Andrew Lucas Virtual Show Room
The Andrew Lucas virtual smart home was conceived as a way to help potential customers gain insight into how a smart home can be integrated into a home without being intrusive and improve their lives in the process, all without the need for them to visit a showroom. Instead, a virtual reality experience was created that could be brought to the client in their homes, letting them explore a smart home in its entirety and learn more about the various types of technology that could be installed in their new properties.
Andrew Lucas London commissioned its VR design division – Andrew Lucas Studios – to create the following:
– A fully animated, completely explorable VR home experience on the Oculus Rift platform, which allowed the user to interact with a whole property inside and out, including a home cinema/virtual reality room.
– A lighter version of the VR home experience with a number of fixed viewpoints, which could be viewed using a mobile headset or on a screen via a web browser. This included a limited number of animated interaction points and reduced resolution to keep the build light and quick to load.
The project was first designed to be shown at the Ideal Home Show in the UK and was intended to give potential clients a greater contextual understanding of the smart home design and installation service available from Andrew Lucas London.
The initial build was created for use on the Oculus Rift, with the virtual smart home modelled from scratch in Unreal Engine by the Andrew Lucas Studios team and populated with home technology, either through using available 3D models from manufacturers, where possible, or being visualised from 2D drawings by the design team. A custom VR demonstration unit was designed and built by Andrew Lucas to house the necessary computer and sensors, as well as a TV so others could see what the person using VR was looking at.
This has subsequently been used for client meetings, where a VR Pro set-up are used to let potential smart homeowners explore various ideas for their own properties. Following the first showing of the virtual smart home, a second, lighter build was created using the Unity platform for use on mobile devices or in a web browser. This means that potential clients are able to take this experience home with them and demonstrate it to family and friends.
Both virtual smart home builds include the following systems and devices:
• Lighting and shade control (Lutron)
• Home security system using (Satel, Netatmo)
• Whole house home entertainment system (Bowers & Wilkins)
• Outdoor speaker system (Sonance)
• Voice recognition control (Amazon Echo)
• Heating control (Heatmiser)
• Unified home control (Control4)
• Home cinema (Ineva, Projecta)
One of the things that potential customers often find difficult is envisioning how smart home technology will fit into their homes, and how it will look once completed. While having experimented with numerous smart home technology demonstration units, the Andrew Lucas London team wanted to exploit the immersive nature of VR to create a memorable experience that would stick in customers’ minds.
Working with the smart home division, Andrew Lucas Studios came up with a list of relevant technology and created an initial design that could be used to show a client VR. This was refined over several stages as the smart home team tested the model and gave numerous suggestions to make it a more realistic experience that hewed as closely as possible to the smart home experiences the company can deliver.
So that customers could try this experience using a mobile headset or on their computers/tablets via a web browser URL, a secondary model was devised using fixed vantage points, allowing the home to explored while minimising loading times and lag. This second build was also adapted and shared with price comparison site MoneySuperMarket for use as part of its Connected Home hub on its website, allowing a much wider audience to get a better understanding of a custom smart home installation.
VR has now become a critical part of the client journey for Andrew Lucas London customers; not only are they able to get inspired by a VR experience ahead of choosing their preferred smart home configuration, but complex environments such as home cinemas are now being modelled in VR as part of the design process for client sign-off before construction begins.
Andrew Lucas Virtual Show Room
Category
Project > Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality / Emerging Technology
Winner Status
- Winner
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