Commercial Centre Máj: Virtual Reality Helping to Lease Commercial Space

Today it’s incorporating virtual reality in its extensive renovation of the iconic Máj department store in the heart of Prague.

Brief

Extensive visualizations and catalogues are no longer enough for developers to present their projects and spaces to clients. The goal today is to transport clients into the unit they may want to lease before it’s been built and experience their future sales floor. It’s also crucial for developers to see what their spaces will look like, which usually isn’t possible just from an architectural proposal. These ideas led Amádeus Real to seek out the Virtuplex, which transformed the renovation process and the way spaces to lease are offered and presented.

The Solution

After the initial meeting, Amádeus Real put Virtuplex operators in contact with the architects who delivered the needed data to be transposed into virtual reality. Within a month, the company’s management including Project Manager Václav Klan toured the 17,000m2 and 11 floors of the department store in virtual reality, and they have regularly returned with the architects since then. They view the layouts of all the spaces and make smaller adjustments to the project that can be immediately added to the project, fine-tuning the renovation to perfection before it actually begins.

Tenants Can Use VR to Design Their Space to Their Desires

Future tenants also have their say about the appearance of their spaces, using the Virtuplex to see what their sales area will look like They can design their space and see it’s benefits and problems, or select another unit that has more added value for them. The opinions of the tenants also help the developer, which then makes adjustments that were not expected before the use of virtual reality because the problems could not be pinpointed using just blueprints and visualizations. Thanks to virtual reality, Amádeus Real saved time and money that would otherwise have to have been invested into construction work later.

The complete immersion and the reality that clients can change the scale of the walkthrough as desired allows them to see minute details that would be ignored in a real walkthrough. While a 1:1 view shows the height of ceilings, the layout of rooms, or the width of hallways, a 1:50 scale shows an overview of the entire project and an understanding of how it works as a whole.

A Challenge For Us

“In the case of the Máj department store, the most difficult thing modelling the surroundings. It was important for people to have an authentic experience when doing a walk-through. It’s not just a photograph, but a real 3D model of all the buildings in downtown Prague. The easiest aspect was the visualization of the store itself, which is an iconic building. We had to make sure that its virtual twin was identical with the real thing.”

Pavel Novák, Virtuplex Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer