Real Estate Goes Virtual
Buying a house is a big decision for most people, there is a lot to think about when choosing the place you wish to spend all of your time at. Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could visit all the houses you were checking out online, in person instead? You would be able to walk through each property and decide how you feel when actually standing inside the house’s walls. As nice as it sounds to be able to visit every property personally, we just simply don’t have the time in our days to travel to each and every individual house in the area for sale, and look at them in person. Virtual reality could change the way we shop for houses, by actually bringing the house to you when most convenient.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
In the category of virtual reality we have its cousin which is known as augmented reality. This augmented reality is a bit different than virtual reality in that it doesn’t change the whole space around you like a virtual reality headset would. Instead augmented reality adds a layer on top of real reality. The easiest way to describe the difference between these two would be to think about snapchat and it’s camera filters. Those filters would be considered augmented reality, since you are rather just adding information to the world that is already in front of you. Augmented reality could be especially useful in real estate since we build houses on top of the world in front of us.
Here are some ways VR and AR could be used in the real estate market:
- Remodeling decisions
- Looking at properties, virtually
- Architectural concepts
Bringing The House To You
One very effective use for virtual reality in the real estate business is for the ability to allow home shoppers the opportunity to virtually tour any house that they were interested in, without having to travel from location to location. Virtual reality headsets can literally place you inside the home you are looking at and let you see what it would look like as if you were actually standing there, and I think everyone can agree an in person view is much better than some thumbnail photos. Brittany Ryan describes how this virtual reality house tour works by stating “VR uses super smart software to stitch together still photographs and provide users with an interactive, 360-degree view” (2018). Which basically means when you take a 3D virtual tour of a house you are essential looking at a bunch of 360 degree photos through a VR headset.
Remodeling Ideas Brought To Life
Every now and then, people like to change up the look of their houses by taking out walls, putting in windows, or even just painting a room a different color. The only problem with this is you are not quite sure how a project is going to look in your house until after it is done, and once you take a wall down it is going to cost a lot to put it back up incase it turns out you liked the wall better than the open space. Augmented reality could provide a neat solution to this problem, it works by adding elements to the world already in front of you as Brittany Ryan states “AR can work in several different ways and is used for many different reasons, but in most cases, AR involves a scenario where virtual objects are overlaid and tracked atop real, physical objects to create the illusion that they’re in the same space”. (2018) With this, we see how augmented reality could simulate what our houses would look like with the changes we have in mind before any construction actually takes place. This is a huge market for virtual reality to get into and it could potentially save people a lot of money in the long run.
Virtual reality is taking a step into more practical forms of use besides video games, and real estate is one of the giant industries that could really use technology like virtual reality to it’s advantage. Maybe you’ll be visiting your future house one day through a VR headset before going there? We’ll have to find out!
Cited:
Ryan, B. (2018, December 05). How Virtual and Augmented Reality Are Changing the Game in Real Estate. Retrieved March 2, 2019, from https://www.followupboss.com/blog/vr-ar-real-estate/
