WGAN-10 Takeaways for Real Estate Photographers from AWE USA 2024 and its Apple Vision Pro Workshop by We Get Around Network

Realtors can really blow up on their social media by using [RayBan Meta Sklyer or Wayfarer smart glasses] as an influencer tool. The image quality’s good. It’s HDR, it looks really good. And so I don’t think you would be wanting for more at this point. It’s not about creative control. It’s about quick and meaningful in the moment. This would appeal to a tech forward Realtor and I think it would really set them apart.

Emily Olman CEO & Chief Media Officer

Hopscotch Interactive

www.HopscotchInteractive.com

Emily Olman

CEO & Chief Media Officer

WGAN-TV - 10 Takeaways for Real Estate Photographers from AWE USA 2024 and its Vision Workshop | Guest: Hopscotch Interactive CEO and Chief Media Officer Emily Olman | Wednesday, 26 June 2024 | Episode: 220 | www.HopscotchInteractive.com

- What was way-cool at Augmented World Expo ?

- What’s the latest on Apple Vision Pro meets real estate photographers?

- Do you enjoy hearing what’s cool in spatial computing?

Stay tuned.

Hi all. I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WGANForum.com]. Today is Thursday, June 26th, 2024.

You’re watching WGAN-TV Live at 5: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today. We have an AWEsome show for you: 10 Takeaways for Real Estate Photographers from AWE USA 2024 and its Apple Vision Pro Workshop.

Our subject matter expert is Emily Olman, CEO and Chief Media Officer of Hopscotch Interactive. Emily, thanks for being back on the show.

- Thank you, Dan. It’s so nice to be here and I love being able to join you to talk about AWE, which is an amazing conference that has just celebrated its 15th year and we moved the show from Santa Clara, California, where it has been all the way down to Long Beach, so it was wonderful to be there. For those of you who don’t know me, I am the Chief Media Officer for Hopscotch Interactive, a real estate media consultancy and agency here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

And Dan, we’ve been chatting about all things real estate photography, Matterport, and spatial computing now for quite some time. So it’s just nice to be back on the show. Thank you.

- Yes, Emily, let’s not short shift you on your company, Hopscotch Interactive. Before we jump into AWE, tell us more about Hopscotch Interactive.

- All right, Dan. So I started this company in 2015, and I was so enamored with the Matterport Pro, the Pro1, the very first Matterport system, and I saw that it really was the beginning of this era of 3D virtual tours and reality capture.

And so I started doing virtual tours here in the Bay Area, and now we are in our ninth year. We work for luxury residential and commercial real estate clients; predominantly in the office market in San Francisco.

Realtors can really blow up on their social media by using [Ray-Ban Meta Sklyer or Wayfarer smart glasses] as an influencer tool. The image quality’s good. It’s HDR, it looks really good. And so I don’t think you would be wanting for more at this point. It’s not about creative control. It’s about quick and meaningful in the moment. This would appeal to a tech forward Realtor and I think it would really set them apart.

Emily Olman

CEO & Chief Media Officer Hopscotch Interactive www.HopscotchInteractive.com

Our big product that we are pushing in 2024 is more of an all encompassing commercial real estate marketing services offerings. So media services, drone, scanning, digital twin services, as well as marketing coordination, which is a big shift because we spent

a lot of time in the first few years really focused on the residential market, and we’re shifting now into more commercial real estate, which is great. I love it.

And I’m meeting a lot of wonderful people, and I’ve been running that agency now this whole time.

And the other thing that I do, in addition to running Hopscotch Interactive, which excels in architectural photography and virtual tours, is that I spend a lot of time on the cutting edge of media, specifically for real estate, trying to be that translator and evangelist for the early adoption of virtual and augmented reality as well as mixed reality.

And many call it the Metaverse still, but it’s also been called Spatial Computing now by Apple.

So I am a very good resource for people who want to learn more about it, and I’m really trying to push various industries into learning more and adopting the technology because there’s already so much available now that can help people in their daily work.

- AWEsome, AWE! And your website: www.HopscotchInteractive.com And just one last thing is, I noticed looking at your website, you’re doing a lot of speaking engagements. Can you talk about that?

- Yeah, Dan, thank you for bringing that up. So exactly. So, because I have, I’ve gotten so much knowledge over the years and also as sort of a creative evolution of what I’m doing.

I have been giving keynote talks in the form of speaking at the PMRE Conference -- Photography and Media for Real Estate -- and giving a keynote speech on the metaverse there.

I just spoke at the Urban Land Institute in Los Angeles, specifically on virtual reality for commercial real estate. And so I put a lot of effort into creating talks and sharing my knowledge with people.

I have a column with AR Insider. In fact, I just published a piece today about the Ray-Ban Meta Skylers, these smart glasses, which we can talk about in a little bit.

And so I publish pretty frequently on these topics and give talks and also on my YouTube Channel, and also with you, Dan, spend a lot of time trying to educate people about what is out there. It’s just one of my passions.

- I know we were going to talk about AWE and your takeaways, but you showed us your Ray-Ban Meta [Skyler] smart glasses. Let’s talk about that first.

- Okay. Yeah, absolutely. And for anybody who wants to another deep dive on this, I highly recommend going to AR Insider, [www.ARinsider.co] I just wrote, I don’t know how many words, but a pretty long takeaway about the Ray-Ban Metas and pretty much like saying that they stole the show for me at AWE.

So we’re talking about the Ray-Ban Metas, but we’re also talking about AWE because these glasses, Dan, were sort of the big one for me.

And these are Skyler. So the Wayfarer did come out last year in their version two, right? So in the Wayfarer glasses, sunglasses, smart glasses, by Ray-Ban and Meta, there had been another predecessor, a pair of smart glasses. That was the Ray-Ban Meta Stories, which came out in 2021.

Now we both know that 2021 wasn’t exactly the best time for influencers and people to be walking around and being very social with a pair of glasses that can be used for vlogging and social media posting. And also the glasses before didn’t have an AI assistant embedded in the operating system of the glasses.

- I’m confused. I thought the Wayfarer was the current version.

- Yeah, and Skyler just came out. So these ones are the Skyler, they’re sort of like, they’re more geared towards women and sort of fashioned after 1960s sort of jet set lifestyle, PanAm design.

- Emily, someone’s just tuning in. They’re just looking at sunglasses. What’s special about them?

- What’s special about them? Okay, so I’ll tell you a few things that are special about them. So what I’m going to do is, just to give you an idea, I’ll turn them on, right? So I’m going to turn them on right here.

There’s a little switch where we turn the glasses on. What’s special about them, first of all for me, is that they’re the first device that has really been designed for women, or for most likely for women or females to be wearing.

And so you power up the device here on, and then once you do that, you actually are able to toggle that to your phone. And I hear a chime as I put them on spatial audio. There’s two speakers here and here, and I have an AI Assistant. I also have the

ability to take a photo. So I’ll take a photo of you. There we go. And you could see that. Did you see the indicator light?

- Yes, it lit up. So I knew that you were taking my picture.

- Awesome. Now the other thing is that, Dan, guess where I’m hearing you now?

- You’re hearing me through your Ray-Bans Meta Skyler.

- I’m hearing you through my Ray-Bans. Exactly. And so what’s cool about these is that, for example, when I first got them, I was walking through the airport and I was going to my gate. I was listening to Spotify, because these can play Spotify, they can play your music, they can play your podcasts.

And nobody really knew that I was listening to my music. I basically had my own soundtrack and it just sort of gave me just like earbuds would, or headphones. It gave me a little bit of a veil from the crowd, a sonic veil as I was walking through the airport.

Now, what I loved about that was that it also didn’t sort of take me out of any major announcements. Like my ears are still open. I can still hear if there’s an announcement from the loudspeakers. And so this is the first device:

A) that I feel like is really designed for women and with women in mind. It just came out in May, and it’s only $299.

So these sunglasses are $299. I wear sunglasses all the time. As you could tell, when I started a call with you, I had just come in from outside and I wear my sunglasses up like this all the time.

- So Emily, pause there for a moment, because what’s happened now that you’ve turned them on, the sound has changed. So let’s turn them off for the moment. And I think that will release the sound from your phone.

- Yeah, no problem.

- Perfect, but let’s stay back on the glasses. Because it is, do you hear, can you talk to [Meta AI]?

- Yes, you can talk to me, I don’t think it’s ChatGPT, I think it’s Meta AI Assistant.

- Oh, excuse me. That’s right. Totally two different companies. Yeah. So let’s see, Meta/Facebook would be different from Microsoft. So yet another AI solution. How good is it?

- Exactly. So what’s cool about it is I can also live stream to Instagram. I can also post these images and I can AI caption the images straight to Instagram and Facebook.

I can use the AI Assistant to, for example, tell me what I’m looking at and describe what I’m seeing.

Emily Olman CEO & Chief Media Officer Hopscotch

Interactive www.HopscotchInteractive.com

So reading a menu in German or reading a menu in Italian and translating that back to me in English. So we had just been chatting about how I didn’t know that ChatGPT could read, and these glasses actually are analyzing the photos and able to tell me exactly what I’m seeing.

- Excuse me, when you’re looking at that menu, do you need to snap a picture for it to analyze the picture, or does it actually see what you’re seeing in real time?

- No, it takes a picture and then it gives me a description of the photo, or it tells me it takes a picture of what the text is, and then it analyzes it, and then it reads it back to me.

And then what’s cool about it then, Dan, is that instead of just reading it back to me and then being sort of lost in the conversation, it ends up in the Meta View app as a stored photo with the text description of what was either translated or seen. So it’s really like a superpower for you. And the glasses, they do a lot. I’m actually just really impressed with them and how lightweight they are and how approachable they are as an augmented reality device.

And I would call them augmented reality, even though there’s no projection because they have spatial audio, they have augmented sound, there is an AI assistant, and it’s like, it’s the superpower. You are really giving yourself an augmentation of your ability to read a scene or to interact with the world around you.

- And can it give you walking directions?

- I haven’t tried that yet, but that’s not a bad idea. I don’t know why not. I mean, I feel like if you put the map into, if you pull up maps in an app on your phone, there’s no reason it wouldn’t tell you where to go because you’re just using it almost in the same way as you would headphones or earbuds. But yeah, it’s pretty cool.

- Okay. Well we promised our audience: Top 10 Takeaways from AWE USA 2024.

That was just last week, June 18th, 19th, 20th, 2024, Long Beach, CA as you mentioned, I could imagine that you brought your Ray-Ban Meta Skyler smart glasses with you. Tell me about that.

- Yeah, so my idea was to see if I could keep the cell phone in my pocket and just use the glasses. I didn’t have an assistant videographer with me. I usually come with an assistant and due to the location, I didn’t have an assistant lined up.

And so I just wanted to see if I could go as lightweight as possible on my content creation and see if going to the show with something like Smart Glasses that could record video and take pictures would really be like a way for me to publish content faster, kind of limit the length of the video that I was shooting, and then maybe make it smaller, more snackable content.

And then I would also be able to understand a little bit more about the photography and the composition, because as you can imagine, the neck, the head, we can look quickly when we hear something and we can be easily distracted.

And so if you’re recording and you don’t have one, you’re not a gimbal. Like I said in my article, humans make for bad steady cams, we just aren’t good steady cams.

And so I was really learning a lot about composition and thinking about the end user while I was doing this.

So, but for me, I felt like I didn’t come away with a dozen folders full of video content and hours of footage, but I also didn’t come away with all that extra work. I kind of was able to just get a few really key points from the things that I saw, and for me that it actually felt very, very efficient.

So I liked it. I thought it was a good addition to my tools and I didn’t really take my phone out all that much. I wasn’t on camera as much, but I didn’t take my phone out as much. So that was actually a big relief.

- So for our audience of real estate photographers that do 3D/360 photography, did you have any takeaways of how a photographer might use this in their everyday workflow?

- Ah, that’s a very good question. I think that a real estate photographer could probably, if they’re working with a real estate photographer on their social media, I think that they could recommend that their clients get these and that their clients are posting more frequently as they go to things like open houses, as they go to things like broker tours and that as they’re interacting with their community.

And that if you are working at an agency like Hopscotch and you have access to their social media, then you would be able to kind of curate posts and help them with their social media. So many Realtors complain about having a pretty lame social media game.

And I think that this puts them in an influencer world and in an influencer position very quickly by using the smart glasses.

- So the photographer’s making a recommendation, the photographer as a thought leader is helping inspire their clients to be thought leaders. And hopefully that leads to more and bigger premium listings for the agent.

Hopefully that then translates for more shoots for the photographer and maybe additional work as in the case of Hopscotch Interactive, helping clients with a broad spectrum of media, including social media.

- Well, I think so, and I think that real estate photographers, there’s real estate photographers and then there’s real estate photographers.

There are people that are hired guns that go out and capture the media, they deliver to larger organizations and they are not necessarily as individual contributors or they’re working more as an individual contributor than they are an agency or as a partner to their clients.

And I think that this is a way to deepen the relationship by making recommendations to your clients about how they can do more and not have to change their behavior.

I think one of the things that many people have worried about when they’ve entered social media is also they are worried they don’t look good on camera and they might actually be awkward.

And I think if you put them in the glasses and you’ve got ... you don’t need to have an overlay, you don’t need to have virtual

staging, you don’t need to have augmented reality. I think just having the Realtor’s thoughts as you tour through a property and as you are thinking about a property, I feel like Realtors can really blow up on their social media by using these, like I said, as an influencer tool.

- Could a photographer do it as well?

- Yeah, I mean, there’s no reason why not, like if I’m at a shoot and I have these glasses on and I want to do it behind the scenes, I literally just behind the scenes ... I take the shot. I’m not fumbling for my camera. I think these are three megapixel or maybe it’s up to 12 megapixel images on the camera and you can’t control the focal length, but there’s a lot of AI baked into this.

And so the image quality’s good. It’s HDR, it looks really good. And so I don’t think you would be wanting for more at this point. It’s not about creative control. It’s about quick and meaningful in the moment.

- Could you post to the We Get Around Network Forum, perhaps a video, maybe one from your YouTube Channel? Hopscotch Interactive and maybe a photo or two to share with us on that?

- Yeah, I would be happy to. And like I said, it’s pretty early days, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Meta Ray-Ban or the Ray-Ban Meta Skyler, specifically the Skyler, because they could be worn by women real estate agents more comfortably than maybe a broader Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer which is a wider frame. You can get them in different sizes, but I just think that this would appeal to a tech forward Realtor and I think it would really set them apart.

- Before we move on from this topic, do they come in prescription lenses?

- Yes. So exactly.

- And do they come in clear lenses?

- Yes.

- I could get totally clear lenses: no prescription lenses.

- You could get a clear/no prescription, Dan, you can also get transitions. So you could have them be transition lenses. This is the Skyler, it’s called Chalky Gray, and then with a cinnamon pink tinted lens. But that’s what it comes with.

They’ve just announced, I think they had a black, and then now they have a blue and a brown in this particular collection. And then in the Wayfarer, they have a blue, a sky blue color, really beautiful colors.

And other YouTubers have said that the thing they wish they didn’t have was transitions because in the car maybe they’re not used to them or they want to vlog indoors and then they’re wearing glasses that are too dark. And I have to say, I’m very happy with these.

Emily Olman CEO & Chief Media Officer Hopscotch Interactive

www.HopscotchInteractive.com

- Did anyone at AWE notice that you were wearing these AWEsome glasses?

- Yes, they did. In fact, one of my friends Dave had Wayfarers on, and so I took a picture of Dave with these and he took a picture of me with his.

And so we have two photos taken at the same time from people wearing the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. I felt like an early adopter. But, I feel like again, you don’t change your behavior very much.

They’re very approachable, they’re very affordable. They are a great way to step up how people are already using things like social media and Facebook.

And from a storytelling perspective, I think they have, they have a lot going for them. The only thing that would perhaps not be so great, and it would be disappointing to people is that you’re not currently allowed to develop third party apps for the headset or for the device.

So as far as smart glasses go, it’s going to still be pretty limited to what you have access to on your phone and like Spotify and some of the other apps are really, really working perfectly with it: like Instagram, Facebook, and Spotify.

I think there’s one other I can’t remember right now, but my podcast worked just fine. And again, I’m pairing this with the iPhone.

It’s an iPhone 15 Pro Max, so it’s a good phone. But you compare them with, I think, any iPhone.

- Okay. Two geeky people looking at each other through these glasses. I think that’s a natural segue to AWE. Actually, for someone who’s just never heard of AWE, tell us about the AWE: Augmented World Expo.

- Okay, Dan.

- What is this event even before you tell us the highlights of the event?

- Yeah, well thank you for the segue. Augmented World Expo is a place for industry professionals in virtual, augmented, extended reality to meet and to learn. And the event has been going on since, this is the 15th year.

So it’s been going on since gosh, long before I started attending. But this was my ninth AWE in the US and actually my 12th AWE overall, because I have also attended the event. It is an international event and they have Augmented World Expo Asia, they also have Augmented World Expo Europe, AWE Europe.

- So AWE Asia 2024 is August 27th to the 28th, 2024 in Singapore, AWE Europe 2024, October 29 through the 30th, 2024 in Vienna. So how many, how many super-geeky people come out to see the latest AR, VR, XR, MR, metaverse, spatial data?

- Yeah, so there were several thousand people at the show and so I’m not sure of the total attendees. I would probably put it at around 6,000 to 7,000. It’s over three days.

So it was three days, which in this year we also had something very special that I’ll talk about in a second, which is we had the Apple Vision Pro Vision Workshop, which was on, I would call it day zero because it was the day prior to the opening of the conference.

And that was a pretty special event. And so that was an all day event dedicated just to sharing with the community about Apple Vision Pro.

- Let’s start there. Let’s actually start with day zero, Apple Vision Pro, which is actually kind of interesting to have you talk about it because literally back today is Wednesday, June 26th, 2024.

On June 26th, 2023, you and Paolo Tosolini were on WGAN-TV talking about the potential for the Apple Vision Pro meets real estate photographers. So we’re now fast forward a year, any takeaways from that workshop? The Apple Vision Pro Workshop specifically as it relates to real estate photographers?

- It doesn’t really. Real estate photography didn’t come up at all. And I just want to also say, just quickly a couple of things about AWE before we jump into this. So AWE also has a very big event called the Augies.

So there are also awards for everything from content creation to the best enterprise solution. And so they gave 20 awards this year, plus they inducted, I want to say a hundred people into the XR Hall of Fame.

So it was everybody in this industry, including people like Tom Furness, who was one of the first augmented reality researchers that was putting augmented reality in airplanes for the US Air Force back in the 70s.

So really legends in our field, and we really stand on the shoulders of giants when we are there. And it’s actually, it’s an amazing community. So Apple Vision Pro, of course, was absent at the show last year because they had not yet announced the Vision Pro.

That came, I believe, on June 5th, 2023 it was announced. And then we were able to chat about it pretty quickly after that. You, me, and Paolo talking about what we thought Apple Vision Pro might mean for our industry.

Now the Vision Workshop was run, well it was, it was sort of, I would say like, a condensed version of a three day hackathon/ workshop that is run professionally by my friends Dom and Raven.

And they ran the very first iOS iPhone developer workshop back in the day. I want to say this was 2014? I don’t remember the date.

- Let’s bring you back. All our audience cares about is how is this going to affect me doing real estate photography or shooting Matterport or Matterport and spatial data or can I use my Apple Vision Pro related to this to content that I create with Matterport? Can it be viewable in Apple Vision Pro?

All those kinds of things. Let’s try and stay focused on use cases for real estate photographers, in general. 3D/360 content creators in particular. Was there anything at the Apple Vision Pro Workshop that kind of stuck out and you went, “oh yeah, I see how that’s going to affect our real estate space?”

- So I would say that I did not see anything that I think was very specific to real estate photography.

There of course can be indie developers that are developing for Apple Vision Pro, but as you know Dan, the initial sort of push into the Apple Vision Pro, there are about 2,000 apps that are available on it, but Apple is not; this is one of the big issues is that Apple has this operating system called the visionOS.

That’s what they launched for development for the Apple Vision Pro. They now announced visionOS 2, the second version of this software, which was introduced and is really focused towards the enterprise.

And that happened about a week before the show. And what we learned was that only for enterprise developers within their organization, meaning not just out in the world like cameras like this, would anyone be able to develop an app yet that uses the cameras, the external facing cameras.

So as Paolo and I had sort of surmised what it could look like a year ago, we were thinking, do you turn your head and use it as a scanning device? Would you be able to use it in any kind of reality capture sense?

And I would say that right now the answer is no. Because unless you are at a large corporation that has A) a big enough dev team and that they are accepted into the enterprise development program with Apple, you’re not going to be seeing those kinds of utilitarian apps coming out of the Apple Vision Pro anytime soon.

- Yeah, you brought one of these.

- You can take video and you can take spatial video and photos and you can make your own content. But again, as I explained before for real estate photography this is, your body is not a great steadicam and so that content is questionable as to whether or not it really is going to be something useful as a tour.

I have heard of some companies experimenting with it, I’ve seen some footage and I have not been impressed because they have not solved for the awkwardness of somebody walking around wearing an Apple Vision Pro capturing video.

And that’s really, that’s it. The one thing I do think, Dan, and maybe this is interesting for people down the road, is that the visionOS 2 software does enable the scanning of QR codes and spatial QR codes, meaning it understands the location of objects and of where things are and then it can track those objects.

But again, I think we’re getting into something that is sort of beyond the scope of most real estate photography and gets into more manufacturing and other other use cases.

- Okay, so let me ask one question, one observation then we’ll move forward for day one of AWE. In Apple Vision Pro, you bought one, Paolo bought one, can you look at a Matterport tour within an Apple Vision Pro?

Emily Olman CEO & Chief Media Officer Hopscotch Interactive www.HopscotchInteractive.com

- Yes, you can. But it’s a web experience. So I went into, for example, anybody who is a Matterport photographer should know that through what we call WebXR.

So remember there are apps and then there’s WebXR which is us being able to reach or to be able to view and manipulate and have 3D objects accessible to us on the web.

For many years, for a few years now Matterport spaces have been Spatial XR enabled through the embed code, right?

So if you look at embed codes, you’ll see it’s enabled for spatial viewing. Now what’s cool about that is if you use the most recent code and you put that on any website that if someone is viewing that space on a Quest, right, like on a Meta Quest 2 or a Meta Quest device, then it will recognize it and you will be able to load the experience.

Right now on the Apple Vision Pro, you cannot load that experience with Matterport other than in a web browser.

Now it’s cool because you’re still viewing it immersed and you can dial out reality, but it’s not a better experience in the Vision Pro as opposed to a more immersive experience like being in a Meta Quest at this time. Matterport may in the future do that or CoStar, future owner of Matterport may put resources behind it, but I don’t know yet Dan.

- Okay, so it’s an immersive experience, but it’s not the promise of a spatial data 3D model that feels like you’re walking through the space?

- No, you can have that experience very easily on a Meta Quest, but right now it does not function--

- Not Apple Vision Pro.

- Does not function on the Apple Vision Pro. Matterport does not have an app on the Vision Pro and their spatial tracking does not launch the models on an Apple Vision Pro. The exception to that is if you take your ... there’s always an exception. If you take your 3D model or if you take for example a drone map.

Say you have a drone map that you have converted into one of the standard file formats like USDZ or GLTF, then those files easily through Sketchfab or through even Keynote on the Vision Pro can be viewed in 3D and it’s very, very cool.

And then you are seeing and playing with that Matterport model in 3D right in front of you. But it’s the 3D model, it’s not the tour.

So I just want to be very clear about what you’re able to experience, and again, the hackers, like Paolo, and his [Tosolini Productions] team I’m sure are coming up with very cool experiences, and it is possible to develop, but it’s not like it’s not an app.

- Let me make one observation, get your reaction, then we’ll move on to day one.

So at the moment, Apple Vision Pro, let’s see: there’s photos, video, aerial, drone, floor plans, virtual staging. Apple Vision Pro is its own medium into itself and it just may be another tool or how video gets recorded, let’s say on an iPhone 15 Pro Max that is an immersive experience within Apple Vision Pro.

Totally separate from Matterport or 3D or 360. It may be just another way for a high-end property to enable people to experience a space that either doesn’t exist yet or exist, but you can’t go see it right now because the model’s built out, but it’s still on a construction site and you can’t walk on site. Fair enough to say today for a real estate photographer trying to understand the impact, Apple Vision Pro is a standalone medium of itself.

- Yeah, it’s a touchpoint. I don’t want to say that it’s a medium. I think it’s no different than in the way that the internet, you can connect to your internet through your phone, through your watch, through your computer, through many different devices.

They have different features and I think that the Apple Vision Pro as a touch point to digital media enables you to see content in the highest fidelity right now.

Because it’s like having an IMAX on your face. It’s like you can see high fidelity content and you’re able to use your hands and gestures and use it with gaze tracking.

It’s a different interface. It’s a different touch point. But I wouldn’t say that it is for our content. It will enable very cool things in the future, but we haven’t seen those come to market yet.

- Excuse me, at the very beginning of the show, you talked about Hopscotch Interactive, doing high-end luxury residential and commercial real estate. Do you see Apple Vision Pro being a high-end solution for any of Hopscotch Interactive projects?

- Yeah, I think that we’re working on that. I think Dan, my team is reviewing ways to develop on Apple Vision Pro.

And I think that you have to sort of look at the different paths for development, whether you do something on the web, whether you build an app for iOS or visionOS and the Apple ecosystem, or if you build something maybe in Unity that can be used for both, right?

So I think we are evaluating what the most interesting use cases are for us. I’ll give you an example of where I think it has gone wrong so far and then maybe you can give me your thoughts on that.

But Zillow made a lot of headlines when it was announced that they had an app on the Apple Vision Pro. And so being an Apple Vision Pro owner, I got one at launch, I pre-ordered and I got one at launch. I wanted to try the Zillow app.

I was very excited to try the Zillow app. And the Zillow app has a very interesting design because it’s basically, it’s not very curated. I got pretty motion sick in the app almost right away because there’s inconsistency in the way that people use Zillow 360 photography. Some people are doing it with their phones,

- Emily, are you talking about Zillow 3D Home?

- Zillow 3D Home Tours. Yeah. And so through ShowingTime+, for example, which is their platform for trying to expand the use of the Zillow 3D Home Tours and do higher end media right now, I believe show home some, a few homes that are on the ShowingTime+ platform have been selected to be put into the Zillow Vision Pro app.

Now those are, it’s unclear how they were selected and chosen. I don’t think that they were quality checked in the headset when they were chosen because the image quality, what you can tell right away is that in the Vision Pro.

- Emily, let’s do this because it’s not something that’s going to help a real estate photographer today. Let’s move into AWE day one, day two, day three. Tell us about what was AWEsome.

- Well, what to me was awesome was ... It was awesome to me, and again, this is not necessarily just for real estate photographers, but for day one, my job on day one, day zero was Apple Vision Workshop. And that was very, very exciting to hear great case studies.

That will all be recorded. Everybody should check out AWE XR on YouTube so that they can see all of the recordings and they can watch any of those--

- www.AWEXR.com is the website.

- @AWEXR on YouTube and I think it’s, yeah, www.AWEXR.com on the website as well. [www.AWEXR.com]

But yeah, all the sessions are recorded and actually it goes back several years, but all the sessions are recorded so you can actually watch these different sessions yourselves. But on day one, my job was to lead a group, a focus group for real estate and AEC.

And so I was walking around the show floor and I had selected about five or six companies that I wanted to go see and to show to the group that had joined me on that tour. So that was really exciting because I was with a few different people, somebody who works in commercial real estate branding, somebody who runs like 40 properties in the Los Angeles area, a big multifamily developer.

And we were looking at all the different technologies and how they could be used. And so one of the first places that I wanted to take them was to the treatise team to show them that, for example, some of the features that were being shown at AWE might not be the ones that like your audience at the We Get Around Network has tried yet.

But every single Matterport scan could be used on the Treedis platform to create, for example, like a virtual or wayfinding, path finding augmentations, augmented reality on mobile AR, so on your phone and using the Treedis platform.

But I do believe you have to have a business plan or higher. And so it’s a little bit more expensive and a bigger investment, but you can do really cool, cool things already with Matterport. And Matterport was there, but I didn’t see anyone from Matterport when I was actually at the booth.

Emily Olman CEO & Chief Media Officer Hopscotch

Interactive www.HopscotchInteractive.com

But couple of the guys from Treedis were there showing how they had scanned the show floor with their phones and I believe they scanned it with their phones, not the Matterport Pro3 Camera, but they had already augmented and added augmentations and way findings that you could find your way to other booths on the show floor. So they were showing how practical it was.

- Cool, www.Treedis.com what else did you see?

- So I felt, again, for me, the storytelling was very important. So I love wayfinding, I love augmentations and spaces and so I also took them to a company called Zaubar, [about.zaubar.com]

They’re a German company and I can [WGAN.info/AWEtour], Dan, of the little tour book that I put together for people.

- Yeah, we’ll put that in the We Get Around Network Forum. [www.WGANForum.com] That would be awesome.

- Yeah, I’ll put the link in there for you so you can share it with everybody so they can see the companies that I highlighted on my tour and Zaubar was one of them.

And the reason I wanted to bring them to Zaubar was Zaubar means magic in German, right, Zaubar or to sort of, I guess to create a feeling of magic for people and they are doing ... using location based augmented reality and putting different points of interest and augmentations along an outdoor gallery or in a museum, they’re able to add storytelling elements and virtual reality and augmented reality in a very lightweight and easy to access way for anybody who has a space that they want to tell a story about. So they use it in museums.

They use it in outdoor galleries. They use it in parks. They use it in manufacturing facilities. So Zaubar is one where they’d like to come to the US, they’d like to have more opportunities here in the US. And so I think that you’ll be seeing more use cases for that in the future.

- Okay. Website: about.zaubar.com about.zabar.com

- Yes.

- Sure it’s not a delicatessen in New York City: Zabar’s :)

- No, the Zabar’s, that’s, yeah, no, it’s not a place to get chocolate babka. :) It’s a place to get cyberpunk art. Let’s see generative AI pictures of yourself and to place them into the real world as an augmentation.

- Awesome. What else did you see on your curated tour in the real estate space?

- So I checked in with my friends at GeoPogo and GeoPogo, do you know the GeoPogo guys, Dan?

- No.

- So GeoPogo is really interesting. They were founded by an architect. They’re local. We actually ... When I had another company, we did an accelerator together and GeoPogo started as what was basically, a visualization platform for you to be able to create and build and easily visualize things like adding an ADU to your backyard by using their web-based tools. And now they have really evolved into, they still have the platform, but they also have GeoPogo Cities.

So for example, if you as a real estate media specialist are working with developers and the unbuilt environment, they’ve mapped I think 26 cities and they have made it so that you can bring in your building, you can do directional lighting, time of day, shadows, rotation, highly detailed visualization and sort of decision making software for developers and also presentation software. So that is very cool.

- ADU, Accessory Dwelling Unit. So if you live in Manhattan and you’re wondering what that is, if you wanted to put a little Mother-in-Law house on your existing property, that would be called an ADU.

- That’s right. And in California now, and I believe in some other states, they’ve really lifted the restrictions on being able to build or add an ADU up to 1,000 square feet. In California you can build one up to 1,000 square feet on your property because we have such a housing shortage and a housing crisis. So it’s very advantageous for people to be able to understand, can I fit this on my property?

- And that’s where GeoPogo comes in. Www.GeoPogo.com Another site or two that you saw at AWE that you were excited about?

- Well, I think that I am pretty excited about it, so this is the Apple Vision Pro and I’ll just pull this out for you guys and I’ll illustrate a couple of the things that are interesting to me about it. So obviously I have this is, I’m actually like these, I don’t know if you know the story, Dan, but I had black eyes when I first got the Apple Vision Pro from its weight.

And so the guys at [www.AnnaPro.com), which they made this heads drop, this is something that I have been now telling everyone to get because it has really saved the pressure on my face. And I love the Apple Vision Pro.

It’s an amazing device, but there is another device that is coming out. It is in addition to wearable glasses. So something in between these two devices, right? It’s by a company called XREAL. And the [www.XREAL.com] takes almost this same amount of, well I wouldn’t say the same, but it is sort of like a lighter weight version of the Apple Vision Pro.

And they have a new device that is connected, it’s tethered like this, this is tethered to the battery, it’s also tethered to, and so the XREAL + Beam Pro and the Beam Pro comes out [July 2024] and I got to get hands-on with the Beam Pro and I haven’t done my article on it yet.

I haven’t done my article on it yet, Dan. But for the price, the ability to have a very close to the Apple Vision Pro experience with a spatial video. This is not it, this is the Apple Vision Pro battery, but we can probably share a link to it.

- I’m feverishly here, so I’m not, I’m not hearing the correct name of it ‘cause I ended up on the wrong website. [www.xreal.com/ beampro]

- Yeah, the company is [www.xreal.com]

- Ah, ah, okay, and that’s their product. Okay, so the [www.xreal.com] And so we should look [www.xreal.com/beampro] for the Beam Pro coming [July 2024].

- Yeah, look at, look at the Beam Pro. So the Beam Pro, it does it’s a little bit of a tongue twister, but that device is basically like

your iPhone or your phone and it does have two cameras, two lenses. So you can take spatial video with it, you can wear the mixed reality glasses, you can dim, so you have dimming, you have a spatial menu like you have on the Vision Pro.

You can watch video content, you can shoot video content and I thought it was very easy to use and the price point is significantly lower.

I don’t know the exact sale price [$199]. I know that they are not shipping yet, but they will be shipping soon. But it should be many orders of magnitude less expensive than the Vision Pro.

And keep in mind that XREAL has already sold 400,000 of the [www.xreal.com/air2ultra] AR glasses. and mostly gamers and others like early adopters.

So there’s already a built-in market for that at a really lower price point with some pretty exciting hardware. And so I think that is another device that people should definitely check out.

- Cool. Anything else you were particularly interested in before we said bye, anything else that you were particularly excited about?

- I would say that, let’s see something else? I didn’t see a lot of reality capture there and I wish that I had seen a little bit more on the reality capture side of things.

The things that I was mostly looking for though, I would say were maybe things that, for regular real estate photographers might not be necessarily so exciting. But for me they’re very exciting and the things that I’m excited about, for example, are more like, I’m excited about Microsoft Mesh, in fact, so I don’t know if you know what [WGAN.info/MicrosoftMesh] is, but Microsoft of course is the largest provider corporate software in America.

And so they are basically integrating a virtual, like virtual Zoom if you will. Much like Meta, let’s see, Meta Horizons [WGAN.info/ MetaHorizons]

And so it’s called [WGAN.info/MicrosoftMesh] and they’re just going to continue to be rolling out and improving that product, which means that the more that people in the workforce are getting used to going into spaces as an avatar, if it’s web-based or if it’s in headset, I do think that this is going to be sort of like the standard way to go immersive with somebody and to be immersive with somebody.

And once it’s integrated into things like Microsoft Teams where you just press let’s go into VR and let’s meet in VR, I think that that is where you’re going to really see the tipping point for people.

Emily Olman CEO & Chief Media Officer Hopscotch

Interactive www.HopscotchInteractive.com

And again, that’s like with this, I’m connected to live streaming on Instagram and I hit connect with the glasses, and suddenly I’m live streaming with the glasses, I’m having an augmented experience.

And I think that it just becomes part of your everyday work. I think the more that we try to make it something that you think is just exciting because it’s new tech, I think that that doesn’t excite me as much as when I see that people are able to use these tools to have superpowers in their everyday work.

- Emily, thanks for being on the show today.

- Thanks Dan, it was great. Thanks for listening to everybody and please reach out if you have questions. I would be so happy to chat with you.

- You can reach Emily at www.HopscotchInteractive.com in the We Get Around network Forum: @Hopscotch You do have an awesome YouTube channel, @HopscotchInteractive For Emily in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum, and you’ve been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.