VR Real Estate Tours

A flat is sold before anyone has walked into it. What the buyer gets is a 2D floor plan and a handful of photographs - and neither answers the one question that matters: what does the space feel like when I am standing in it?

A floor plan shows square metres. It does not show ceiling height, sightlines or how the light falls. Photographs show the corners the photographer chose. The rest is left to imagination, and imagination does not carry far in a decision of this size.

The client wanted prospective buyers to explore properties without a physical visit, in a way that produced a reliable impression rather than a decorative one.

Three hard requirements followed. The flats had to be fully furnished, because an empty shell does not answer the furniture question. Scale had to be right at walking height, because any deviation reads immediately as wrong. And the controls had to work for someone holding a VR controller for the first time.

We built each property room by room in 3D - kitchen through bathroom - and assembled it into a walkable tour. Modelling was done in Blender; the runtime ran on Unity3D and Unreal Engine.

The furnishing was not decoration but a scale reference: a sofa, a bed, a worktop are objects whose size everyone already knows, and that is precisely what the eye measures a room against. The tour does not stop at the front door - exterior views place the property in its surroundings, because location is more than an address.

The tour does not replace every viewing. It changes which viewings still need to happen at all.

• Shortlisting instead of driving. Several properties can be explored from one location; the journey is spent on the ones that survive the shortlist.
• The furniture question becomes answerable. You can see how furniture fits the room, not just how many square metres it has.
• Size and layout are experienced rather than read - ceiling height, doorways, sightlines.

The same construction carries beyond flat sales: commercial space, rental stock and luxury property pose the same question about how a space feels, only to a different audience.

On large developments a second use appears: investors and stakeholders can walk several units in a single session - at a point when there is nothing yet to walk into.