Matterport is a company that started from the XBOX (jobs at Microsoft) Kinect Hacker crowd back in 2010. Founder and CEO Matt Bell was amazed by the robust abilities of the $150 Kinect. He envisioned a cheaper and equal device that could let anyone map out rooms to create 3D models accessible straight from the web. During this same time he was working in a gesture recognition company that utilized very expensive cameras and bloated files that needed specialized software to handle it. Matterport wants to make $50,000 cameras unnecessary and have created a $4500 camera that can transform 2D images into 3D Virtual ones. Matterport is already a huge hit with the real estate crowd.
A year ago, Matterport (jobs at Matterport) got serious about the commercial market, and raised a $16 million Series B to chase the real estate vertical. Matterport targeted the companies that help real estate workers photograph properties. The company has already sold thousands of cameras, but are now being refueled by a very new injection of $30 million and will be hiring out a top-notch team to make mobile VR scanning a reality. Matterport wants to be more than a camera company, with the help of a partnership with Google they want to invent the ability to let you wave your phone around to create VR tours of anywhere you want called Project Tanjo.
Matterport believes once smartphones can serve as the cameras and source images flood in becoming the software layer that stitches images together into VR their business will explode. The plan is to make an SDK and API’s that will let other apps carry Matterport’s image stitching to present VR to the public. So here’s the rundown on Google’s Project Tanjo with Matterport. The plan is for Intel (jobs at Intel) to provide its RealSense VR sensor hardware, Google (jobs at Google) to power the scanning software, and then Matterport to stitch the imagery into immersive VR scenes.
It’s obvious that Matterport is looking way beyond selling cameras to real estate agents. Think about the potential of sharing immersive 360-degree windows into what it’s like to be there. Post a Virtual party up on your Facebook with entrees and party goers! Once this technology can be amplified through proper symbiosis with other companies looking to grow this VR universe, Matterport will definitely make itself matter. Perhaps you could matter too, jobs are opening as you read this article.