Real Estate is a vertical market which has benefited from the information explosion, and we are at the point when the marketing brochure for a commercial property is ready years before the building itself. Case in point is Dubai where any number of Hi-Rise developments are being sold on TV worldwide via 3D walk through animations. For the ultimate in realism though we have to turn to Hollywood and the kind of pixel magic that you see in multi-million dollar movies, such as a development in Las Vegas that VRset produced a series of “photographs” and a private showing video presentation for.
This kind of presentation is not virtual reality but “Augmented Reality” and you will not see this technology used for real estate, we shot the empty land behind Belagio aboard a helicopter as if the building was there, we framed the shots to include the non-existing building, while in the air we shot both hi resolution still photos called back plates and video as the helicopter was arcing around the property.
As you imagine a lot of planning and coordination goes into this type of production, and nothing is left to chance. We can not say oops here, and come back to re-shoot this scene. Camera pilots are a different breed, they are like aerial DP’s (director of photography) and know how to move the ship around so it points at the focus of the shot without a lot of sweat from the camera man.
Once these plates are color corrected and processed VRset received the CAD files of the property from the architect, these files were then translated to 3D friendly form so we could “skin” them, meaning color each facet and apply properties such as glass or steel etc.
Now with the 3D building ready, using Hollywood wizardry VRset placed the building precisely onto the land using geo-data, and this is all good to create the high resolution “photographs” but for the moving video shot inside the helicopter we need another step where we have to move the building in sync with the helicopter back plate which has bumps, yaw, skew, shake, in every axis.
Rocket science stuff, meaning we are reverse engineering what was going on in the real camera up in the air as it was filming the land to a set of data which can drive the 3D software camera and tell it how to shoot the building frame by frame to match every frame of the back plate video.
Once the two images are composited you have the augmented reality shot of viewing the building from the helicopter as if you are seeing it from the passenger seat.
VRset has an extensive portfolio of luxury real estate in Orange County and Los Angeles.
