At the beginning of this year, many real estate companies and decoration companies started to use VR technology and launched VR model rooms one after another. In a brand-new way, the effect of the room was presented to the visitors.
I sat in Starbucks with an architect. He handed me an Oculus virtual reality helmet, a Samsung mobile phone for use with it. In his own hands, there is an iPad. I put my helmet on my head and all of a sudden, the cafe I was in was gone and I was teleported into a charming luxury apartment in Miami. I stood in a white apartment building. The floor-to-ceiling windows were very wide and I could see the pool outside.
The pool is a must-have for Miami luxury apartments. I walked to the edge of the pool, a menu appeared in front of me, let me choose different times of the day. After choosing "Twilight", I saw the waves in the pool that were breezed by the breeze and felt that my body and mind gradually relaxed. At this time, the voice of the architect came as if it came from the air and it surprised me.
In reality, we still sit opposite each other in the cafe, and I now hold the edge of the table and want to confirm where I am. My eyes told me that I had just walked into a spacious kitchen, marble countertops can choose different colors, these options are floating in my eyes. And my body said that I was sitting in a noisy cafe. If I continue to look back, I may fall from my chair.
As I wandered around the virtual Miami apartment building, I saw a beautiful model wearing an elegant black dress sitting on an open platform. "If you look at her face for a few seconds, she will smile at you," the architect told me through the iPad. He has been tracking my adventures and my gaze. Forcing her to smile at me? Even if I knew she was not real, this thought made me a bit awkward, so I walked away.
A few minutes later, I reluctantly took off my helmet and returned to the real world. The architect, Gonzalo Navarro, is one of those who is increasingly creating VR experiences for wealthy real estate buyers.
Navarro’s company is called ArX Solutions, which creates virtual prototype rooms for unfinished apartment buildings. "I'm an architect who has never designed a building," he said to me with a smile. But on the other hand, he created a complete VR city, helping builders apply for approval from regulatory agencies so that they can build the city in the real world.
VR technology is often associated with games, entertainment, and sci-fi author stories such as Ray Bradbury and Neal Stephenson, but now the technology is gaining momentum in real estate.
Goldman Sachs estimates that by 2025, the real estate VR software market will reach 2.6 billion U.S. dollars. Such companies have sprung up and built sites such as ransported and You Visit to allow users to use VR to see their homes.
Real estate brokers such as Sotheby’s, Cokerun, and Liman have already used VR technology to attract customers. Navarro said that as VR technology becomes more and more popular, the price of VR hardware is getting closer to the people. Older websites like Zillow will also join the ranks of virtual reality. Ultimately, this technology will expand from the luxury real estate market to the general real estate market.
Navarro said that VR applications and helmets are now becoming more and more common, and more and more families are using them, usually as an entertainment tool, and the competition in the VR real estate field has become very fierce.
"All the large real estate companies are working hard on this," he said. Every company hires its own programmers and tries to lay the groundwork for the future. In the near future, people may spend a lot of time on virtual viewing and experience the feeling of “telescope†to the top floor of the Park Avenue or the vast detached villas. Once this technology becomes as popular as the iPhone, most people will love it.
Even though there are some limitations in VR hardware at present, the clarity of VR images is not satisfactory, but it is still meaningful to use VR technology to sell new buildings, Navarro said. Instead of spending the money to decorate the model and furnishing it with furniture, the real estate company might as well create a virtual model room so that real estate agents can carry it around. Navarro said that although the cost for creating a virtual model room is not low, the cost of decorating and arranging a real luxury model room is about 1 million US dollars. In contrast, the cost between virtual model rooms is much cheaper.
At present, wealthy foreign buyers are pouring into the luxury real estate market in big cities such as New York and London to avoid the risk of investing in domestic property. With the VR model room, the buyer’s degree of exhaustion across half the globe can be greatly reduced. In addition, the novelty and coolness of VR viewing are also particularly attractive. "It's like Call of Duty, it's just a scene of no killing," Navarro said with a laugh.
How long does it take to make a VR model? If it is a very large unit in neutral colors with elegant furniture, the entire production process takes about one and a half months. A bathroom can be done within a week. The paintings on the walls, the lamps and furniture in the room are all based on real objects. The scenery outside the window comes from photos taken in the field. So what about a blonde model who is smiling in a black dress? It's another element that brings in the virtual world from the real world. "She is a real person," Navarro said with a smile.
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