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The technology’s already here
“Real estate, architecture, and design are
already working with 3-D models, and VR
and AR are, in essence, just an extension
of that process,”
says Chad Eikhoff, founder of
Atlanta-based TRICK 3D, one of several companies
that’s already getting in on the ground floor of real
estate’s VR/AR transformation.
Last year, he and his team
released Floorplan Revolution,
a product that can create an
interactive virtual 3-D model of
a space from nearly any two-
dimensional floorplan, not just
detailed architectural drawings.
In the AR sphere, AR Pandora Reality is getting
things off the ground with technology that allows
customers to use their smartphones and tablets
to examine miniature virtual models of new real
estate projects as if they were positioned on a
real-world desk or table in front of them, and
they can also use it to project virtual finishes and
furnishings into existing spaces to see how they
might look. The company is already working on
demo versions of its product for developing AR
headsets such as the Hololens, but it’s waiting for
the technology to become sleeker and cheaper
before it seriously rolls things out. “Software-wise,
we’re quite ahead of the curve,” founder Alper
Guler says, “and we’re waiting for new toys to
come out to amaze people.”
More on the horizon
Once VR/AR has become a proven market
with consumer interest, the real estate industry
could see some truly dramatic innovations,
including hyper-specific analytics, more
interaction with existing properties, and even
whole virtual marketplaces.
One of the first possibilities Tepper sees coming is
the ability to collect and mine the data from virtual
walkthroughs for more targeted marketing. “If
somebody has a VR model and it’s viewed twenty
times,” he says, “we’ll have the capability at some point
or the technology to say, ‘OK, 90% of the time was
spent on the office or the conference room. So, what
can we do with that data? Could we maybe serve up
that data first?’”
16 The Occupier Edge