What do you get when you mix drones and 3D technology? One seriously immersive home tour, that’s what.
GeoCV has crafted a marketing package that blends 3D walkthroughs (of the sort popularized by Matterport) with 3D aerial models, providing one of the richest virtual experiences to hit the market.
Halstead Real Estate, a New York City-area brokerage, has put the visualization technology to use with an ultra-luxury property (see the model embedded above) listed in New Rochelle, New York. On the brokerage’s website, the listing pairs a 3D aerial model shot by a drone with a 3D interior model and walkthrough captured with a smartphone. GeoCV uses a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone equipped with a 20-megapixel camera to conduct 3D aerial scans.
Users can navigate the aerial model to view the estate from all angles and then click to seamlessly transition to either a 3D walkthrough or a floor plan of the home.
The technology helps prospective buyers probe the full grandiosity of the $18.95 million listing. Its grounds feature a 23,000-square-foot home conceived by the designer of Central Park, stretching over a 3-acre peninsula that includes a beach, dock and pool.
“The technology allows us to showcase this impressive waterfront estate in a way that traditional photos and floor plans simply could not,” said Matthew Leone, chief marketing officer of Halstead and Terra Holdings, which owns Halstead Real Estate. “The partnership will enable us to deliver a transparent experience to buyers that makes a sometimes-stressful experience of homebuying much more streamlined.”
GeoCV has focused on building technology that lets real estate agents and marketers capture photo-realistic home tours with smartphones. It currently uses the Samsung Galaxy S8 with a 3-D camera attachment
In April 2017, it fielded an app compatible with the only smartphone that included 3D capture technology at the time. It’s expanded into leveraging drones to capture aerial 3D visualizations as well.
To capture 3-D interior walkthroughs, GeoCV currently uses the Samsung Galaxy S8 with the 3D camera Structure Sensor, made by Occipital.
“These two devices are placed into a proprietary panoramic head sitting on a tripod, which allows the cameras to capture 360 degrees panoramas,” explained GeoCV CEO Anton Yakubenko.
The company’s technology will support more phone models in the future, including iPhones, he said.
“Showcasing the land and exterior of a house is crucial for marketing and understanding of any single-family home and especially for unique properties,” Yakubenko said in a statement.
The new marketing package, called the “Virtual Open House,” is available “to enterprise partners keenly interested in supporting our R&D” and costs, on average, $500 per listing, Yakubenko said.