Donan, a full-service forensic investigation firm, and Matterport, a 3D media technology company, have partnered together to bring Matterport’s all-in-one reality capture system to fire investigations.
Fire investigators commonly take around 200 to 300 photos to thoroughly document a scene. This is to ensure that, in five months, these photos will still provide him with enough information to understand exactly where in the house they were taken. However, other people need to view that information, too: “if I gave an adjuster or attorney all my photos to go through,” says Alan Meadors, a certified Fire Investigator for Donan, “they’re going to get lost really quickly.”
Matterport’s solution, originally designed for real estate and the AEC industry, will provide Donan’s Fire Investigators and clients with a quick and easy-to-use system for capturing, documenting, visualizing, and collaborating around real-world environments. The solution combines a Matterport 3D camera with the Matterport Cloud, an automated system that creates immersive virtual 3D models, high-resolution 4K 2D photography, floor plans, and other key data assets to enable complete documentation of a property.
As a result, the scan allows fire investigators to spend less time on site, and desk adjusters to examine the scene and provide a quicker turnaround for claims. It also allows for a comparison between pre-loss and post-loss scans, to analyze damages, accurately identify materials and return the property to its pre-loss condition. In addition, scanning a property as soon as possible after a loss occurs avoids concerns over weather, excavation, remediation or repairs affecting the scene.
“If you’re looking at a virtual reality scan of a fire scene, you’re walking through it just like you’re there,” Meadors explained. “You know where you’re at in the property, and you know where the fire is coming from, especially if an investigator can walk you through and say, ‘look here, there are fire patterns in the hallway; they grow from this room and they get smaller towards the other end.’ It makes it really easy for an adjuster or courtroom to understand the environment in which the fire occurred.”
Every fire investigator across Donan’s national footprint is now equipped with a Matterport camera.
