Fredrik Eklund had a glimpse of the future. In it, he wears a collarless red shirt and, by his own admission, a questionable hairstyle.
Nevertheless, the famous real estate agent has embraced Apple's latest gadget, the Vision Pro headset, which projects a cartoonish, ghostly Eklund into online meetings.
“This is the first generation of this technology,” he said of the headset, “and you can feel it.”
Eklund, who has started using headsets to participate in remote meetings, improves agents' work and gives buyers a vivid and compelling experience of a property, both remotely and before the property even exists. He is one of the early adopters in the real estate industry who sees opportunity. Being equivalent to reality itself.
“I have my laptop somewhere,” said Eklund, one half of Douglas Elliman's Eklund-Gomez team of the same name. “I only use my cell phone all the time, and this helps me get my work done because I can't see details like architectural drawings on a cell phone screen.”
The headset's spatial computing displays reality, or at least everything within a person's field of vision, on a large translucent desktop on which apps can run. To the person wearing the headset, apps appear as a large, high-resolution screen that can be placed anywhere in their field of vision.
“If you need to talk to someone and see a kitchen rendering and a floor plan at the same time, you can do that,” Eklund says, adding that there are drawbacks such as the device's weight, short battery life, and hand difficulty. I pointed out. -Free typing. “It's not perfect, but we can have hope.”
Eklund's avatar is clearly a computer-generated image, Apple's apparent workaround for the fact that headsets prevent their wearers from participating in video calls like they can with a laptop.
“I think my hair looks a little weird,” he said jokingly.
For Compass agent and Hawaii native Aaron Businger, the promise of the headset is on the client side. “Hawaii buyers are online buyers,” he said. Technology that provides an engaging remote walk-through experience is a clear boon for the remote real estate market.
Businger discovered during the early stages of Vision Pro experiments with the Alesia Barnes team that Apple's iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max were capable of better 3D video capture than the headsets themselves. Both Businger and Eklund said they felt Apple's device was much better than Meta's Quest 3 headset.
Among the flaws Businger found with Vision Pro: Siri's inability to understand Native Hawaiian names, such as Oahu's busy Kalanianaole Highway, and objects appearing blurry near the edges of the headset's field of view. There are several things that can be mentioned.
Bassinger said Apple's headset has only been shown on paper and in architect renderings, such as in a 60-acre master-planned community called “Ward Village” between downtown Honolulu and Waikiki, planned by Howard Hughes. We believe that it can also be used to sell new developments that do not exist.
The sales gallery Eklund is planning for 72B or 72 Carlyle by Lefferts, a 125-unit condominium project in Miami, will include an Apple headset that buyers can wear to experience the finished apartment before it's actually completed. We plan to set up a website and fill it out for those who wish to purchase it. A unit with furniture in your preferred style.
Apple Vision Pro's video quality has impressed some industry experts.
“Spatial video is somehow different than a camera that captures three dimensions,” says real estate photographer Evan Joseph. “3D videos often appear as flat layers on top of each other, but with Vision Pro, images appear more rounded.”
Joseph, who took the property photos for Annie Leibovitz's recent apartment sale, specializes in aerial photography that shows buyers what the property will look like once it's built. He has worked on numerous projects including the Billionaire Row project, 30 Park Place, and One High Line.
To field test Vision Pro, Joseph donned a headset and climbed into a helicopter. He quickly encountered hurdles.
In some cases, vibrations from flight interfered with the device's eye-tracking technology, which allows the wearer to select objects, similar to a mouse or trackpad. Wearing winter gloves, Joseph's hands were no longer visible through the headset, preventing him from selecting objects or apps or zooming in and out of images and videos.
“On the first flight, I had to land three times to make adjustments and deal with error messages,” said Joseph, who felt the Vision Pro was superior to the Quest 3. It’s a client deliverable,” he added.
As businesses test how to leverage Apple's devices, Zillow is one of the early entrants to the Vision Pro app store with Zillow Immerse. The app allows Vision Pro users to utilize their 3D real estate listings through the company's Showcase product. Currently, the Vision Pro app doesn't allow users to search for products, but a Zillow representative said the search feature will be introduced later this year.
Ten years ago, listing real estate on the internet was a novelty. Now, Apple is promising that its headsets will deliver impressions of reality as convincing as real life itself, with all its emotions, from windy beaches to the amenities of a new condo.
“At the end of the day, we're selling a lifestyle,” Eklund says. “We believe this can support price increases by translating the reality of the real estate experience.”
