Scanner users want answers, not point clouds – Manifold Tech & FARO INSIGHT

0:00Michal Gula: So I, I think, th- this episode will be about the world record of how many pe- people can fit in, the one couch-... in a podcast studio. welcome guys. I hope you can introduce yourself, Toby, you can go first.

0:15John Chwalibog: So we'll go this way.

0:16Tobias Böhret: Yes. Hey. Hello. nice to be here. I'm happy to be here, guys. My name is Tobias Böhret. I'm working for FARO since more than 20 years now in different roles. was starting as a sales guy, yeah, so selling laser scanners from the very beginning, starting in 2006, you know, big sizes of laser scanners there. and then I moved on and make my way through FARO. I was working for R&D, and now I'm responsible for product marketing, so all the products we are selling as of today and we are working on for the future, I'm responsible together with my team. And yeah, happy to talk more in detail about it.

0:56Michal Gula: Okay. I'm, I'm just doing the remark here that you are a good person to talk to, to be friends with -... 20 years. He's a great guy. Great guy.

1:05John Chwalibog: I'm John Chwalibog. I'm working with Manifold, as Director of Strategic Partnerships. came on board, working with them in the last year and, had previously in a, past life, worked with FARO. and so when I started to work with these guys, saw a natural fit between the two companies and organizations, and so went to work on trying to get the collaboration together, and Manifold and FARO, working together in some way.

1:40Fan Yang: And cool. So I'm, Fan. I'm Fan... Dr. Fan Yang. So I'm, currently Chief Operating Officer and also Director of International Business at Manifold Tech. So Manifold Tech is a relatively young startup. We originate from 2022 at Hong Kong. Then, so we're very strong in the SLAM world ever since because we work in the robotic industry for all the research several years, and it's really exciting here and seeing that we can synergize our technology advantage with FARO, and moving forward, bring this industry to a new, complete new different world.

2:16Michal Gula: Amazing. when John reached out, he said that, you guys are going to, like, introduce some, some new collaborations, some, some new partnership, between the, those two companies, and that's the main reason why you are three, three of you here. So can you just tell us, like, what's the big news?

2:35John Chwalibog: Yeah. I mean, do you wanna, from FARO's perspective, announce the collaboration?

2:41Tobias Böhret: Absolutely, yeah. So I'm happy to announce that we found a new partner, a great partner, Manifold, right? So, we see that there is so much movement on the SLAM market at the moment, so many new devices, great devices being out there, and FARO is also being part of the SLAM market since, quite a long time. We acquired GeoSLAM a few years back, and GeoSLAM has quite a long history in SLAM already. And we have our own solutions, but we also found out that there is a lot of dynamics on the market. So we started to look around, what will be next, what kind of technology will come out to the market. And so we found a new great partner here together with two, these two gentlemen. So we start to talk to them, discuss with them. We found together pretty s- fast, amazingly fast, and here we are with a partnership, a relationship, and more important, with a new product.

2:41Michal Gula: We can see in, in many companies like coming with this, like lower tier and entry-level scanners, especially with SLAMs, like fighting really, for as low price as possible, with getting like enough of the quality. And FARO comes with this partnership. Do you think it's fair to your competition that you are not spending millions for developing of -... and, and, and two to three years for developing the, the hardware, and you just go and, and partner up with somebody?

2:41Tobias Böhret: You know, it's, it's the partnership, so of course we, we, we had a kind of a internal discussion about what, what to do, what's the right to do for FARO, you know. What is the new trend? And look around how the market is shifting, yeah, right? So I'm, I'm a professional surveyor. My father is running his own business, and so I'm familiar with, with surveying equipment for many, many years, yeah? And looking at this trade show here, what's happening, yeah, and how it changed over the last five, after, over the last 10 years, it's amazing, yeah? So in the past, it was always about accuracy, precision, accuracy, precision. Now we're talking to really new customers. We talk to... We can address new customers, new areas, new markets, and so on. And this is where this partnership is so interesting, right? So we, of course, keep our traditional products in the portfolio. We still address these customers. We fulfill their needs. But here we have a perfect collaboration together with somebody who is entering and is being part already of this market. And, the collaboration and the partnership helps us to better fit into that one. And it's not just a piece of hardware. From our perspective, it's the ecosystem of FARO. So we include all of our hardware devices into the FARO ecosystem when it comes to processing, when it comes to project generations in the field, till the data is falling out in the cloud on our desktop software scene. And it's not a piece of hardware. Like I said, it's really the complete package, what we are offering here. and I'm, I'm proud really to sit with these two gentlemen here on the couch because this is a great future for all of us.

5:43John Chwalibog: Yeah, I, I think that's part of it from what we saw, FARO recognizing where the industry's going. Right? And y- you see this trend, the way I describe it is you have more of like a prosumer user, right? It's not the power 3D user anymore. It's someone that benefits from good enough data, whether it's point clouds or splats- but they're building landscapes, outdoor environments for, you know, your home or, or developments. They're architects. They're the law enforcement community. They want answers. They don't care so much about the point cloud or manipulating the point cloud. They just know that there's an advantage to using the tech to get me the information that I need so I can do my job better.

6:30Michal Gula: I totally understand the prosumer, approach because we could compare it to, to cars, for example. We still have professional drivers with the licenses and everything else, but it's a very small portion of, of the overall car market, right?

6:44John Chwalibog: Yep.

6:44Michal Gula: Because the majority of, of car users are just regular people-

6:47Fan Yang: Yeah

6:47Michal Gula: who will get, like, few hours of training-

6:50Fan Yang: Exactly

6:50Michal Gula: and, and the, and the license. So, and, and this is going to happen on the reality capturing side. The, the same thing because people on the construction site or, architects or designers, they don't really need the, the licensed surveyor to capture the data and give them, like, a stamp of, of approval or... No, they just need to pick something from their pocket, scan very quickly, and have data as soon as possible, right?

7:14Fan Yang: Yeah. From just a bit add on from Manifold Tech's perspective. Again, Manifold, we... We're not a surveying company from day one. We've been doing research all in the robotic industry, and then what we're seeing from there is a need for a super robust SLAM.

7:28Tobias Böhret: Yep.

7:29Fan Yang: Which give in many different condition. For example, on the dense canopies, in the forest, under the long tunnels of the 10 kilometers, your SLAM is still there. It's not flying always to the moon, right? So that's what we're seeing, and then we are more like an enabler. At Manifold, from day one, we start to put this technology and giving the real time, good quality of a point cloud that are fast. Hopefully no post-processing, and if needed, better to be on the cloud instead of putting on your computer occupies for 12 hours, right? So that's what we're seeing, and we've become so excited to see FARO because, you know, FARO has been in the industry for 40 years. They have the acknowledge. They have all the customer demands, understand customer need, understand the trend of changing from a instrument to more and more like a, like a tool, right? So that can be used by field workers. And then that's a perfect fit between us because we're enabling this to happen from both the product easiness of use, from of course the price point, from the technology itself that are endurable for many of the surveillance, I mean the industrial facility surveillance perspective, that we are very unique in this industry. So if I may, I, I would say we're very different from the other hardware only, which, you know, w- it's the main focus still on the point cloud itself. But we're working, try to fit into a whole workflow that enables different industries. And from new ones, maybe I'll take a good example, from this year that we see a lot of these robotic companies, the startups, they start to take the Gaussian splats as one of the input, train their AI models for robotics deploy and manipulation. We're talking about they need millions hours of data. So each customer, even though they have five people, employees, just establish for four weeks, they want 200, 300,000 devices that collect all this data. They don't care about the point cloud anymore. So that are the new emerging demands and markets we've been seeing over the past few years, even past few month. And it's definitely what we are going to in the broader future. But of course, we're gonna try to cover still what are the needs from the surveyors, but not, that's not the main focus, with that tight focus, Eddie.

9:48Tobias Böhret: You all-

9:48Michal Gula: I'm wondering about the... Sorry. I'm wondering about the strategy here because I understand it from the FARO point of view because, like, these times are very, very difficult to be developing so- something for the next two to three years because the all our industry is developing very, very, very fast. So if they see something interesting on the market that fits their, positioning, their strategy, and their, their view of the future, it totally makes sense to partner up with somebody else, okay? Or to acquire them like you did with the GeoSLAM. what's your strategy like? Is the FARO going to be your only partner, or are you thinking about partnering with, with more companies? I k- I know th- this might be something like to

10:28Fan Yang: It's, it's the perfect question.

10:30Tobias Böhret: Yeah.

10:30Fan Yang: I, I won't worry about this. I, I'll speak it up, in a very genuine manner. So Manifold, as I said, we are more like a robotic company. So-

10:39Tobias Böhret: Sure

10:39Fan Yang: we have... If you go to our booth, you'll see we have so many different robotic partners. We never will say... You know, it's, it's more like a... How do I say? It's like a, a, like a camera, right? So Sony, for example.

10:52Tobias Böhret: Yeah.

10:52Fan Yang: Sony can work with so many different industries with so many good partners.

10:55Tobias Böhret: Yeah.

10:56Fan Yang: They're s- they've been partnering for the last three or four decades. It's what we are trying to do. You know, FARO is definitely a great partner for us in reality capture, in public security, right, in the AEC industry. Then we have other partners in the robotic field, and there could be some overlaps. It's... The world is not only like a zero sum, ga- zero sum game, right? Sometimes we could one to one plus we get 10. So that's our strategy. I'll put it that way.

11:23Tomáš Barnáš: I-

11:24Tobias Böhret: Yeah.

11:25Tomáš Barnáš: So, you all just, touched the topic of, Gaussian splats as well, so I assume it's coming from, from your side. But is it like for FARO, already that interesting that you wanna implement it into your software processing side and, and delivering this as a full package to your customers or?

11:46Tobias Böhret: It's already implemented.

11:47John Chwalibog: It is?

11:47Tobias Böhret: Yeah. So Gaussian splats had been implemented with the Rovi device. Yeah. So, customers then now can upload the data directly from the field into the cloud, and the cloud is processing the point cloud, and as an option on top, the Gaussian splattings as well. Yeah. And Gaussian splattings, the- The name was exploding last year, right? Everybody was talking for good reasons about Gaussian splattings. It's amazing. Yeah. As we look at how we start to consume point clouds, it's sometimes not so easy to navigate and, and you have all these blind spots and so on, yeah. Gaussian is definitely something a lot of people looking into for good reasons, yeah. And this is our, our, our answer now also, yeah. We are processing this one in our cloud and make it available. Yeah, so that's a perfect fit as well. Okay, so-

12:37John Chwalibog: And from a user perspective, right, and you see it in the Sphere product, like I can be in the Gaussian splat, navigate, kind of get that virtual tour experience. But if I wanna measure, say, right, I'm measuring off the point cloud. So now I'm taking advantage of the point cloud, you know, from a dimensional perspective. But the UI, the experience perspective with the splat is more friendly to, again, kind of that prosumer market or user type because they're not used to navigating around point clouds and, you know-

13:09Tobias Böhret: Uh-

13:09John Chwalibog: do- doing what you do there, so.

13:11Tomáš Barnáš: I believe this became, more understandable also for many users because like last year when it was a hype, everybody was just trying to get into these battles. Like, "Ah, yeah, but you cannot measure, it's not accurate," and blah, blah. But, exactly as you mentioned, like we speak about layers, and you can switch it and measure and keep the, the accuracy as, as you had it before. as this is like also FARO device, can you process it together with other of your devices? Like, if you have like also with TLS and-

13:39Tobias Böhret: Absolutely, 100%. Yeah. So that's always the intention, you know. With all of our hardware products, we have the Focus scanners. We announced a new Focus scanner here on the show. It's called the Focus i.1 and the Focus i.1 X. We have the great Blink scanner. We have, our Orbis SLAM scanner. And our customers, of course, have always the opportunity to combine the different data sets with each other, yeah. You can do that in the cloud. You can do that also offline in the Scene software. both the cloud and the software are now part of a new subscription model we also introduced here on the show yesterday, and the data fusion is absolutely given in the one and the o- in the other direction.

14:18Tomáš Barnáš: Can you just quickly s- Yeah... say about the subscription model? Just it's always interesting if you s-... announce something new that we also mention to people.

14:26Tobias Böhret: Ah, yes, of course. Yeah. Great. so basically what we see is that also the cloud is getting more and more important, right? So the traditional customer base normally is still processing data offline. They go with Scene. so they take the s- the data from the scanner, process it, on the local machine and so on. Now we have two different options, using the cloud and the desktop, so- Where it's the choice of the customer. So now with the new subscription models, everything is bundled into one, one package. Yeah. So all the time, the cloud and the desktop software is part of what we sell to the customer. The customer h- then has the choice using offline or online. They can process offline, upload the data later into the cloud, or they can check directly upload the data into the cloud. So we don't want to separate anymore between offline and online, and bring all the benefits from both worlds to the customer directly.

15:24John Chwalibog: Can, can we talk about-

15:25Tobias Böhret: Yeah, yeah

15:26John Chwalibog: the Rovi subscription?

15:27Tobias Böhret: Absolutely.

15:27John Chwalibog: I mean, I think that's really interesting-

15:29Tobias Böhret: Yes

15:29John Chwalibog: that you're taking the s-

15:30Tobias Böhret: No, no, no, no

15:30John Chwalibog: existing subscription.

15:31Michal Gula: You, you're ste- you're steering to th- this discussion to the sales pitch. No, I, I wanna go back to why you chose Manifold. We'll go... We'll get back to that. No, no worries. I wanted to ask, one more question because, FARO is established long-term company- Yeah... within the laser scanning, so, like, I don't believe, in this case, I don't believe on a love at, at first sight. Okay. So you were definitely searching the, the, the whole market for a suitable partner. So why did, why did you choose Manifold?

16:03Tobias Böhret: So yeah, good question. Absolutely. You know, of course, we had been searching the market. We had try out different devices. We played around with the benefits of the one and the other and so on. but it's the technology, absolutely, but there is more. there needs to be a personal relationship. There needs to be trust, and it's not just to have now one start and stop it. It's a long-term relationship. Yeah. And that's what this is about, this partnership with these two gentlemens and together with, with the management of FARO INSIGHT here. there is a technology part of it, absolutely, but it's also the personal relationship and the way you collaborate and you work together. You can imagine that their R&D teams need to work together, yeah, especially when it comes to the data integration into the FARO ecosystem. the collaboration out of the marketing, the product marketing, and everything else, and that's really, really important. Yeah. If you want to move fast, if you want to move in the right direction, yeah, you need to choose the right people, and that's what happened here.

17:05Fan Yang: I'll, I'll put a comment. It's like a romantic relationship. It's two ways. So-... for us, you know, Toby, we, we have met, in Berlin in 2023. They, they saw us, you know, with our previous generation, very first generation devices, which are already generating real-time colorized point cloud in a full, full point cloud manner. So I think that was a good first sight, and from my end, because, you know, like, it's not a secret, we've been talking with all the big names here as well. and then, you know, FARO, we just have to vibe. A- as I said, it's two ways, right? So it's a romantic relationship, let's put it that way. It's two ways. It's going hot really quick because both side on the ways, on the engineering level, on the business level, on the management level, are so in the right direction. We're focusing on the one direction, the same, the same future that we've been foreseeing, and then we're doing this at 100 mile per hour speed. So-

18:00John Chwalibog: That common vision and strategy-

18:02Fan Yang: Yes

18:02John Chwalibog: is important.

18:03Michal Gula: The, the, the chemistry is very important because as long as the things go the right way, like, quote-unquote, "You can do the business with whoever," like with the devil, right?

18:14Fan Yang: Yeah.

18:15Michal Gula: Once bad things happen, you wanna have a partner that you are able to go for a beer with and just to discuss th- this through and, and, and to be able to speak to them. So I totally understand the, the, the chemistry point of view of, of the collaboration. And now when we speak about this romantic relationship, we can, we can get to the baby, right?

18:36Fan Yang: Yeah. The baby. Yeah.

18:36Michal Gula: Oh,

18:36Tobias Böhret: now, okay.

18:36John Chwalibog: What's, what's your, child? No, to co- come back to it a little bit-

18:43Tobias Böhret: Yeah

18:43John Chwalibog: I think it's really interesting, the combination of the subscription with the hardware and, and the model, and this is the affordability piece of it that we, we don't wanna overlook that. There is... That's a reality that we all have to deal with- with pricing and, and making, the device as affordable-

19:01Tobias Böhret: Absolutely. Yeah

19:01John Chwalibog: as possible, along with everything else.

19:04Tobias Böhret: Yeah. So absolutely. of course, as you can imagine, there is always the big question mark when it comes to the go-to market, yeah, for a company like FARO, especially in this kind of price categories we are talking here about. And, if we are looking around here on the show, there are many, many different SLAM devices now available, really cheap ones. Some of them are looking similar to the others and so on. Yeah. So, the subscription models I just talked about, you know, the combination of cloud and desktop, there is one more but really important component to it. We are bundle the Rovi into the subscriptions. Yeah. So the Rovi is part of the three-year subscription, and, so there's basically one line item for the customer, and there's... we want to keep it simple for everybody. so cloud, desktop software, Rovi, everything is bundled into one package, into the subscriptions, so that there is no complexity to talk about. And Gaussian splattings are included into that one, the processing of the point clouds, sharing the data, collaborate with other ones, create annotations and stuff like that. So what's really interesting for us as FARO to provide the best workflows out in the field, not just to add another piece of hardware to the portfolio. It really needs to be included in the right way so that we have a, a great end-to-end workflow, a great experience for our customers. This is for Rovi, and that's also for our, all of our other hardware products we have.

20:40Tomáš Barnáš: Can you also describe the Rovi as well a little bit? Like we have, we have also cameras here so people can see it.

20:46John Chwalibog: Yeah, yeah. So, um-

20:48Tomáš Barnáš: You could just play with it a little bit.

20:49John Chwalibog: Yeah, yeah. So well if you take the top piece away, that's a accessory pack that can be added. We have, the Rovi core product or base product. So you've got the LiDAR sensor, you've got three two-megapixel global shutter cameras, for colorization of the point cloud, but also helps with the SLAM positioning. this is also part of the accessory pack, so it's an add-on camera to take still images. So think about, you know, um-

21:19Michal Gula: High-res.

21:20Fan Yang: Forensic.

21:20John Chwalibog: y- yeah, or forensics, or I just want to take a picture of the serial number tag of the HVAC equipment.

21:27Michal Gula: Can, can it take pictures continuously-

21:28John Chwalibog: No

21:29Michal Gula: during the scan?

21:29John Chwalibog: No, I trigger them with the, with the, device or the, the-

21:34Michal Gula: The app

21:34John Chwalibog: the app itself.

21:35Michal Gula: Why, why wouldn't you use it continuously for better data for the Gaussian splatting?

21:41Fan Yang: The Gaussians-

21:43John Chwalibog: that's a question for-

21:44Fan Yang: Yeah, I'll, I'll answer that later.

21:46John Chwalibog: Yeah. Okay. so, so that's kind of the base model, and then we can add, a higher resolution panoramic camera, so two times 12 megapixel lenses, one-inch CMOS sensors on the C-

21:59Tobias Böhret: Yeah.

21:59John Chwalibog: Yeah, on the sensors, and then RTK- as well as an accessory pack. So it comes in two configurations.

22:05Michal Gula: The obvious questions for me is, aren't you losing the, the spatial data with... Because it looks like the, the RTK antenna and the cameras are covering the field of view of the, of the LiDAR.

22:17Fan Yang: Yeah, I'll answer the technical part. So basically, that's a great question. So this picture, the idea was mostly from the, you know, inspection guys, and also forensic guys. They wanna... They used to use, DRS, cameras to take the high res pictures, but then those are not, geo-referenced. So all these pictures, you can have a nice bubble view. So you click them up, and then you'll see the high res picture that you're referencing the point cloud and the Gaussian, which are definitely what their workflow is requiring.

22:46John Chwalibog: It's more of an annotation- than-

22:48Fan Yang: Yeah

22:48John Chwalibog: part of the-

22:48Fan Yang: And then the pano, you'll have a good sense of a Gaussian, how they work. So we could work with Gaussian on the th- three cameras. That's, it's global shutter, so it's very insensitive to the motions that you have, which usually happens in the field, right? You don't scan it, like, for 35 minutes of a small booth area. Usually your workers will just scan five minutes, and it's good enough. So the base model itself is good for Gaussian already. And if we want upgrade quality, you can use definitely the top panel, the high res camera, to give you a better quality for Gaussian. But by the way, the secret sauce is the Gaussian is not that requiring a high-resolution picture from a technical standpoint of view. So if anyone find excuse we need a 50 million pix so that we do a Gaussian, that's definitely wrong.

23:35John Chwalibog: Yeah.

23:35Fan Yang: Yeah.

23:35John Chwalibog: you, you should check out the splats that get produced from even the base model. They're, they're pretty impressive, and a- again, it's this question of good enough. There are applications where that is good enough. There are some that need the higher res, or maybe they want a pano-

23:51Tobias Böhret: No,

23:51Michal Gula: no

23:51John Chwalibog: base interface, so.

23:52Michal Gula: It's, y- you know, it's, it's not the question of good enough. It's the question, like, if I have their better sensor, why wouldn't I use the additional images for, for-

24:01Fan Yang: Constantly

24:01Michal Gula: for the reconstruction? But, here's the thing.

24:05Fan Yang: Mm.

24:05Michal Gula: what I'm thinking. the better camera can be actually used for, like, a detailed part of the Gaussian splatting. Like, for example-

24:12Fan Yang: Yes

24:13Michal Gula: if, if I'm doing the Gaussian splatting of this, like, street between the, the expo zones, I can come here to this table, just press the button-

24:23Fan Yang: Yeah

24:23Michal Gula: and take the very detailed pictures of this-

24:26Fan Yang: Yes

24:26Michal Gula: base, for example.

24:27Fan Yang: Exactly. That's, we, we, we actually enable that function.

24:31Michal Gula: Okay.

24:31Fan Yang: So it's, it's part of the function, as you mentioned.

24:34Michal Gula: Perfect.

24:34Fan Yang: We could use also DSLR cameras to, to take those pictures, and then make a good patch of the part of, s- sweet part of the Gaussian as well.

24:45Tomáš Barnáš: so now we have, like, two positions of the cameras. if you are using the higher resolution, are you, like, turning off the bottom ones? Or-

24:54Fan Yang: No.

24:54Tomáš Barnáš: No.

24:54Fan Yang: They are always on. The bottom ones are colorization, but most importantly, they are part of the SLAM algorithm. So, you know, with no LiDAR stem and no visual SLAM for us, you can think in a more non-technical term, it's a visual SLAM enhanced by LiDAR. So that's our secret sauce, which we've been working in the past so many years since we've been in the research world. So that makes the uniqueness of the robustness of the SLAM, even if your LiDAR is completely out of order. For example, in the long, straight tunnels without a lot of features, it's still working. And-

25:30Tomáš Barnáš: So then it's calculated, like, with the offset that you know, like, that the additional camera is on, like, different position?

25:36Fan Yang: Yeah. We'll s- put in a term what we call the, the pose refine or-

25:42Tomáš Barnáš: Okay

25:42Fan Yang: precision refine. So let's put in that way. So that also make it possible to fuse even with other set of data. For example, future workflows requiring drone scans.

25:52Tomáš Barnáš: Mm.

25:52Fan Yang: We could fuse the drone Gaussian also with the Gaussian we have from the Rovi, also maybe from the, the Orvis. So it just a whole ecosystem that makes everything into a synergized central platform like Sphere XG.

26:07Tomáš Barnáš: So do you support also the processing on your platform with the drone images or, like, other sources, or this is then how the-

26:14Fan Yang: That's, that's definitely on the roadmap.

26:16Tomáš Barnáš: S- S- Sphere, I mean, work with drones?

26:19Tobias Böhret: Yes, exactly. We also, have the opportunity since April, if I'm not mistaken, to process drone imagery in our ecosystem as well. So we talked about data fusion, right? That's also here, then, the possibility. This is, like, an often question in the, in the market. Like, we are talking with many people. And, often we are getting a r- question like, "Okay, but what would be the best solution now if I have, like-

26:44John Chwalibog: Mm

26:45Tobias Böhret: yeah, LiDAR scanner or something, like, with 360, I want to combine it also with the, with the drone images.

26:52Tomáš Barnáš: So I definitely think that the demand is there, so it's, it's great if you already have that.

26:57Tobias Böhret: Yes. So for us it's important, we are not living in an isolated world, right? So and we see the capturing methods getting more and more and more. Yeah. So, I was talking about that I'm a s- professional surveyor, yeah. So I was starting with total stations and-

27:12Fan Yang: Yeah

27:12Tobias Böhret: GNSS robots and stuff like that. So single point measurements, at some point laser scanning was coming into the game, and, stuff like that. Nowadays, it completely changed. We talk about cameras, we talk about different LiDAR sensors, and so on. And of course, we want to give the right answers out of a FARO perspective, and also to give our customers the opportunity to do this fusion of data in our ecosystem.

27:38Fan Yang: Yeah. I think everything comes to down how do we solve the most important problems of our users, right? So that's the essence of the solution. We need to solve problems. For instance, like you mentioned about drone data, definitely it's important sometimes you need a overview of the whole site.

27:56Tobias Böhret: Mm.

27:56Fan Yang: That we cannot provide from a handheld scanning point of view, right? So that's definitely, if there's a need, I think that's on our roadmap for R&D.

28:07Michal Gula: What's the, what's the next step? Are you going to develop like, higher tiers of, of scanners or this is something you wanna focus on?

28:14Fan Yang: Well, I don't have a definitive answer yet. as I said, from Manifold's perspective, we're very large in the robotic industry. You probably, just for your reference, you can see all the top, human ride and, quadruple robotic companies are installing our devices and technology inside their solutions. So that's definitely our focus. In terms of, you know, we have a lot of possibilities to work together in future products. Long range, higher accuracy, I think everything is because the underlying SLAM and platform are already there, so we can just do it at the right timing.

28:53Tobias Böhret: And sorry to add one more thing here- Yeah... on that one, because you're asking about why Manifold, right? For good reasons. And it's also the future we are talking about, and we had been looking at each other, right? Do we share the vision of the future, and share the same vision of what products will be next? And that's also part of, the relationship now.

29:15Michal Gula: Perfect, guys.

29:15Fan Yang: Great.

29:16Michal Gula: congrats on this, collaboration and partnership. we wish you good luck and, and a lot of, su- success.

29:23Fan Yang: Success.

29:24Michal Gula: Success and, and, satisfied customers.

29:27Fan Yang: Yeah.

29:27Michal Gula: Yeah.

29:27Fan Yang: Thanks for the time. Really appreciate it.

29:29Michal Gula: Thanks for the time. Of course. Of course.

29:29Fan Yang: Yes.

29:29Michal Gula: Thank you very much. It was great to have you guys.

29:31Fan Yang: Yes. Pleasure.

29:31Michal Gula: Thank you.