ZEISS: the store that exists twice.

In 2022, Carl Zeiss India commissioned 360° capture for its Vision Center format — the brief was Google Street View for the stores' digital marketing. Four centers across three cities followed: Indiranagar and Koramangala in Bengaluru, Thane, and Pune, each run day-to-day with ZEISS's franchise partners.

The store that exists twice

Indiranagar became the interesting one. Alongside the customer-facing tour, a second tour of the same store was captured for a different audience entirely: prospective franchise partners. ZEISS used it to show opticians what a Vision Center looks like as a business — the layout, the diagnostic equipment, the format — without flying anyone to Bengaluru. One space, two tours, two jobs. It remains one of the clearest examples in this portfolio of a client treating spatial capture as a sales tool rather than a photograph.

Scanning a store made of reflections

An optical store is a camera's least favourite room: glass display cases, mirrors at eye level, lens demos, polished floors. Every shoot was scheduled two hours before opening, and the mornings always began the same way — a walk-through with the store team catching last-minute details (a missing QR code stand, a display that hadn't been reset) before a single scan, then camera positions planned around the reflective surfaces instead of into them. It's slower than pointing and shooting. It's also why the finished tours don't have a tripod ghosting in every lens display.

What happened after delivery

The ask was Street View; the delivery went further. The Matterport tours were kept live on a complimentary hosting trial so the stores could test them on their own pages, and the individual 360° extracts were handed over for the stores' social media calendars — the capture kept producing content long after the camera left. The panoramas published to each store's Google listing have been compounding since: the largest single panorama at Thane has crossed 100,000 views, and dozens across the four centers sit in five figures each.

ZEISS Vision Centers continue to open across India — the format is documented on ZEISS's own pages — and the capture playbook for the format sits ready here.