How Makaan.com Is Replacing the Boring 2D Floor Plan With VR-Ready Virtual Tours
Thu Dec 01 2016
One of the best things about Google Street View is the freedom offered to the user – to not just look in any direction, but also move any way you please. Makaan, a Gurgaon-based online real estate marketplace, wants to build a version of this, for under-construction homes, which would help potential buyers better visualise what they are spending a fortune on, and push out the archaic 2D floor plan that's been used for decades in the process.
The company is calling it “3D virtual realty tour”, a cheeky play of words on virtual 3D models, real estate aka realty, and virtual reality. Yes, you can put on an Oculus Rift and tour your next home, welcome to 2016. Makaan isn't the first company in the real estate space to look at 3D models for houses - Commonfloor and Housing.com have come up with similar ideas, and HDFC Red suggests that this will soon be a hygiene feature in real estate projects.
The challenge lies in the resolution and accuracy of the 3D models, and Ravi Bhushan, Chief Technology Officer for Makaan, and parent real estate platform PropTiger, reinforces its importance multiple times during our conversation.
Makaan is doing things differently than everyone else, he claims. Using 3DSMax and an internally-built engine called Peacock, it creates a 3D model based on a 2D floor plan and available dimensions. These details are then stored on the server, fetched locally when a browser requests them and rendered at the client end using WebGL, which is supported by all standard browsers, Bhushan says.
