HOMING IN ON HOUSING

The client is a large developer who specializes in the construction of single-family houses and entire housing estates. Due to the fact that the sale of such facilities often takes place before the investment is completed, the client decided to present finished houses in virtual reality, which was aimed at increasing people’s interest in their offer.

Client

NDA

Sector

Real Estate Interior

Decoration

Services

3D modeling

Technology

Unreal Engine 4

HTC Vive

Visual results gallery

Apartment exterior, 3D building visualization side view

3D interior visualization living room table

Apartment exterior, 3D building visualization

Challenge

Make a virtual tour of a planned house even more exciting

The client needed an application that would allow customers to explore architectural facilities that exist only on plans. In this case, it was a single-family house.

An important part of the project was to make it possible for customers to customize the building at their discretion. In other words, it was to be something more than just the ability to enter a dream house and simply stroll through the rooms or the backyard.

Another feature that the client requested was to allow the customers to change the color of the walls or the façade of the building. The client preferred Unreal Engine for this project.

Process and project scope

Sometimes it’s important to just feel at home

The developer is well aware of the criteria that their customers are guided by when choosing the right facility. Usually, the attitude of a given customer depends on his or her imagination.

Scope

Thanks to the Unreal Engine, the application (including realistic graphics) was delivered to the client in a relatively short time.

The app works on HTC Vive goggles. Just put them on and you can freely explore both the house and its surroundings. Users move with the help of controllers. They can also make changes to the model (e.g. colors and materials).

Process

This project required a Scrum framework. This is because the client wanted to test and verify the progress of work very quickly and submit their corrections on an ongoing basis.

We worked in weekly sprints, providing more functionalities at given intervals. All in all, this model of working at lightning speed turned out to be very effective for both parties.

Collaboration

To create a house that would be realistic enough to reflect the nature of the planned investment, we needed graphic materials and architectural plans. All materials were provided, of course, but we had to do the modeling ourselves.

Typically, modeling works require more time for the effect to be good enough to show it to the client. In this case, however, from the very beginning, the client had the opportunity to test everything in VR.

Initially, it was only about the correct scale and perspective as well as the layout of the rooms. As time went by, the client’s comments concerned smaller and smaller details that needed to be changed or added in several variants.

Business value

The virtual reality app provides tangible customer experience improvement

Our client’s customers now have the opportunity to pay a proper visit to a facility that does not exist yet. For the developer, it is a very important sales and marketing element because it presents a three-dimensional, fully decorated facility in proper scale.

The overall benefits include:

presenting the building being constructed in hyper-realistic quality
strolling across the entire property and change various details by yourself
a significant increase in the customers’ engagement, they no longer have to limit themselves to just watching 2D plans or mockups

Technology stack

On-the-spot results? No problem

Unreal Engine is perfect for situations where the client requires good results at the very beginning of development.

The application was prepared for HTC Vive glasses, which offered the best image quality on the market at the time. All models were made in 3ds Max.

Unity - the main tool used by 4Experience