Dear readers,
Last week I was invited as a speaker to Disrupt CRE (http://disruptcre.com), a conference that brings together real estate and technology professionals to explore how technology is facilitating the changes in the future of investing, developing, managing, leasing, buying, selling, & financing commercial properties.
The conference brought together almost all the leaders (CIO and SVP level) in real estate including companies such as DTZ, BlackStone, CRBE etc.
Panel discussion about the prospects of using 3D scanning, augmented and virtual reality in sales and demonstration of real estate was moderated by Hussain “Hoss” Ali-Khan (Director, Strategy at CBRE).
The focus of the discussion was on the future of the sector, as well as the immediate prospects of the use of 3D scanning and virtual reality technologies in real estate sales among leading companies Floored, RDM, Cube Cities and Augmented Pixels.
I would like to summarise the main points of our discussion:
1. Those companies that train staff and integrate interactive presentation and sales platform AR and VR into their business processes get very good results in terms of conversion, customer engagement and strengthening of brand innovativeness.
2. Since the market is only in its infancy and there are many companies with very raw products, most retailers or real estate developers who decide to use Augmented or Virtual reality solutions in their business, do this inefficiently or do not integrate AR or VR into their core processes at all, but use it just as a gimmick. As a result, they receive negative return of investment and a believe that these technologies do not work.
3. Key vendors of real estate sales solutions with AR/VR have significantly improved the quality of their platforms over the past 2 years, so now the main constraint is the quality of devices (Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR) and the cost of content creation (3D reconstruction).
Considering that the device quality is improving by 100% per year we can be expected that by the end of 2015 or in early 2016 we will be able to demonstrate real estate projects with photorealistic quality in virtual reality to consumers.
4. Recent news about the support of 360-degree videos by YouTube and announced support of 360-degree videos by Facebook together with plans that Oculus Rift has to release the final product in 2015 or in the beginning of 2016 let us make conclusions that AR/VR market is going to become a mass market in 2016. This means that real estate and retail spheres can expect the mass usage of their solutions for marketing and sales by ordinary customers.
After the panel discussion we had another discussion broadcasted live:
Thank you for your attention!
I hope my notes were useful to you. I will be glad to discuss any ideas and proposals.
Vitaliy Goncharuk
CEO of Augmented Pixels