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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

Holy mother of god. Wow!

Either matterport takes and runs with this or this is a startup waiting to disrupt Realestate.

I can’t believe how smooth this ran on my smartphone.

Feedback: if there was a mode to use the phone compass and gyro for navigation, it’d feel natural. Felt weird to navigate with fingers and figure how to move in xyz dimension.

As others have said, VR mode would be epic.

View on HN

Is this really something the real estate market wants though? The point of using styled and meticulously chosen images is to entice people to visit the property in person. I think it’s hard to fall for a home because you saw it through virtual reality.

It is, yes. If you browse zillow you'll find many homes have 3D views attached. These are often image-sphere captures that you can painfully move through by clicking. While I agree that full res photos can be more appealing, the user experience with SMERF is so much better it might leave end users with a more positive feeling about a property and thus increase the chances of a sale.

> I think it’s hard to fall for a home because you saw it through virtual reality.

I think if you take this 1-2 steps further and combine this with halucinating already owned furniture, or furniture that matches the prospective buyers taste into the property, this will make it a lot easier to fall for a home.

Thanks for the feedback!

I agree, we could do better with the movement UX. A challenge for another day.

Since the viewer is on GitHub, I’ll take it for a spin.

Are you accepting pull requests?

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