RentAR – Augmented Reality Apartment Viewfinder
RentAR envisions an augmented reality real estate application for mobile devices. This project focuses on utilizing AR technology with Vuforia and Unity to present a potential solution for augmented reality apartment hunting.
Project Overview.
Project Time: October 2016 to December 2016
This project was conceptualized as the final project for my Mobile Augmented Reality Studio class during my time completing my M.S. Integrated Digital Media degree.
The Problem: Apartment hunting can be stressful and time consuming. We all know the procedure, we spend time on sites like Zillow and StreetEasy looking at apartments we’re interested in. From talking to a small group of students at NYU while I was thinking about augmented reality projects, it was determined through conversation that sometimes, they will be walking with friends in nice neighborhoods that they didn’t know previously to look at. They will make a mental note to try and remember to look it up when they get home. The process, however, can be long as they will need to remember where they’ve been in order to enter their location into these website.
The problem here was that they thought it took too long to revisit these places online to check for available apartments after the fact.
The Solution.
With RentAR, I wanted to create an experience for people where they could walk into a neighborhood and the app would pull data from the phone's GPS as well as popular rental sites to pull up relevant information.
Simple and straightforward. RentAR was designed to show what was possible with real estate and augmented reality.
Ideation.
RentAR was conceptualized on a walk through Brooklyn. I was walking around and wondering if there were apartments for rent in the area. I decided not to look because it would involve too many steps to get the information that I wanted.
I wanted a simpler way to get the information that I wanted, so I thought that it would be neat to point my phone at a building to show me if there were vacancies.
Differentiation and Interface.
With the wide variety of apps out already for apartment rentals, I wanted to differentiate by displaying important and relevant information first.
I decided to include the features and details you see above as many people wanted to know right away how many bedrooms and bathrooms there were, the price, and the floor plan of the apartment.
2D Floor Plan.
The inclusion of a 2D floor plan is pretty standard. People want to see the layout for the apartment they want to rent.
3D Floor Plan.
The 3D floor plan was conceptualized as a way for people to see how big the space could be. The idea was to include furniture at scale so that people could see how big the space really was, something that wasn't so easy from a 2D floor plan.
360 Degree Photos.
With the commercialization of 360 degree photography equipment, I thought it would be really neat to also include these 360 photos into the app.
The idea behind this was that it would give the user a way to see how to arrange the room given the amount of space. This feature would rely on the gyroscope of the phone to move the user through the space.
