Matterport creates 3-D virtual reality images
Published 4:02 am, Monday, July 7, 2014
Imagine visiting a famous winery in France's Loire Valley, but instead of posting a standard selfie on Facebook, you share an interactive virtual reality tour captured on your mobile phone.
That's the vision of Matterport, a Mountain View startup that on Monday announced a $16 million round of financing from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and from venture capital firms to accelerate development of its 3-D computational photography technology.
The company received a boost two weeks ago during the Google I/O developers conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco when Google and LG Electronics announced plans for a 7-inch Android tablet capable of capturing full 3-D images in 2015.
Google, LG and other consumer electronics companies will have to prove that such devices work and are affordable. But Matterport CEO Bill Brown called the announcement "great news" because it should reduce the time his 3-year-old company's technology gets to consumers.
"The move to incorporate 3-D sensors into mobile devices is happening faster than we anticipated," he said. "Within the next few years, the camera systems in smart phones are going to have a 3-D sensor, so as you capture photos, you also capture a depth of information."
And in his French winery scenario, "Instead of making a gallery of photos, you could share with your friends something that would let them immerse themselves in the location."
With companies like Oculus VR grabbing headlines, and a $2 billion buyout from Facebook, virtual reality has become one of the next tech frontiers.
In February, Matterport demonstrated how the inside of a room could be captured and converted into an online virtual reality presentation using a smartphone developed by Project Tango, a 3-D research effort headed by Google's Advanced Technology and Projects department.
Matterport then introduced a $4,500 professional-grade 3-D camera aimed at commercial markets, such as real estate, construction and auto insurance.
Digital cameras capture a simple 2-D image, but cameras like Matterport's capture a wide set of data about physical objects and space. The data then create a digital map of the object or space, which is then converted in Matterport's cloud platform into an interactive experience similar to what people see in a Google Maps Street View.
But unlike in Street View, close-up photos of a neighborhood within Google Maps, or in an existing 360-degree panoramic photo, Matterport's platform can add data such as the length and height of a room.
That lets online viewers plop in a virtual table or change a wall color to instantly see how those things would look in the real room, Brown said.
While Mountain View startup Lytro sells similar, but less expensive, light-view cameras, Silicon Valley tech analyst Rob Enderle said Matterport's platform gives it the edge.
"Lytro would have to have a rendering application like Matterport" to produce a similar product, he said.
And once an object or scene is converted, "you could quite literally change the world," Enderle said. "For instance, in forensics, if you wanted to capture a crime scene and then re-create the crime digitally, or in archaeology, you could scan a ruin and then digitally re-form what the original building looked like."
One example of Matterport's technology, posted at www.matterport.com/try, is a 3-D tour of the Beach Chalet in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. An online visitor can move the view around the Depression-era building to see close-ups of its frescoes, mosaics and wood carvings.
Matterport's latest financing was led by venture capital firm DCM, which has offices in Beijing and Menlo Park. Investors also include the Jerry Yang-founded AME Cloud Ventures of Palo Alto.