europe and especially in Germany. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, I think you can use Matterport in many, many use cases. I think in the real estate, in construction, AEC is a huge market and the other huge market that's quite had in front of us is retail.

I'm unconvinced that retail will jump on the Matterport train because Matterport enables them to to open 24 seven space that is still there. This is the showroom. Yeah, the flagship store. And you can open it 24 seven with a matterport tours. And this is something that that the store owners will will do. I think I think retail retail will will be coming up.

Carson Clement: Yeah, I agree with that. I think one of the benefits of of retail is with air, you know, you can like preview an object in your space which has a ton of value. Sometimes those air models aren't the most high quality or the colorings a little off. But I think what's cool about like a virtual showroom is it kind of helps provide more context of a product, you know, and like what that product like what size it is compared to other objects in a space, what it looks like from all the way around.

And then also just kind of provides a, you know, the flat e-commerce website is not really a replication of a retail experience. And so being able to actually have retail experiences online in a way that's kind of immersive and feels like you're going to a store, I think, you know, as as Matterport continues to improve, as I said, Openhaus, like continue to build build better e-commerce solutions.

And then just as, you know, VR and these 3D experiences become more acceptable or kind of expected, I think you're right. I think we'll see. Retail really get get the point because I think up to up to this point, there's just been a lot of these different things that have held stores back from wanting to really embrace Matterport.

Florian Wagner: Yeah, I think so too. The always the same grit in online stores. I think this doesn't see this. This is currently selling, but this is not a product experience and you can add more information in the 360 space. You can add a video and explain things and and push people to the buying decisions much better than in an online store layout. I think this is this is one of the chances that we have with immersive experiences in retail to to to try to drive customer interest and to tell them to to to tell them things and to teach them about the product, to make them buy it in the end.

Carson Clement: So yeah, definitely. So we talked about different things that have you excited about. Matterport Again, one of the things that has been big news in the Matterport and 3D space is obviously the announcement of the Matterport Pro three camera. What's kind of your just initial reaction? Are you getting a Pro three camera? What are you excited about? What are you disappointed in? Like, what's your what's your initial reaction to the the Pro3 Matterport Camera?

Florian Wagner: Well, the Pro3 is a completely new camera. And I think you need to buy one to stay in the business you cannot compete with out of the Pro3. I mean, the Pro3 comes with outdoor capture. It comes with the LIDAR for high ceilings for much, much bigger spaces. And it has this wonderful new optic one inch sensor and a powerful single lens, which will also eliminate some problems of the old Pro2 with these carved out image effects.

And yeah, I think this and it has exchangeable batteries as well. So in theory you can let your camera roll 24 seven without charging it again then I think these are all advantages and you cannot compete without having the Pro3. But the even bigger announcement for me this week was the release of the new Matterport Cloud. And they changed something.

They changed from this 50 K polygon limitation, from the download of space to the streaming of a space. And now you can create a space of almost unlimited size as they have. Right. And so this is I think this is a step into the metaverse and this is this is why you will need Matterport Pro three and two to to to build these huge experiences.

I mean now with a matterport pro three we can scan and the care that this was not possible with the pro tools or with the limitations of the of the 50 K polygon mesh. It was impossible. You had so many objects in there you couldn't scan and it was about 200,000 or 250,000 square feet in one model. But now it will be possible and this will change a lot of things.

So and this will open new possibilities for for Matterport and also for Openhaus.

Carson Clement: Yeah, I agree with just both of those things combined. I just think that just in your perception of what's possible to capture, really, it's just totally changed. I mean, you can you can capture, you know, more like city blocks. I think some of the the spaces they showed was like basically like a city block or like a large building with multiple floors and, you know, the external, you know, entire block area outside.

And I just think, you know, I think you're right. Our perception of like what we can create are our, you know, some of our business to business clients that we're working with have these like large properties that before we were thinking, okay, yeah, we'll just like make separate tours of all these different spaces on their property. But now I'd like really becomes possible one just from like a logistical scanning perspective that you can actually scan that place in a consistent and quick enough way, but then also have the ability to even load and, you know, stream and view that space.

So it's, it's really exciting for sure. Yeah, I think to that, I think for, for someone that's just kind of doing because I think a lot of the negative feedback I've heard about the Pro three is that basically a lot of Matterport service providers, they are doing a lot of just residential scanning. So most of their business is just scanning for like real estate listings.

But to me, if I were in their shoes, like I think that the time, the scanning time between like new, you know, iPhone and new iPhone chips, first of all, plus this new Pro three camera. I think the time to even scan a residential space should be cut down significantly as well. That anyways, we're, we're excited about it for, for all different types of reasons.

Florian Wagner: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think the Pro3 can be a breakthrough and the pricing is okay. I mean, it's $6,000. You need some more packs or 6507 I think. 6000 with with the extra batteries. Yeah. And, and I think it's, it's, it's, it's if you buy it, you will have this new Matterport moment or you have this Matterport moment.

Again, you will be invited to scan something just to show this camera and how it works and how the dollhouse looks and what you can do with it. And and to compare the image quality with a new one inch sensor lens, which is much, much better and and four. Yeah. And for us in retail, I want to focus on retail.

We will have these night scans when it's really dark and sometimes also outside and inside and we'll be thinking of window shopping, witnesses, headphones and yeah, this will be great as a visitor with a new camera.

Carson Clement: Yeah, definitely. Have you ordered years yet?

Florian Wagner: Not yet.

Carson Clement: Same here. We actually we did order. We. It's funny you say that because we when the announcement came out, we were like, Oh, let's order this right now. And then we kind of got distracted. And then like three days later we're like, Wait, we've got to order this. Because obviously, I mean, they may have limited inventory, you know, so we actually finally did order ours. But it's funny you say because we kind of spaced ordering hours as well.

Florian Wagner: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I need one. So I probably this weekend I will also this one.

Carson Clement: Yeah, definitely so. Well Florian, we're definitely going to have to do another call soon. We got through like half of what we planned on, but we'll definitely do another call soon. I'd love to hear kind of we talked a lot about just Matterport in general. Obviously with Openhaus and other SDK partners. We're building things on top of Matterport and I'd love to talk again, you know, in the next few weeks about your perspective on SDK partners and like what that means for the future of Matterport. So we'll have to save that for another time. I can talk to you all day. I'm sure we're going to have more conversations.

Florian Wagner: Yeah, it would be great. Thanks. Thanks, Carson. Thanks for the invitation.

Carson Clement: Yeah. Yeah, you bet. Again, thank you, Florian from MESH Images. You can learn more about MESH images at MESHIMAGES.com, is that correct?

Florian Wagner: Correct.

Carson Clement: Awesome. And anyways, that concludes our chat for today and we will see y'all next time.