19. September 2019
ZipView simplifies real estate with immersive VR archviz solution
ZipView literally means “viewing the house”—zip is the Korean word for house. But ZipView goes beyond the act of just physically seeing a place; it encompasses activities like visiting showrooms before making a purchase, receiving consultations from a realtor, buying and selling real estate, signing leases or rental contracts, and browsing interior designs.
The platform acts as a new distribution ecosystem that connects businesses with clients, and leverages advanced technology for all stages of real estate transactions including sales, brokerage, leasing, development, management, and residential services. Our goal is to make transactions between businesses and clients more accessible and reliable.
Using ZipView, clients can easily and conveniently make real estate transactions online or offline, when and where they want, and with significant time and cost savings; the immersive 3D VR environment offers a virtual showroom that offers the same realistic experience for viewing residential and commercial buildings as physically being on site.
Unreal Engine and Datasmith drastically reduce time and costs
In order to meet the client’s expectations, the immersive real estate content has to be as realistic as the real thing, to eliminate the need for an actual viewing. ZipView’s VR content, powered by Unreal Engine’s photorealistic real-time rendering, immerses the user in the experience of being in an actual house, with sunlight shining through the windows and inviting furniture placed in the virtual rooms. The exceptional quality gets people asking us if the service uses photographs. Many of them are surprised to hear that it is entirely CG. Unreal Engine was the natural choice to achieve this level of hyperrealistic quality, to manage large assets, and to maintain stable, high frame rates for VR. Unreal Engine also greatly enhanced the productivity of our content creation pipeline. Prior to using Unreal, creating the final output required complicated pipelines and long wait times. Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering enables us to quickly view the final pixels in real time, and even offers the option to export images and videos for various marketing materials. With the introduction of Datasmith, we are able to directly import 3ds Max and CAD data into the Unreal Editor, significantly reducing the overall production time.
Enhancing the user experience with Unreal Engine
Most importantly, Unreal Engine is extremely accessible. ZipView’s 3D designers, who were accustomed to other software packages, were able to quickly learn Unreal from tutorials and templates. Also, the Unreal community offers tips and know-how from around the world, coupled with high-quality assets that are freely available. Unreal’s features—such as large-scale collaborative build capabilities, data management, and profiling—boost our work effectiveness and help us manage multiple projects. In addition, we continue to improve productivity in ZipView through various proprietary automation plugins added onto Unreal Engine.
Last but not least, Unreal Engine enables us to keep our platform up to date with the latest real-time technology by offering features like real-time ray tracing and virtual production tools, which consistently improve user experiences and help keep ZipView at the forefront of the industry.
Saving time and cost for construction companies and clients
With ZipView’s immersive 3D VR environment, clients can experience all aspects of houses before they are constructed including the interior space, the view of the surrounding environment, and the building exterior. At the same time, construction companies can operate online and offline digital showrooms throughout the country based on ZipView’s VR content and real estate distribution ecosystem, reducing both the construction fee for mock-ups and the indirect cost of promoting content. By offering the option to customize various interactive content like the view on each floor—using a physical single-floor apartment space with fake windows made of LED screens—the balcony structure, the furniture, the interior design, and more, ZipView enhances the marketability of real estate and delivers a unique, immersive experience to clients. There have been cases of sales being closed on multi-purpose residential buildings simply through ZipView, prior to building mock-ups.
Since commercial facilities like shops, malls, hotels, resorts, and other business complexes are difficult to replicate, ZipView is the sole provider of a virtual viewing experience in the Korean market. Customers can easily view houses by accessing the online service across various platforms that include PC and mobile, or through offline businesses that use ZipView.
Popularizing high-quality, immersive 3D VR content through proprietary technologies
Having created Korea's first immersive 3D VR interior space experience in 2015, we welcomed Daelim Industrial Co., Ltd, one of the leading construction companies in the country, as our first partner to install ZipView at the sales site. They received many accolades for their launch of the first VR showroom. Last year, ZipView was well-received at the exhibition hall of Acro Seoul Forest, which had the highest sales price across the nation. ZipView is now being used in the real estate sales market by top apartment brands and construction companies in Korea, enabling clients to experience Korea’s iconic landmark complexes such as Hannam The Hill, Signiel Residence, Trimage, and the Galleria Foret. ZipView is expanding into the global market, starting off in Vietnam in the first half of 2019 with plans to enter markets in Malaysia and China.
In addition, ZipView owns numerous proprietary technologies and patents on VR technology as a result of the team’s R&D efforts. The company registered a patent for its immersive 3D VR interior space information web viewer technology, which was awarded the grand prize for Best Patent Products in the latter half of 2016. ZipView also has two patents relating to the easy creation and distribution of 3D objects in interior virtual spaces.
ZipView significantly reduced the time and cost of creating and distributing existing VR real estate content by developing a modularized automation system, and has contributed to the popularization of high-quality, immersive 3D VR content. Currently, ZipView has the most VR real estate data in Korea.
Want to create your own high-quality, immersive 3D VR content? Download Unreal Engine today.