DIY VR Kitchen Remodel
We live in a charming little tudor house, that came with a charming little kitchen, so after many years of bumping into each other while making dinner we have decided to remodel. When I asked our architect about 3D models, the price became expentially larger, so my husband and I broke out the tape measure and decided to do that part ourselves.
First we spent a ton of time measuring every inch of our kitchen (and first floor), then my handy husband entered all the information into SketchUp. (He's a perfectionist and even added the coved ceilings to the design.) SketchUp is pretty easy to use, and its free, so that's hard to beat when tackling this kind of DIY.
I had never uploaded this type of asset to Unity, so I did some googling and found a good post walking me through the steps and got the house all loaded and scaled properly. I was excited to put on the headset and see it all in VR.
Of course, as soon as I put on the headset, I didn't even get to the front door before I ran into a literal wall. As the scale is 1:1 we're going to have to teleport to get inside and walk around.
No need to reinvent the wheel, so I did a quick search on how to add locomotionn to my house. I found a pretty good post with directions and links to github (honestly the best part about the post was just the helpful tips and solutions discussed in the comments section.)
After downloading everything and adding it to Unity, the transporter is supposed to just work (with the example provided), but of course it didn't. An hour or two of reading blog posts and fiddling with it in Unity (error had to do with the NavMesh baking settings) I was finally "walking" through my house in VR!
Successfully teleporting around my house!
I think the first thing that struck me when I entered my "house" was that it seemed smaller somehow. Maybe it was the lack of furniture, I understand there is a whole psychology behind staging --emptiness can actually make rooms look smaller. However, I truly started to question, is my dining room really this size, is our living room really this small?
Turns out it is, but this made me wonder about the future of VR tours for real estate or architects --have they run into this same issue, or are they just doing virtual staging? I know that Matterport and other similar companies are banking on VR as the new wave in home sales, and with 360 degree cameras becoming more affordable I'm sure we'll start to see more VR home tours soon!