SOLVD CASE STUDY: Scanix

ScaniX are a Telford-based company who have diversified into providing innovative 3D building scanning services.

The company’s original business model focused on providing services into the property conveyance / estate agency sector to provide 3D virtual tours of properties on the market. However, this specific market has already been saturated by Estate Agents providing this service in-house.  

ScaniX are seeking new business opportunities through the adoption of innovative 3D immersive technologies, such as Augmented Reality, (AR) and Virtual Reality, (VR) into the construction design sector and corporate Facilities Management portfolio holders to realise company growth and find new companies.

Company Director Nik Abel has recently secured a Marches Growth Hub grant, allowing the company to acquire a Matterport 3D scanning camera. However, the complexity of image processing and after-effects resulted in ScaniX reaching out to the UoW SOLVD Project for support.

Through a series of exploratory meetings between the company and the University’s subject matter experts, the SOLVD project identified the main challenges that the company was facing. The SOLVD project collaborated with ScaniX to improve their in-house capabilities around creating ‘virtual staging’ environments through the Unity3D games engine, creating a technology roadmap to allow ScaniX to adopt other technologies and platforms in the future, e,g. the addition of a VR experience to the companies service offerings.

We produced a series of bespoke user guides and video tutorials, allowing ScaniX to learn at their own pace, and revisit the training material as required. This included:

1. Installing the Unity Hub & Unity3D
2. Importing a Matterport Scan & Texturing
3. Implementing Camera Control
4. Navigation
5. Interaction/Staging Zones Part 1
6. Interaction/Staging Zones Part 2
7. Building & Exporting the application for PC & Web

Nik Abel, Director of ScaniX, commented: "It’s been a fantastic experience to work with the SOLVD team, the support has been invaluable to my business and will help me to develop some amazing solutions which will generate valuable new business”.

The SOLVD project is continuing to support ScaniX through a longer-term R&D Collaboration to develop the company offer around 3D scanning and VR as a collaborative design, planning and marketing tool for a variety of uses, including the refurbishment of old commercial buildings into apartments.