Monday, April 7, 2008

Purchasing Property through SL

As I prepare to graduate and move on to a career, I am faced with issues such as searching for a condo/apartment to move to. It has been a tedious process and I can't seem to get over the feel that I am going to make a bad decision. The problem with this is that I am looking at pictures and reading about properties online, but I am unable to get a feel for what I am actually getting.

Second Life could be a possible avenue for improving this process. If property owners or management groups built models of their properties on the market, potential buyers would be able to tour them in second life. They could be built so that the dimensions are similar to that in real life, and everything within the house is the same. If this process was developed, I believe it would become very popular and potentially change the way people shop for homes forever. This could also be done to sell commercial properties, vehicles, or anything else that adding dimensions to could improve.

2 comments:

arturo said...

Although this has been proposed as on of the practical uses and actually implemented by a major hotel (and probably many others we are not aware of), so you can check their rooms and their surroundings, real estate companies do offer "virtual tours" of their properties via QuickTime VR and other technologies that work almost without a hitch and are accessible and easier to use for the common person looking for a house or apartment. These VR tours are almost standard by now in the real estate industry

chihyu said...

And as I know, lots of interior designers take advantage of some other 3D softwares like 3ds max to create a model before they build it. The main idea is to have customers interact with the environment so that they may get a feeling about how it would be like once they live in it. These models would then be presented either as a movie with pre-defined navigation, or an application that users can navigate the camera around so to inspect the whole building. Building in SL is less complicated and detailed than in traditional 3D software, yet for people to look around and have a brief understanding of the rooms, it should be useful and convenient. I can't imagine how great it will be if every community has its apartments' layout and environment built by any of the existing VR tools.