JK Tyre: ten lakh square feet, moving.

Tyre plants are not built for cameras. They're built for machines, and the machines win: a Banbury mixer several storeys tall, curing presses packed panel-to-panel with no walking lanes at all, forklifts in constant motion, and heat that makes Chennai's summer feel like the mild option. Between November 2025 and now — the most recent scan uploaded this month — the two plants were documented section by section: mixing, extruders, tyre building, GT painting, curing, uniformity and inspection, warehouses, and the full utilities backbone from substations to chiller plants.

Two plants, two methods

Gwalior went first and was scanned availability-first: each morning, the plant's IT lead set out which sections were clear, and two security escorts held foot traffic and forklift movement around the tripod. Fifteen days. Chennai went differently — by then the plant's rhythm was familiar, and the route came from a casual conversation with the union leader: scan in process order, raw material stores to final finish, the way a tyre actually moves. Ten days, and a tour structure that made immediate sense to everyone who used it.

The alignment problem nobody warns you about

A Matterport tour expects walkable floor; its minimap draws what the camera covered. In curing there are no lanes — machine beside panel beside machine — and with people and forklifts moving through every frame, 3D alignment breaks. The fix starts manually: each misaligned scan point re-set in the capture app, three to five minutes apiece, across hundreds of points, evening after evening. Where the lanes still refused to be rectangles, the merges went to Matterport's own senior support engineers — days of mesh-level adjustment and reprocessing to keep a kilometre of plant floor from bending. Some sections ultimately couldn't be merged at all: past 2,000 scan points, the platform simply says no. That number is what capture density looks like from the inside — it's the opposite end of the trade from fast coverage claims.

The people on the floor

Staff meet a strange camera on their floor with the full range of reactions — some posed hopefully (and were gently disappointed to learn people are blurred), some asked if it records sound, a few asked outright if it was surveillance. Every question got a minute and a straight answer, at every level, and the return on those minutes was the project: lights switched on ahead of the camera, trolleys re-parked to 5S, advice on timing lunch, directions to the buttermilk carts, and ten days of hellos. One early section was rescanned after the floor was reorganized to 5S standards — rescans are free here, so it cost the program nothing. And in both plants, the canteens deserve their own line: unlimited, excellent, and geographically inverted — rice arriving daily in Gwalior's roti country, chapatis in Chennai's rice country.

What's public, and what isn't

One tour from this work is public — the plant gallery below. The other hundred-odd spaces are exactly where they should be: private. Plant interiors are shared here at pattern level only, and that restraint is the same one every client gets.