Dive Brief:
- In collaboration with Skanska USA Commercial Development and digital production agency Studio 216, Microsoft is putting its new holographic headset to work for a Seattle office tower this summer in what will be the "world’s first holographic real estate leasing center," according to GeekWire.
- Skanska USA is using the technology to offer potential tenants a look at its high-rise office project, called 2+U, planned for downtown Seattle, according to the Daily Journal of Commerce.
- Studio 216, which has previously produced guided real estate tours with the Oculus Rift headset, has lent the same technology to a HoloLens experience for the planned Seattle high-rise.
Dive Insight:
The office building’s sales center will open in June, and the actual tower has a scheduled construction completion date of early 2019.
Virtual reality and mixed reality have become major forces in the design, construction and real estate industries. In December, Autodesk announced that its Fusion 360 software, with which users can design, test and manufacture physical objects, will be able to connect with Microsoft’s HoloLens as well. The company expects the technology to reduce the physical prototyping phase for those with a HoloLens headset.
It’s not a huge leap to imagine HoloLens playing a major role in Building Information Modeling’s (BIM) march toward the increased use of virtual reality. In February, Autodesk’s Stacy Scopano told Construction Dive that display hardware like HoloLens, combined with the latest 3-D modeling software’s capabilities and massive computing power, are leading toward the tipping point for virtual reality.
