case-studies realestatevr: a vr property portal on google daydream
realestateVR: A VR Property Portal on Google Daydream
case study · 28·09·2026
Before Far Horizons: realestateVR, the VR property portal REALABS built at REA Group and launched on Google Daydream in 2017.
This is Luke Chadwick’s work at REA Group, before Far Horizons existed. It follows on from Matterport at REA Group.
The challenge
By 2016, REALABS at REA Group had shown that 3D tours changed buyer behaviour, and it had a large library of Matterport scans. The next question: could you search for properties and walk through them without taking the headset off?
Google announced Daydream, its mobile VR platform, in 2016. Building for it meant building for hardware most people didn’t own yet.
The approach
REALABS built realestateVR with Cogent and DiUS as development partners and people from across REA Group. Drew Pearce was the product manager.
The interface went through many iterations. The lesson was that people fall back on what they already know: the menus that worked best looked like realestate.com.au on web and mobile. realestateVR shipped with property search and browse, price overlays, agent cards and navigation cues, with Matterport tours as the main content and a browser fallback for people without a headset.
The results
- realestateVR launched on Google Daydream in 2017, a world-first VR property portal
- Search, browse and property visits all worked inside the headset
- It made the content problem obvious: VR for every property needed far more 3D capture than Matterport could supply at the time, which led Luke to cheaper 360° cameras and, later, the work that became DTour
The takeaway
In VR, familiar beats novel. The interface that worked was the one that looked like the website people already used, and the hardest constraint was content, not hardware.
The build, screenshots and partners are on the realestateVR page and the REALABS timeline.