Virtual reality: diving into photorealism of interior design

Virtual reality is much more than a technology that you can use to create and play video games. Find out how this new medium is changing the customer experience in interior design.

Virtual reality technology is offering an entirely new model of a user engagement and is quickly becoming mainstream. Displaying products and services in all available sizes and formats and presenting information visually has become possible and easy independently of a screen resolution or an individual’s physical location.

VR is a powerful tool that can take you to an absolutely different time and place in an instant. Virtual reality apps are successfully used to do shopping, visit real and non-existent places, conduct training activities and educate. VR is capable of creating an emotionally engaging experience and helping present complicated information in a format easy to understand.

Interior home design is currently becoming one of the most popular niches in virtual reality development because with it you can easily become a skillful designer. You don’t need to take any training courses to become one. With VR, users can experiment with design at different levels, starting from complex and imaginative solutions to slight changes in the interior.

Currently we can see that virtual reality development in design is shaping the following areas of business interest:

• Interactive environments in video games.

3D games programming helps creating powerful visualizations of an environment, so a player can enjoy a realistic view of the rooms from different angles. With virtual reality, you can enter a totally different space, enjoy privacy or spend time with other players in a beautiful place.

• Visualization tool for designers.

For professionals, VR means growing their skills to introduce an interior as a virtual tour, sending virtual design models to customers, and making updates quickly. Virtual reality enables painless experiments in design.

• Interior design industry.

This is all about mobile app games where users create a virtual interior design for their home, using fashionable furniture items and compete with other app players. Creating and surrounding yourself with an interior design of your dream and immediately enjoying the final result is perfectly possible with virtual reality.

• Real estate business.

Virtual reality enables an immersive user experience for ecommerce sites, where a user can ‘walk’ around their future home or apartment and see the 360-degree interior representation. With the real picture in front of you and understanding how it looks like, it is easier to make decisions.

Our Unity developers have recently completed an interior design demo-project. Programming in Unity allowed us to create a very comfortable, bright and versatile home environment, using the PBR (physically-based rendering) and PBS (physically-based shading) visualization skills.

Specifically, with PBR we achieved development of the textures that could adjust their colors according to the changes in lighting and environment. And with PBS we enabled interaction between materials and light to achieve a high-level photorealism, allowing materials and surfaces blend with the shifting light most authentically.

Modeling of this interior design was completed using only a layout.

A technology stack that we used includes Real Time Lighting, High Poly Modeling, Real-Time Global Illumination, Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion, Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing, Post-Effects, Cinema 4D, Visual Studio Code, Photoshop, and Unity 3D.

Check out the video of the interior design our Unity developers team created:

Content created by our partner, Onix-systems.