Raw material to green tyre, in 3D.

JK Tyre commissioned digital twins of two of their plants: Gwalior and Chennai, just over ten lakh sq ft between them, covering both Passenger Car Radial and Truck and Bus Radial production. This is what that actually involved, on the floor and afterward.

How a spatial camera actually "sees"

The Pro2 works something like echolocation. A microbat's ultrasonic squeak, timed on its way back, builds a mental map of a cave; the camera does the same thing with structured infrared light instead of sound, timing how long it takes to bounce back to calculate real geometry. The catch: it assumes the room stays still. If a forklift drives through mid-rotation, the software doesn't see "a moving vehicle." It sees a wall that impossibly jumped three feet forward, and the alignment breaks.

Raw material to green tyre

It starts in the Raw Material Section, at the Banbury mixer, a multi-storey machine that compresses and folds compound under real force. Capturing it means hauling a tripod up steel stairs that hum with vibration from the machinery below, timing every exposure around it. From there the compound moves through extruders and into the Tyre Building Machine zone, where operators hand-assemble the green tyre across three continuous 8-hour shifts plus a general shift.

That floor has real humanity to it. On one of the older TBM lines, two operators kept trading glances mid-shift; one had spent the last hour putting on a genuine performance for the rotating lens. When his shift-mate asked if he'd made the final cut, breaking the news that faces get blurred automatically got the whole line laughing. During peak summer heat, a cart handing out free spiced buttermilk paused the floor for a few minutes, managers, operators, and the capture team standing together drinking it before the line started again.

Then the heat

Vulcanization, curing the green tyre under extreme heat and pressure, is the hardest zone to capture: narrow trenches, intense thermal output, and hardware that needs to be manually cooled and cycled periodically so it doesn't fail from the ambient heat itself.

Why one plant becomes 15 to 30 separate models

Matterport won't merge models whose combined scan points exceed roughly 2,000; two 1,500-point tours, for instance, simply can't be combined into one. At over a million sq ft between two active plants, the only real option is segmenting each facility into 15 to 30 distinct models, capturing overlapping zones deliberately, then manually merging them afterward into one walkthrough. The largest segments alone can use up to five individual spaces on an enterprise hosting plan.

The part that actually takes weeks

Editing a facility this size takes several weeks, not days: realigning fragmented scans, repairing meshes where infrared data bounced badly off reflective steel. The most labor-intensive part is privacy. Automated face-blurring is trained mostly on offices and homes; its confidence drops fast around someone in heavy industrial PPE next to an extruder, and compliance here means blurring a person's entire body, not just their face. Because the camera captures through mechanical rotation, someone walking across the floor in the same direction as the lens can appear three or four times in a single 360° panorama. When the automated system misses those duplicates, every instance gets blurred by hand, across thousands of panoramas.

Why floor prep matters more than people expect

There's no fixing clutter after the fact in 3D the way there is in a photograph. A facility that hasn't properly sorted, set, and cleaned before the capture team arrives corrupts the baseline data directly. That's not just a cosmetic issue; it can force real delays or a full physical rescan. The plants here ran strict 5S preparation before capture began, which is exactly why the result held up.

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