Developers use 'virtual tours' to familiarize prospective tenants with what hasn't yet materialized
Glide toward the glass facade of 100 Cambridge Street, and the revolving door turns smoothly as you enter. Observe the skyline through the atrium, then move down a hallway marked by shops, ceiling lights glistening off the dark marble floor as you go. Watch business men and women chatting and gesturing, some seated in a lobby cafe, before you enter the elevator, rise, and tour a furnished office. Or circle the 22d floor, gazing at views of the Back Bay and Charles River, of Boston Harbor and the Financial District. Now, sit back in your chair: You haven't taken a step. You were on a computer-generated tour of the completely renovated former Saltonstall state office building months before it is completed. Tours like this one, created by Injectmedia of Brookline, are a glimpse of the future -- and increasingly the present -- in the real estate world. "If you're working on a project where it is difficult to take that real estate for a test drive, it's a real opportunity to give people a good vision and feel for what the property is going to look like," said Andy Hoar, president of CB Richard Ellis/Whittier Partners, which is selling space in the emptiest office building in town, the new
33 Arch Street, for developer Dean F. Stratouly. The marketing office for nearly completed 33 Arch Street, a block away from the actual structure, features a virtual tour of the 33-story building created by ADD Inc. of Cambridge and Neoscape Inc., also of Cambridge, the leading local firm in creating bricks-and-mortar-like reality when only architectural renderings exist.
"Here's something cool -- a `helicopter ride' down the shaft of the building," said Enrique Bellido, project manager for Stratouly's company, Congress Group Ventures, as he navigated through an interactive virtual tour of the new building.
Absent, or virtually so, only a decade ago, this niche in the industry has gained rapidly. Now any sizable new project almost demands a Web tour, a CD-ROM, or a DVD to familiarize prospective tenants with what hasn't yet materialized.
Just as 10-year-olds create minutely detailed suburban abodes with the popular computer game series The Sims, artists and architects -- working with powerful computers -- "pre-create" the commercial, and increasingly the residential, floors and rooms that someone will use or inhabit.
"When you're doing multiple shots or moving through a space, you really can't do that through watercolors," said Robert MacLeod, president of Neoscape. "There is absolute value in movement, in understanding volumetrically how the space is put together."
Neoscape has put some key pieces of the modern Boston puzzle together even before they were ready for occupancy permits: the Back Bay office building 10 St. James, the mixed-use Channel Center on the edge of South Boston, and -- almost ready for prime time -- Robin Brown's Mandarin Oriental Hotel and Residences at the Prudential Center."It's hard to visualize on Boylston Street," said Brown, former general manager of the Four Seasons Hotel and a partner in CWB Boylston LLC, developer of a project he says will raise the luxury bar in Boston. "The benefit of what Neoscape did was to place the building in the context of the street and the neighborhood."
Shown only to a handful of "qualified" potential buyers so far, the DVD displaying the Brown project takes viewers on a day-into-night, suspended-in-air journey around the complex, to be located on Bolyston just west of Lord & Taylor.
As the perspective changes, the windows -- in a building that doesn't even get under construction until later this year -- reflect the actual surroundings, the structures across the street. The view closes in on a digital but highly realistic blonde woman in a black dress, sipping wine, standing on a balcony. Her view over Boylston Street is the Charles River at sunset.
A work in progress, the Mandarin Oriental virtual tour will eventually allow prospective buyers, many looking to move from large suburban Boston manses, to "tour" any one of the 53 condominiums -- to test out the views on all sides of residences as large as 6,000 square feet each.
Although he has been closely involved in putting it together -- including choosing the make of car that pulls up front (a BMW) and the song that plays over this brief, fast-paced marketing movie ("The Way You Look Tonight") -- Brown said the details still surprise him.
"I see a fire burning in the condo, I see pianos in living rooms, I see furniture on the balcony," he said, tapping a remote control one morning recently in the Boston offices of the project's architect, CBT Childs Bertman Tseckares Inc. "We created a two-minute version of `Shrek.' "
Evolving from architectural stills, slide shows, and videos, virtual reality technology at first was too labor intensive and expensive for any but the largest and most expensive developments.
MacLeod, president of Neoscape, one of the leading companies in the industry nationally, was working in the "advanced visualization group" of Parsons Brinckerhoff in the early 1990s, concentrating on large public transportation projects. He cofounded Neoscape in 1995, employing new digital products to shape space in two dimensions.
"Some things you can do with a virtual camera you can't do with a real camera," said MacLeod, who started with software from a Texas firm called Electric Image and a modeling tool known as Form Z, made by Autodessys Inc. Now Neoscape also uses 3D Studio Max, manufactured by Discreet.
"You can animate anything with it," he said.
Neoscape was tapped last year by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority to produce a nine-minute, soaring aerial tour of the post-Big Dig park strip known as the Rose Kennedy Greenway.Doing similar work are Advanced Media Design of Providence, IOMedia of New York, and a number of companies in California and elsewhere. But, said Neoscape's marketing director, Dick Casey, on the West Coast, "Most of them want to be in the movie business."
Not everyone is captivated by these semi-real sojourns.
"We do not believe in it as a selling tool," said Ronald M. Druker, who is completing the Atelier/505 luxury condos in the South End and leasing his also luxurious Colonnade Residences on Huntington Avenue. Druker prefers full-scale mock-ups of kitchens and bathrooms, and he has a remarkably detailed scale model of Atelier in the marketing office across Tremont Street.
Druker and his architect are using computer-driven technology to get a 360-degree sense of a home he's building for himself, but he said some prospective buyers can be put off by virtual-reality presentations.
"They're very one-dimensional, even though they are three-dimensional, and they're very unreal," Druker said.
But Gretchen Mellon, cofounder of Injectmedia, who helped create the 100 Cambridge Street tour for Meredith & Grew Inc./Oncor and is now an independent consultant, said disks with virtual tours on them will soon be as common as color brochures. In 1997, Mellon did one of the first such tours in the Boston area, for Waltham Woods Corporate Center.
"If they can walk through six months before it's finished, vs. going on a property with a hard hat, their buying decision is going to lean toward the one they can walk through," she said. "And with the residential market becoming so competitive, I think it's a necessity."
Perhaps as a sign of the increasing importance of these virtual tours, developers are now going to great lengths to get the details right.
When none of the stock characters in the Mandarin Oriental files seemed to work for the grand entrance envisioned for the new Boylston Street project, the creators spared no expense in their search for the perfect model for virtual greeters, who could be digitally stitched into the presentation.
Brown hired a photographer across the Atlantic.
"The doormen are from the Mandarin Oriental in London," he said.
