Eight questions to ask before your first 3D scan.

A referred client recently asked a good question: with several ways to get a space scanned in India, how do you actually compare providers? It deserves a better answer than a features list, because most of what makes a 3D tour succeed is decided before the camera arrives — in the questions asked at the quoting stage.

So here's a buyer's guide. Two ground rules, since it's written by a vendor: everything in it is something you can check for yourself before signing anything, and there's a section near the end on when a different kind of provider will serve you better than this one. Eight questions, none of which require understanding cameras.

1. Who operates the camera on your job?

Some firms sell the scan and subcontract the capture; others shoot everything in-house. Both models can work — the useful thing is simply to know which one you're buying, because the portfolio you were shown may or may not have been shot by the person walking into your property. Worth asking: who will be on site, and did they shoot the work in your portfolio? (Here, the answer is one sentence: I do, and I did, every project since 2017.)

2. How far apart will the scan points be?

This is the most useful technical question a buyer can ask, and the least asked. A 3D tour is assembled from individual scan positions, and the spacing between them decides how the finished tour feels: closer points mean smoother navigation and more dependable measurements. Different cameras encourage different spacing — some capture positions a couple of metres apart, while newer lidar units can span far larger gaps in open areas, a real strength outdoors and across big sites.

So rather than comparing coverage totals, ask something concrete: how far apart will the scan points be in my space, and roughly how many positions do you expect for my floor area? A provider who has thought about your project will have an answer. For a sense of scale, a five-star property we documented in Dubai took 575 scan positions — that density is what lets a facilities team measure a corridor from the tour and act on the number.

3. Ask to see work shot in conditions like yours

Every space throws something at a camera: dust, low light, glass, cold, crowds, machinery in motion. The best predictor of how your scan will turn out is a finished tour from a comparable environment, so ask for one — a plant if you run a plant, a hotel in operation if you run a hotel. From this side of the tripod, that field record is the credential I'd point to: live manufacturing floors in Gwalior and Chennai across roughly ten lakh square feet, a hotel documentation project through a Srinagar winter, operating hospitals scanned around patient hours.

There's also a layer of experience that predates the current market. In the years working assignments for Matterport's own capture programs, projects came with property-type-specific capture standards and delivery audits — how to handle mirrors and glass in retail, patient privacy in a hospital, alignment discipline through warehouse racking. Those playbooks were never published anywhere; they live in the people who worked to them, and they show up in the finished tours. It's the difference between owning a camera and having been audited on how you use one.

4. Open a sample tour on your phone, on mobile data

Not on office Wi-Fi — on the connection your customers will actually have. However good a tour is, it only works if it loads, and connectivity in India is uneven no matter what device someone carries. Matterport's native player streams progressively and degrades gracefully on weak connections; richer overlay experiences — avatars, voiceovers, custom players — add capability and also add weight, and that trade-off is worth testing rather than assuming. It costs thirty seconds: ask any provider for a sample link and open it on 4G.

If a narrated, guided experience matters for your marketing, there's a light-footprint way to get it: highlight reels and tags inside the native tour, plus a produced voiceover walkthrough for YouTube and Instagram — the places where guided video actually gets watched.

5. Who owns the model, and where will it live?

A finished tour lives on a hosting subscription that renews, and if the subscription lapses, the tour goes offline. None of this is a problem when it's understood upfront — so get three things in writing: who owns the model, which subscription plan it lives on, and who is responsible for the renewal. It's also worth asking whether the provider's hardware or workflow ties the tour to a particular plan tier, since that's better discovered before capture day than after.

Some providers host tours inside their own platform, which suits businesses that want a fully managed channel; others deliver a portable asset you can embed anywhere and take with you. My own arrangement is published on the service page: the scan fee and hosting are separate, and you choose — annual hosting managed here (one renewal a year), monthly, or your own Matterport account where you hold the subscription directly.

6. What will edits cost in year two?

Tours keep working long after delivery — a still extract for a campaign, a highlight reel for a launch, a tag update when a menu changes, a merge after a renovation. Providers handle this differently, and both common models are legitimate: some bill ongoing work hourly, some fold it into hosting. The only mistake is not asking. Get the edit policy in writing before you sign.

Mine, for the record: edits are included for the life of the tour while it's hosted here — extracts, touch-ups, reels, merges — because the ongoing work is where a tour keeps earning for its owner, and I'd rather that not run on a meter.

7. Understanding Matterport's partner programs

Buyers often ask about "official" or "certified" status, so here's the program history, plainly. Matterport once ran a Service Partner program with a provider badge; the badge was discontinued, and the program evolved into Matterport Capture Services, where the people doing the work are titled capture technicians — the title used on this site, because it's the current, accurate one. Matterport doesn't publish a public directory of approved providers in India today.

The practical guidance is simple and applies to every provider, including this one: treat affiliation wording as something to verify, and ask where it can be checked. Matterport's own brand guidelines are also the reference point for how its trademark may be used, including in company and domain names. A provider's answer to "where can I verify that?" tells you most of what you need to know, and a good provider will welcome the question.

8. Read the reviews that have names attached

Review counts are a blunt signal; reviews from named people at named organizations are a sharp one, because you can check them. Read a provider's Google profile and weigh the reviews that name a company, a role, a project — and read the provider's replies, which show you how they'll communicate in month eight of a working relationship. Mine are public and I'd encourage exactly this reading of them: a hotel group writing under its own name, an architect, a facilities head, a camera maker's own team.

When a different provider is the right call

Keeping the second ground rule: three cases where you should choose differently. If what you need is an event-design platform — seating mockups, venue marketplace leads, banquet-sales tooling — that's software, and a capture specialist isn't a substitute for it; some venues genuinely benefit from both. If you need survey-grade point clouds for engineering tolerances, that's terrestrial laser scanning, a different discipline with different instruments. And if your project is dominated by outdoor acreage, lidar-first or drone capture will serve the grounds better than my current kit — I'll say so in the quote, and can still document the interiors alongside.

The thirty-second checklist

• Who operates the camera on my job, and did they shoot your portfolio?
• How far apart will the scan points be, and roughly how many for my space?
• Show me a finished tour from conditions like mine.
• Send me a sample link — I'll open it on mobile data.
• Who owns the model, which plan does it live on, and who pays the renewal?
• What do edits and extracts cost in year two? In writing.
• Where can I verify any partnership or certification wording?
• Which reviews have names and organizations I can check?

None of these depend on taking anyone's word for anything — which is the point.

One closing example of what checkable looks like. The two photographs illustrating the camera section of Matterport's Wikipedia article — a Pro2 by a resort pool in Phu Quoc, and one on a shikara at Dal Lake, Srinagar — were shot on my projects and contributed under a free licence; independent editors chose them to illustrate the hardware in the field. Click either image and check the uploader. Every provider worth hiring has their own version of that — something you can confirm without asking them. Find it, and the choice usually makes itself.