Matterport Genesis
I designed the vision for Matterport's generative AI future: defurnishing, virtual staging, and layout optimization in dimensionally accurate 3D. I built the demo that sold the board and created the planning framework that turned a vision into a multi-year roadmap.
Company
Matterport (3D capture platform, acquired by CoStar for $1.6B)
Role
Design Manager / Vision Design Lead
Team
Chief Scientist, Design Manager (co-lead), Motion Designer, IC Designer, Engineering and Product Leadership
Impact
Defined multi-year AI strategy
Secured board alignment
CoStar acquisition ($1.6B, April 2024)
What I did
For 11 years, Matterport captured spaces as they are. Genesis was about what spaces could become: generative AI that could defurnish rooms, reimagine layouts, and virtually stage spaces in dimensionally accurate 3D. I worked with our Chief Scientist and another Design Manager to get executives aligned on the vision, then designed the future-state experience and produced the artifacts that made it something people could rally around.
The design.
I used a pre-existing tech demo as the starting point and designed the full end-to-end experience across four interaction patterns:
Natural language prompts for layout optimization, where users type what they want ("Create a more efficient layout for my office space") and the AI responds with spatial options. I designed the prompt UI, loading states, and how suggestions appear in the 3D environment.
Style pickers for virtual staging: Surprise Me, Contemporary, Industrial, Feng Shui. Users select a style and see the space re-rendered.
An "Add Anything" interface for placing objects contextually. I designed the search flow and how objects preview in place before confirming.
Floorplan views with AI suggestions overlaid on real geometry, showing how many people could fit, where to add desks, and occupancy optimization.
I built it all in Figma for the UI and Blender for the 3D renders showing AI-modified spaces. The deliverable was a produced video mixing both, not a live demo (the tech was too early and too risky) but something concrete enough that executives could see the same future we were seeing. The video was the selling tool. Without something you can watch and react to, it's just a deck with words.
The framework
Matterport's culture was built around 90-day shipping cycles, so vision work needed a different structure.
I created a framework that separated North Star (3-5 year state), Strategic Bets (capability investments), and Near-term Moves (next quarter). This connected the vision to concrete roadmap items and gave every team a way to see their work in the context of the larger direction. It's still in use.
The Outcomes
The board signed off. We scoped Genesis into shippable phases and handed the first phase to an IC designer and PM to begin execution. I moved on to other work, but the framework kept the initiative on track without me in the room.
I was named inventor on the USPTO patent for the defurnishing system, the AI approach for removing interior elements from 3D spaces.
A year later, CoStar acquired Matterport for $1.6 billion. Their press release cited AI and digital twin technology as strategic drivers. The work we did, the demo, the framework, the board presentation, showed up directly in the acquisition thesis.