"Immersive" is certainly a hot-button word today and it’s likely only going to be a bigger topic going forward as Virtual Reality technologies continue to unfold. Even though some momentum was already starting to build, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) really brought VR and immersive technologies to the headlines about a year ago with its $2-billion purchase of Oculus VR to get its hands on the Oculus Rift. The technology is still in its infancy, but techies and investors should certainly be able to see the potential for immersive technology to change countless industries, including the real estate business.
"Immersive" is still used loosely and many deep in the industry will still contest that what is offered by many is not "Virtual Reality" or even truly "immersive," but, again, it’s a start. For example, a street view on Google maps allows a user to be in a different place and "walk" up and down the street utilizing cursors, but until there is a greater sense of actually being there, immersion and VR is not attained. It’s this principle that is being used in the real estate market to give potential buyers a far more in depth and personal experience to see a property, house, condo, etc.
Most are shot with 360-degree cameras and then stitched together with interactive controls to allow a potential customer to maneuver about the home to get a more realistic view than just looking at a slideshow of images.
This is what Montreal-based (and aptly-named) Urbanimmersive Technologies Inc. (TSX-Venture:UI), a digital media company coupling its visual content skills with patent pending technology for online marketing of real estate assets, is bringing to the table through its subsidiary Urbanimmersive. Elsewhere, the company licenses a complete suite of software and technology to partners in other markets.
For those checking out the latest corporate press release, note the ticker is incorrect; it is actually "UI" as we have listed and quite the blunder, to say the least.
On Tuesday, Urbanimmersive said that it signed two agreements for the integration of its new immersive real estate blog platform. One is with an unnamed "organization operating one of the largest real estate websites in Canada in terms of traffic" and the other is with an existing customer, the Association of Professional Construction and Housing of Quebec (APCHQ). According to the verbiage in the press release, it sounds like the name of the unnamed organization will be disclosed in the coming weeks following the launch of a new blog that will be provided by Urbanimmersive, including real estate related articles production.
"These new agreements will provide excellent visibility to the new immersive blog platform and could serve as a launch pad for export," said Ghislain Lemire, chief executive at Urbanimmersive. "It is now easier to consider exporting our new immersive blog platform since the revenue model is based on the advertising performance of each article we produce rather than solely on the number of immersive tours sold," he added.
The fully immersive space is still up-and-coming, but it is certainly gaining traction slowly, but surely. Retail investors have stayed somewhat hands off gauging by trading activity in immersive-focused companies like Canada’s Urbanimmersive and U.S.-based Next Galaxy Corp. (OTCBB:NXGA), but if little firms like this can continue to move forward with their development, there looks to be a nice upside in an industry that is not going away; it’s only going to get bigger.
Shares of Urbanimmersive traded ahead by 80% on Tuesday, up two cents at $0.045, although volume was low at 17,000. The activity provided a nice boost to the company’s market capitalization, but still kept it low at only $947,120, according to data from QuoteMedia.
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