In 2012, as Oculus tried to kickstart the new wave of virtual reality experience, my friends and I came up with an idea for developing a platform for people to design their homes by enabling them to walk through it.
When Prasanth initially pitched the idea, I could immediately relate to it, because my parents and I had just finished building a home for my parents. There were lot of mistakes, and a lot of going back and forth with the architect, contractor and other vendors. So we (Prasanth, Sandeep and I) tweaked the initial idea to solve this pain point with customers. We discussed about how a single platform can help customer, architect, builder and vendors. We had a grand plan to solve this big issue. However, the technology required to make it happen was still at infancy. We decided to create a prototype!
Our first step was to learn Unity and create a 3D home structure and do a walkthrough on a computer. It took us a long time to learn and create our first model. We expanded our idea to create a database of vendor provided assets. For example, Ikea could provide 3D model of a dining table and we would add it in the database. Customers can choose from our database and place the Ikea dinning table in their room. If customer is happy with the dinning table during the walkthrough, they could click on the table and place a direct order with Ikea. We wanted the client to walk through the house while wearing a VR headset and be able to move walls, change the color of the wall, or move the TV from one place to another. We hit our first roadblock when we realized that changing the assets in real time and render it quickly was not possible with a standard computer, we would need a high performance computer with dedicated graphics processing. We were still able to make real time changes, it was taking too long to render the output.
We still decided to go ahead with other parts of the prototype, and looked at creating a virtual environment using a VR headset. We were looking at different ways to translate the real-time walking to virtual reality walking. There were few technology coming up at that time, omnidirectional treadmill by Virtuix was one of the biggest one. Other methods were also considered, like setting up GPS points and mounting GPS tracker on a helmet which the client would wear; or laying down a sheet on floor with sensors which detect the movement. There were also concerns on safety, as the client won’t see where they are stepping in real life. Other questions were – how to create a feel of staircase in real world, vertical movement (knee bending or leaning) has to be translated, head tilting to view under furnitures and many more.
We bought the Oculus Rift DK2 when they were only shipping to their kickstarter backers. It was a big investment compared to the rupees we were earning. We were able to get the walkthrough loaded on the headset and the accompanying tracker helped in the straight walkthrough. At this point, we were way past the limits of our technical knowledge and we didn’t even do any business analysis.
At my MBA program, I decided to use our work as a project to understand the business aspect. The market study was not very positive, however, there were various ways to make similar product for different use. I realized that we were attempting to make a perfect product before hitting the market, whereas we should have tried to make a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP would have translated into a quick product based on the needs of the market. This would have provided us the initial customer and revenue source to start tweaking the product to fit the market. We also needed to expand our team as the three of us didn’t have the technical expertise to take it any further. After many discussions and hesitance, we decided to close any further development. It was a great experience as my first entrepreneurial effort. We made a ton of mistakes and learned a lot of new things.
Around one year later, I was happy to see that a company in Seattle developed a similar platform. I have seen various formats of this idea being developed by companies, and it is really exciting!