How Shea Homes Arizona Uses Immersive 3D and VR to Elevate Home Building and Buying

The world is changing quickly as we all adapt to the new normal. But as foreign as things may seem at times, people still need to do the things they have always done – like buying homes. A silver lining to our current situation is that conveniences that have been a long time coming have been accelerated, so touring and buying a new home is now easier and more accessible than ever, thanks to Immersive 3D and Virtual Reality.

Immersive 3D lets you walk around and explore your potential new home all from the comfort and safety of your old one.  By utilizing Matterport, our team can create a digital twin of a real-world floorplan that is realistic and accurate to size as if you were walking through it yourself.

To check it out, select any of our Shea Homes® Arizona communities from our map . Once you’re at the community page, scroll down to choose the floorplan you’re interested in. Click the ‘Virtual Tour’ link, and you’ll be launched into an immersive, 360-degree view of your chosen floorplan. From your laptop you can click the floor to move from spot to spot, allowing you to explore the home from all angles.

Looking at a floorplan is one thing but walking around in it offers an entirely different experience, one that gives a better feel of the space. And for a truly immersive experience you can also use a dedicated virtual reality machine like the Occulus, or even your phone paired with something like Google Cardboard.  Now you’ll really feel like you’re touring the real-life model home.

3D and Virtual Reality or VR for short, isn’t exclusively for our buyers, though. Over the last several months, our design team has implemented VR into the building process, which gives our team even greater flexibility and control throughout construction.

In the past, our team would design and build a model home, then conduct a ‘framewalk’, where the team tours the home and applies Shea’s attention to detail, making sure everything is exactly where it should be, from measuring doorframes to making sure windows are perfectly positioned. Even the smallest of corrections were immediately submitted to be redone. This might add to the overall build time, but for Shea, extra time is worth it to craft superiorly built homes.

But with the onset of social distancing guidelines earlier this year, team framewalks were no longer easy to conduct. So, we implemented VR technology to create completely photorealistic interior and exterior renderings of the finished product, long before a typical construction timeline would allow for a physical tour. And the ability to digitally simulate elements like time of day and season allows for even greater precision in our design – like simulating sunlight from different times of the year to analyze how to minimize glare on your television screen. 

This allows our design team to review the finished product well ahead of construction, which reduces overall build times and costs. And most importantly, it keeps our teams safe.  

To start exploring our Arizona communities in 3D Immersive and VR, start here.

For everything else Shea Homes, visit sheahomes.com.