Explore a living space on your phone
Housing.com helps people find places to live. Typically our customers browse a series of listings, look at photographs, read through specifications and schedule a property viewing to close the deal.
They don’t get an up close and personal view of the house until they visit it. Photographs don’t necessarily give them the spatial awareness they need to make a decision. Moreover photographs don’t help the customer form a mental floor map.
We want our customers to make faster, more informed decisions. Visiting a property only to be disappointed by shabby housing is a poor consumer experience. So we defined our problem statement as:
How can we give customers a rich preview of a house?
Startups like Matterport attempt to tackle this problem by 3D Mapping interiors. While effective, this solution is too expensive to scale. Housing.com hosts thousands of listings. We chose instead to experiment with walkthrough videos. Well shot videos let the user lean back and experience the space virtually.
However interaction with videos is limited to play and pause which constricts the user to an IKEA like path they have to follow. Our problem statement evolved to :
How can we use video to navigate a living space?
We want the user to thoroughly explore different rooms. They should be able to quickly and repeatedly switch between rooms. This should familiarize the user with the space enough so they can comfortably find their way around the house when they visit.
While this works, we also want to correlate each room to its position on the floor map. Our second prototype achieves that by highlighting each room on the map as it scrolls by.
While we’ve used this prototype to navigate a house, we’re sure it has many other applications. We’ve open sourced the code on Github for you to play with!
Download source code on Github
Co-designed and developed by the multi talented Abheyraj Singh
