CASE STUDY: VIRTUAL REALITY IN REAL ESTATE

VIRTUAL REALITY WITH GEAR VR FOR INTERIOR DESIGN

We created a virtual reality for real estate demo for an interior project with photorealistic rendering of a villa using Gear VR/ iOS / Android. This was an opportunity to create the design of mobile-optimized villa on Samsung Gear VR. There are many other different virtual reality devices out in the market like: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Google cardboard and this virtual reality real estate experience can be optimized for any of these devices as well.

APPROACH

Virtual reality in real estate is the latest trend in the market which offers immersive experience for the user. We needed to render each object in the world twice which doubles the rendering complexity. Next was combining the meshes to improve the performance. However anything can’t be overdone, aggressive combining of meshes affects the performance boost given for occlusion culling.

Considering every single aspect, we created this VR experience of interior design to give our clients a real-feel.

• Exterior: We designed realistic 3D architectural rendering and animation for retail buildings, residential properties and hotels. In exterior we built the prototype before actual construction started, which helped in showcasing demos.
• Interior: We offered interior design with a real-feel view and added the elegance in your dream property. It showed the live view of home decor, design which helped the buyers to have a better idea of the property.
• 360 degree panoramic tour: We built the view of the virtual place, consisting of 360 degree panorama, virtual tour, 3D architectural exterior and interior rendering design in various tours, like bedroom, kitchen, living room, bathroom, office, store and more.
• Floor planning: Floor planning helped our clients to easily visualize and conceptualize their dreams in the design of their homes and properties in 3 dimensions through our 3D floor plan, 3D site plan and 3D sections plan.
• Video production:Whether commercial or Social, Religious or Personal, Presentation would be the first step to communicate the message to the target audience. But good video presentation is not only the montage of images, it needs that strength to attract customers which can be done with VR.

• Shaders
• Lighting
• Multisampling anti- aliasing (used for smoothing jagged edges)

• Unity3D
• WebGL

Standard shaders seemed bit heavy on Gear VR as it’s a mobile device. We had to avoid transparent and reflective materials when we were running on Gear VR powered by Note4, however Note 5 was powerful enough to use those shader and better effects.

MSAA above 2x didn’t give visible improvements in the quality and it was degrading performance. There should be optimum balance between performance and quality which is only determined by profiling or testing.

LIGHTING

On the mobile devices using real time lighting is not a good idea. Obviously we needed to go for light backing. Baking of 300 MB model was too much time consuming. We had to switch to external baking used mental ray to produce occlusion map per object. To give the final output, we combined lighting map involved directional light with Photoshop. Legacy light mapped shaders were used for each material. Result of entire process was not great. We again restarted standard Unity baking process to achieve light mapping with tweaking few options which was lengthening the baking process. Much optimised rendering was achieved after disabling final gathering phase.