Auto-Owners Insurance is a Fortune 500 company represented by over 4,900 associates nationwide. Founded in 1916, Auto-Owners Insurance provides its claims service to 2.7 million policyholders.

In order to appraise risks, Auto-Owners underwriters must evaluate physical environments such as homes or businesses with as much information as possible.

Our IMAGe INtake Experience system (IMAGINE) automates part of this process by identifying objects of interest in images taken of an environment and enabling Auto-Owners associates to recreate a physical environment at any time in virtual reality (VR).

Auto-Owners associates upload 360-degree images taken by a spherical camera to our web app, which analyzes the images to detect relevant objects such as a door or a piece of furniture. Associates can then display and edit information about the environments in those images.

Associates can create and edit names, descriptions and comments about environments and the objects in them. They can also download inventories of detected objects in various formats.

Our companion VR app creates a virtual version of the physical environment, which is viewed using an Oculus Rift headset. Associates use Oculus Touch controllers to select objects and to view and edit environment information such as item descriptions or comments.

IMAGINE is written in PHP and JavaScript and runs on all modern web browsers. Our virtual reality application is developed in Unity for the Oculus Rift platform and runs on Windows computers. Our object detection suite is written in Python using TensorFlow.