Some folks from Matterport stopped by our office yesterday to demo their new 3-D indoor mapping system, which officially goes on sale today, and mapped a bit of WIRED HQ (see images above and video below). We’ve written previously about their cloud-based digital reconstructions of interior spaces, but we hadn’t seen first-hand how it works.

To map a room, you use a 3-D camera and an iPad app. The camera is boxy and sits atop a tripod (it looks a bit like those old-school cameras where the photographer ducks behind a cloth to take a shot). To map a room, you simply plop it down in the middle and start it. The camera rotates around, pausing to capture scenes (while you move around behind it to stay out of the frame). This takes about a minute. You can then see the coverage you got in the app and move the camera to another point to get things from another angle. Do this several more times, and in about 20 minutes, you have your room.