Experiences from Proptech Bergen with Matterport 3D Scanning

What should the building interface of the future look like? Should everything go into a 3D model or a digital twin? Over the summer this has been the question we have been asking ourselves at Proptech Bergen.

Software

Matterport is web-based and anyone with a browser can access all models. It is currently only compatible with iPad for scanning, but models can be viewed afterwards on PC, Android, Apple and so on.

Unboxing

The Matterport Pro2 contains the camera itself, which came 50% charged with a charging cable. The tripod must be purchased separately. After a bit of Googling, we went with the Manfrotto MT 190X3, which worked well and did the job.

Scanning

It took us 4 days to scan the entire building. This resulted in 1,200 data points and was a longer process than we had anticipated. It takes a lot of time to ensure all doors are open, deactivate lock pumps, tidy up and so on. One would no doubt become much more efficient with practice, and perhaps it also helps not to be too much of a perfectionist.

We had almost no problems with the scanning, even though we have a very large number of similar rooms. It took approximately 18 hours from uploading the various floors for the project to be updated. Each day we uploaded to the cloud so that we had an updated model the following morning.

Digital twin

There are probably many who scanned their buildings early and have never opened them since. We have a clear strategy to really test this at a completely different level. The next step is to get over 1,000 sensors, ventilation systems, heating systems, cooling systems, lifts, fire systems and more integrated into the model. And everyone connected to the building should use the model — from building owners, consultants and technical suppliers (during refurbishment and servicing), to FM operators and building users.

Positives:

+ Good battery life

+ Impressive quality, high accuracy and few errors

+ Easy to add documentation, sensors and other information

Negatives:

• Every time you update the model you lose all "Mattertags", i.e. all the links. So the model becomes completely new with each upload
• It is not designed for outdoor scanning — when we had to go outside to access technical rooms, it was a somewhat cumbersome process with an extremely large number of scans
• It is not possible to share specific parts of the model with others — it is all or nothing

Please feel free to share questions or suggestions for how we can create more value with 3D models.

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