Élara VR: stand in your home before it is built

Every studio in Bengaluru now shows you a 3D render. That is a good thing, and it is no longer enough. A render is a photograph of a room that does not exist yet, taken from the one angle the designer chose — usually the one where the room looks its best. You approve the picture. Then you move in, and you live in the other three walls.

So the walkthrough an Élara home gets is not a picture. It is something you stand inside, and you get it first, before you have signed anything. We call it Élara VR.

What Élara VR is

Each room of your home becomes a 360° scene: the room in its own proportions, with the materials, the light and the furniture in place, built from the same model the working drawings come from. It opens from your project in Élara OS. You stand in the room and look wherever you like — at the wall behind you, up at the ceiling, down at the floor where the stone meets the wood.

Three ways to see it

On your phone, you look round the room by turning the phone, as if it were a window into it. On a laptop, you drag to look round. In a VR headset, you are simply in the room. The scene, its materials and your approval are the same whichever you use, so the family can each look in their own way.

A double-height room is where a flat render fails first: the ceiling is half the room. Studio visualisation.

What it catches that a render does not

Most of what goes wrong between a design and a finished home is not in the picture you approved. It is just outside its frame. Standing in the scene, these are the things clients notice first:

• —The ceiling. Where the cove runs, where the downlights land against the furniture, whether the false ceiling crowds a room with a low slab.
• —The wall behind you. The side of the room the hero render never shows: the switchboard, the AC, the door to the balcony and the wardrobe that meets it.
• —The view from where you sit. From the sofa, the dining chair, the bed. What you see first in the morning is rarely what the render was taken from.
• —How rooms meet. The kitchen as it reads from the living room, the passage between two bedrooms, the line where one floor finish stops and the next begins.
• —Scale. A 2.4-metre sofa and a 2.1-metre sofa look the same in a photograph. Standing beside them, they do not.

Where it sits in the work

1. 01The free design, in VR. Send a floor plan and a short brief; within 7 days you stand in three of your own rooms in Élara VR, with photorealistic views, a material board and an indicative range. It is free, and it commits you to nothing.
2. 02Every room in Élara VR. As the design goes on, each room of the home is made as a scene, with the working drawings beside it.
3. 03Refined in the scene. Layouts, materials and lighting change in the scene, where a change costs nothing, rather than on site, where it costs a week.
4. 04Signed off, room by room. Each room is approved in your app. Nothing is ordered until it has been.
5. 05Held to on site. The approved scene is what the site is built to and what the 111 checks measure it against.

“A render asks whether you like the picture. A scene asks whether you can live in the room. Only the second question is worth signing.”

For families in two cities

For an NRI family this changes the most. A scene is a link: send it to your parents in Jayanagar or your sister in Toronto, and each of them stands in the same room on their own phone, in their own time zone. The conversation about whether the pooja unit should face the door happens in the room itself, weeks before anyone has cut a board.

Élara VR is part of the Élara Standard on every home we take on, and it is where every home begins. Send us your floor plan: three of your rooms in Élara VR, free, within 7 days.