Hello, Stewart, how are you? 

 

Yes, good, thank you very much, David. Yourself? 

 

Very good, thank you. I'm intrigued by your firm and its offerings! The firm is Virtual Viewing, and one of the key offerings that's piqued my interest is something called The Home User Guide. So, for those who don't know, could you explain what Virtual Viewing is, what it does, and perhaps we can move on to the home user guide after that? 

 

Yes, Sure. So, Virtual Viewing. Who are we? What are we? We're a prop tech company; we're historically steeped in 3D, 4D, 5D, and smart development. So, we've worked in smart cities and with the construction industry and real estate and so forth. But where we're at now, it's been a beautiful alignment of the planets with the marketplace. We've been writing a database, an AI-enabled database around BIM for many, many years. And as you would know, with the advances in AI over the last couple of years, it's all coming to fruition really well. This centralized database that we've created, which we call My Hub, enables a whole suite of products to come off the one database, and The Home User Guide is just one of those apps that comes off the central database. So, it's really exciting. I think 2024 has probably been the most exciting year in the last 20 for us.

 

And The Home User Guide; what is it? How does it work? Who uses it, all of that stuff. How is it installed, and how much did it cost? 

  

The Home User Guide is…you've just bought a new home, you move in, you come through the front door, and usually on the dining room table or the kitchen counter, there's a box of manuals and a bowl of fruit next to it. Now, that box of manuals, which tells you what washing machine you've got, how to find your stopcock, and all the rest of it, is all in an app sat on your phone, Siri enabled, Google Assistant-enabled, so you can now ask the app all the questions that you normally have to rifle through all the paperwork for. Typical users are student accommodation, build-to-rent, PDRs. Local authorities are doing a lot with us at the moment, and housing associations. 

How much does it cost was the other thing you asked. Tricky to answer, that one. If you happen to be building a tower block of 400 of the same, one-bedroom flats, then it's probably 30 or 40 pounds a unit. If you ask us to do a home user guide on an eight-bedroom, six-storey mansion it is probably five or six thousand. So somewhere in the middle there!

 

What sort of thing does it allow the user to do?

 

For instance, you could ask Siri or whoever, what's the size of the bathroom? Or: how much to re-carpet the living room? Or…

 

...so, you're in a carpet shop, remotely, for example…

 

...yes, or even you're sitting at home, and between you, you are thinking, do you know what? It'd be quite nice to redecorate X, Y or Z room. Then the app will already have all the dimensions of the room, so can very quickly give you a ballpark, an estimate of what redecorating costs might be. You could then also ask the app for things like: what make is the cooker? Or where do I buy replacement extractor filters for the extractor? And it will know all the items that you've got in your apartment or in your house, and it'll be able to give you the answer.

 

So, in terms of the cost, the house builder or operator pays for that, rather than the end user?

 

Yes, very much so. I mean, we have an end user app in development, but the end user comes with a whole number of challenges, whereas working with a large-scale house builder, housing association or a local authority is a much more controlled environment. And yes, the business model or the plan is that, at the moment, the housing developer pays for it, hands it over. And if it's a freehold property, at the end of two or three years, depending on what the developers decide to fund it for, it will be up to us, Virtual Viewing, to go to the resident and say, do you want to continue using this? At that point, it's 79 pence per month for them to keep it going.

 

You do a whole lot of other stuff in this field, don't you? You do animation, CGIs, etc. How quickly is technology advancing in this area? I'm presuming it is exponentially quicker in most things. Is that right?

 

Absolutely! There is not a single area of our business that hasn't been affected by the rapid advancements in tech over the last 24 months. To give you an example, yes, we do CGIs and we do animations, whereas historically, if we were doing a CGI and the client has said, could you change the marble floor into wooden flooring, it would take an artist X number of hours to do. You now just ask AI to do it, and it's done in a matter of minutes. So, you can very quickly go back to the client and check what it is they want. We do a large number of digital twins with building data performance embedded into them. That wasn't possible two or three years ago. You couldn't get the data transfer between the systems and the apps, and now you just can. Everybody is collaborating in a way that some other industries have been doing for years, and real estate is just catching up with. So, yeah, terrifically exciting.

 

When you spoke about that, I had an image flash through my mind of an announcement pinned to a lamp post about planning as being the kind of corollary of this, the absolute opposite of this. Has planning embraced this kind of thing in terms of community consultation, effectively?

 

in my opinion, effectively, no. Have they started to try and embrace it? Yes. Have I seen a successful way of doing it yet? No. I think there's a long way to go, but a number of planning authorities are now looking at having digital twins of their areas of their landscape, so that people can submit plans already in a 3D model. They are starting to switch on a bit more to community engagement apps. So again, what you have just said about the lamppost; you could scan a QR code on that, pull up the documents, maybe see the 3D model of what's being proposed. It's happening. But very slowly.

 

Just as a final question, using your crystal ball in terms of the next five to 10 years, what advances do you think we'll see in this space?

 

Well, it will all be AI-enabled to a much, much greater degree than we can crystal ball gaze at the moment. You can see it that planning applications will be done with you being able to sit opposite the planner and speak about what it is you want to be able to do, and the 3D model will be generated in real time on the planner’s desk with you. Or you'll be able to sit down with the architects and be able to do that. You'll be able to walk around your new home instantly in the metaverse, or whatever the metaverse will be then. But I think more important and more exciting for us is that the advancement in AI will allow us to understand what we're actually doing to the built environment. So, rather than just one housing project going forward for planning, when you have whole estates being planned, what's the impact on the wider area? I know companies are doing that already with reporting, but the AI will be able to simulate a whole range of scenarios. It will be able to tell us about building performance, how to manufacture closer to site, cut carbon footprint, look after the wildlife. All of that knowledge that's dotted around in people's minds, specialist minds, will be pulled together. 

 

So: very last question, just to return to your description of the firm, initially, you mentioned 3D, 4D, and 5D. Now I know what 3D is. I think I know what 4D is. Could you explain what 5D is?

 

(laughs) You make a good point! 5d is - we put it in our logo, slogan on purpose so that people would do exactly the same and say what is 5D?  5D is quants - quantities, stuff. You have 3D which is the place in space. 4D is time, and then 5D is: what's in that building? So, you could have a construction sequence of a tower block being built. It's in 3D. It's going up in time, so it's in 4D and then the 5D will tell you how many people are on site, how much carbon has been used so far, how many bricks have been laid, how much concrete has been poured.

 

Wow. Okay, well, roll on 6D! Thank you very much for talking to me, and it's fascinating to hear about all this. Thank you

 

Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you. David.

 

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