When we originally asked ourselves at RealVR.ai what’s possible over VR as a SaaS platform a few years ago, digital walkthroughs were top of mind. But the market wasn’t quite there. Very few people owned VR headsets, and things were expensive, with quality VR experiences within reach only to a select few, often in shopping malls or at the occasional gamer friend’s, at a conference, all experiences locked to PCVR — VR that runs over a PC that often costs upwards of $4K requiring hefty wall mounted and cabled setups.
Fast forward a couple of years + Corona + visionary leader Mark Zuckerberg and his team, who finally cracked the formula toward mass VR adoption with their heavily subsidized $300 ‘good enough’ 6dof Quest 2 device — and the magic of VR is now rocking the planet. And while FB sold $1B of VR software (!) over the last 12 months, And PwC declared VR the fastest growing media segment, and Accenture’s CEO Julie Sweet announced she bought 60K Quest 2 headsets for new employees, industrywide visionaries are coming together with the realization that VR is the greatest bang for buck medium for bringing professionals together with presence and superpowers, all while obliterating the need for expensive and environmentally unfriendly physical twin offices.
Drilling into proptech: What’s possible? Renting or buying residential or commercial real estate requires a lot of effort. First you need to figure out what you’re looking for. Then you have to go hunting for it, often with the help of a tough to find teamster realtor, but not only, ie in the case of renting, Airbnb, or if you’re simply hunting for a place by yourself. Then there’s the issue of driving to open homes, and calendaring availability. It gets messy real fast. And painful. We’ve all been there, looking for dozens of properties over weeks and months. And it’s a substantial pain point, all this driving around. Sapping of energy, the process is categorized as one of the most painful events in people’s lives.
To put things in perspective: Solutions from a myriad of online walkthrough technologies are the new norm, especially for high end residential and commercial real estate. But that still doesn’t replace having to go to the property prior to actually buying. Nothing really does. And you really should do that right before buying the place. But what if you could whittle it down to that perfect location to save you from all the running around leading to finding it? Here’s where the multiplayer VR platform Villa comes to the rescue:
Over Villa you can go in with your fellow decision makers + realtor, and:
- Rapidly go through pre-selected properties that fit your corporate or residential criteria, so you can prioritize rapidly to see which ones are the winners.
- Go in digitally with experts that can help you understand what you’re looking at, talk through the pros and cons, take notes, mark walls to break and new ones to build, spawn furniture, and reimagine your dream residential or corporate space as you begin to envision making it your own.
- You can also upload your scanned corporate campuses and offices, and come meet over those — making your physical twins obsolete if you want to. Don’t be Apple and Google and Amazon who face employee walkouts because these companies are still treating their employees as lemming resources that must be commanded to go to their wasteful multi billion dollar campuses, facing walkouts in a competitive choice-valuing employee market. Instead if you’re a CEO/CFO/Board reading this — do it! Go all digital and save your CapEx/OpEx and the environment. Physical offices are so 2019! They’re wasteful, dirty, unsafe, and an unneeded resource in the new era of the Metaverse.
At Villa — immersive collaboration platform our mission is to make physical twin offices obsolete, but we don’t stop there. We want to make sure that whether you’re collaborating as buyer/seller/realtor, or working on larger teams over imagined or scanned digital offices — that you do so with your unalienable superpowers.
Over Villa you can DIY and create whichever environment suits you. Like Roblox — for professionals in VR. From the Declaration: ‘that we are endowed by certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. And although it took us to 2021 to start fully realizing these unalienable superpower rights as they relate to life, liberty and happiness…Isn’t it more important to live them fully, rather than be in their pursuit?
