Pay-Per-Input Licensing (PPI)

What Stands for PPI

PPI allows you to download the app for free, work for free, work fast in parallel, work offline, and work with automation. PPI is about owning rights for processing particular images, laser scans or other inputs. Once you own rights for a particular input, you can process it without any cost.

The following section covers principles of PPI licensing, how to acquire the licenses, export and re-import them. In general, you do not need to do the latter unless you want to archive your licenses, share them with your colleagues or friends, or transfer them to another computer for offline processing.

• A standard scenario is that you use the software to process your data completely offline and anonymously. When you are happy with your creation and you decide to export it by pressing the respective button, the app will contact our servers to verify whether you own rights for images used to create the output. If you own the rights, you will be able to continue and export your creation. Otherwise you will be asked to pay for licenses for images which had not been licensed before. If you import licenses with the data, then the online step is completely bypassed.

Getting and Exporting Licenses

Consider a use-case when you want to outsource a company for processing your data, or you want to process the data on a more powerful computer which is not connected to the Internet due to company security restrictions. Or you just want to share the images with licenses so that the receiving party can process the data themselves, e.g. for education or archiving purposes.

1. This is when you can click the Input Licenses button in the 3. Output part of the WORKFLOW tab. When pressed, the application will collect fingerprints of all inputs added into the project (images and/or laser scans).
   
   
   The fingerprint is a small binary hash of the file. It does not encode image name, image information or any other sensitive data.
2. Then the app contacts our servers to verify which inputs you already own. If you had previously acquired the licenses, e.g. during mesh export, then this online step is completely bypassed. Otherwise you will be asked to log into your MY account (unless you are already signed in) to identify yourself so that it can compare the input fingerprints with your entries in our database.
   
   
   If you own a license for a superset of data in your scene, the online server will not be contacted. So, for instance, when you get 100 images licensed, the licenses will be turned into a dataset certificate. If you loaded just 50 of the licenced images, you could continue without any cross-checks against the server data.
3. If all input fingerprints are already there, you will immediately get licenses for those inputs. If some fingerprints are missing, you will be asked to pay just for them.
   
   
   You can pay using My Credit, which you can pre-pay in advance, using credit redeem codes, or using other common payment options, like a credit card. Just follow the onscreen instructions.
   For more information on the payment options, click here.
4. Once the input licenses have been acquired, you can specify a location where you want to store the license (dataset certificate). This file has an .rclicense extension. It is recommended to store the license in the same folder with your images.
   
   
   NOTE: Exported licenses are not bound to any user account nor version of the application. Hence, if you share them, the receiving party can process the data without restrictions or need to be online during export.
   Capturing Reality stores licenses for your inputs for 2 years. If you want to store them for a longer period of time, you need to export and store them yourself.

Importing Input Licenses

Importing input licenses allows processing and exporting results anonymously and without the need to be online during export (for license acquisition). The receiving party even does not need a MY account at our webpage to be able to process data. This enables work in secure offline environments, as well as other scenarios like archiving, teaching, development of CLI scripts, or development using RealityCapture Software Development Kit.

• Licenses can be imported directly with your inputs using the Input Licenses button located in the Import & Metadata panel of the WORKFLOW tab, also by simple drag-and-dropping images together with the license(s) into the application.
• Licenses can also be imported during the license acquisition. In the Acquire a license for your creation window click on the Import license from file button in the lower left corner. This will display a Windows file explored window. Find the license file and click on the Open button to import it.

Open PPI Scenes on Different Computers

Projects created with PPI can be re-opened on eight (8) different computers. To correctly use this feature, you cannot use "anonymous mode". If you create a project using anonymous mode, you can still convert it into transferable project by signing in and opening it on the same computer.

• A running session of RealityCapture has to be closed first to let you transfer the project successfully due to a .lock file located in the project folder.
• User must be online while opening the transfered project on another computer.
• Licenses of images transfer with the project as well.
• To see all users/computers that contributed to the project (saved the project), open the .rcproj file in a text editor. At the very beginning of the file, notice the contributors section. Each line represents a pair user-computer.
• Components cannot be transferred as they do not have the contributor information included. Include them in a project and transfer the whole project.