Setting the AI powered future vision of our flagship 3D experience.
Matterport Genesis
In the Spring of 2023, Matterport's executive team wanted to create a North Star to orient the future of the business around. For 11 years, we'd been the company globally for photo-realistic digital twins — allowing users to create, edit, manage, and view spaces from anywhere, at any time.
Key drivers for this vision setting from the Executive team were wanting to see how we could use AI development increases to improve our product experience, the potential for new features to expand our customer base, and wanting to plant a stake for investors, the board, and employees.
Goals
Build a three year vision
Matterport's PDE teams have historically been really good at scoping and defining work to easily achievable release cycles — with this project we wanted to be intentional about setting a longer term vision we could orient the company around for multiple years.
Expand adoption in our verticals
While we historically had been strong in the Residential Real Estate market with Photographers and Real Estate Agents, we wanted to build a feature here that would allow us to expand into home buyers as well as renters.
Guiding Principles
Anchored in Reality
Optimize for Speed — but allow in depth customization
Make every space more Valuable — this isn’t just virtual staging
Own 3D — take advantage of the things only we can do.
Team
For this project, our Executive team selected a team centered around our Chief Scientist, and then two full time design team members. On the design team, all of our IC designers were working on project work, so we allocated myself and our other Design Manager, with support from other designers as necessary. We also had support from our motion designer, an IC designer, a PM, and Engineering and Product Leadership.
Approach
We approached this project by using a pre-existing tech demo as a baseline and building upon it by mixing between 3D renders from Blender and 2D screens from Figma to create a video as opposed to a live demo to mitigate risk.
Next Steps
After a successful roadshow of the work with our Board, we progressed forward by scoping and defining this project into smaller, more managable chunks and then handed it off to an IC designer and PM to continue working through the problems.
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