Property 3D and augmented reality glossary

It arrives in many forms: an architect’s PDF, a DWG file, a development brochure or the plan on a listing. Home View 3D only needs a legible one and one reference measurement to build the home in 3D, with no photos and no site visit. If it has no dimensions, we measure from its scale and say so.

It needs a finished home, a 360 camera and a visit, and it cannot show the layout from above or swap the furniture. A 3D viewer built from the plan does not record reality, but it works before anything is built and has cut-away mode. At Home View 3D, 360° panoramas are coming soon.

The Home View 3D viewer adds what a listing needs: rooms with floor areas, a guided tour, a plan view, cut-away mode, a light control and an augmented reality button. It only downloads the model, 3.1 MB for our villa, when the visitor asks. The complete 3D model includes 12 months of viewer hosting.

This is how a buyer with an iPhone sees the home: they tap “View in your room” on the web page and the system places the USDZ model over the camera image. In our case study, the 1:20 tabletop model weighs 5.3 MB. Apple documents it on its AR Quick Look page; the Android equivalent is Scene Viewer.

Without ARCore there is no augmented reality on Android: Scene Viewer uses it to set the home down on a real surface. Google publishes the list of supported devices. If a buyer’s phone is not on it, the Home View 3D link still shows the model in 3D on screen. Apple’s equivalent is ARKit.

It is what app developers build with. Showing a home needs no app at all: AR Quick Look, built into the system, opens the USDZ file from Safari, which is why Home View 3D augmented reality works from a link. Apple announced it in a developer news post. On Android, the equivalent is ARCore.

In property it lets buyers see a home as a model on their table or at real size in their living room, with no app: AR Quick Look opens it on iPhone and iPad, Scene Viewer on Android. A computer cannot show it, so it displays a QR code. Home View 3D includes it in the complete 3D model, from €490 + VAT.

It is the core tool at Home View 3D. We drive it with Python scripts that build walls, openings, doors and windows from the plan, so moving a partition rebuilds in minutes. We render with Cycles and export to glTF. The licence is explained on blender.org.

With full-height walls, at 2.60 m, the home reads as a closed box. With the cut, buyers see at a glance how the living room, bedrooms, bathrooms and terraces connect, which neither photos nor a 360° virtual tour can show. Matterport calls its similar overview of a scan a dollhouse view. Try it on the villa in our case study.

With Cycles, sunlight comes through the windows and bounces off floors and walls as it would in reality, with no hand-painted shadows. The 13 images in our case study, views and plans included, took about 21 minutes in total on an RTX 4060. The Blender manual calls it a physically based path tracer for production rendering.

It is mostly applied to scans of built homes, such as Matterport captures. A model built from the plan, like those Home View 3D makes, is not a twin in the strict sense: it represents the home as designed, deliberately furnished, with measurements that depend on the plan. That is why it works for new builds, where there is nothing to scan.

Dimensions decide how accurate the model can be. With a dimensioned plan or a DWG, Home View 3D follows the measurements. With only a scale bar, we measure from it and mark floor areas as approximate (≈), as with the villa in our case study. One reference measurement is enough to start, such as the width of the living room or the total floor area.

A GLB is hosted and shared like an image: one file, one URL. The Home View 3D 3D viewer loads a compressed GLB, which weighs 3.1 MB with 178,704 triangles for our villa. For augmented reality on Android we deliver separate GLB files, opened by Scene Viewer.

Khronos calls it “the JPEG of 3D”: lightweight models for browsers, phones and engines. It uses metallic-roughness PBR materials, so a model looks the same in different viewers. It can be saved as several files or as a single one, the GLB. More on the official glTF page.

Home View 3D delivers the viewer with iframe code ready to paste into the property page, on any website that accepts HTML, with lazy loading and permission for full screen and augmented reality. On portals it depends on each one: idealista only accepts 3D tours from its approved providers. Technical reference on MDN.

You will meet it in Spanish developers’ brochures and briefs: infografías de la promoción are the CGI images of a new-build scheme, nothing to do with data infographics. Home View 3D delivers them in 4K, rendered with Cycles, and labels them as virtual when the home is not built yet.

In property it shows a furnished plan with depth: walls, furniture and heights at once, which a top-down floor plan cannot. Home View 3D delivers it in 4K as part of the 3D floor plan, from €149 + VAT per floor; with the complete model you can also turn the home any way you like in the 3D viewer.

Capturing requires the home to exist, be finished and be visited with the camera (Matterport’s cameras). That is why a scan cannot sell an off-plan home and a model built from the plan can. If the property is already built and you want to show its real condition, a scan is a sound choice.

It powers the Home View 3D 3D viewer: it reads the GLB, rotates and zooms with your fingers and hands over to AR Quick Look on iPhone. We host it on our own server and it only downloads when a visitor taps to explore, so the page stays fast. Documentation at modelviewer.dev.

In Spain, the first additional provision of Ley 38/1999, the Building Act, requires developers to guarantee those payments with surety insurance or a credit institution’s guarantee, and to hold them in a special account. With nothing to photograph, off-plan sales rely on plans, CGI, 3D models and augmented reality. This is not legal advice.

Thanks to PBR, a timber floor or black porcelain tiles look the same in a Cycles render, in the 3D viewer and in augmented reality. glTF uses the metallic-roughness model as its core material (specification). For our villa we created 39 PBR textures, all of them procedural.

Two advantages for a listing: there are no third-party image rights, because nothing comes from a stock photo library, and changing a floor’s tone or a tile’s size means adjusting a value and rendering again. Every Home View 3D texture is procedural PBR; for our villa we created 39.

Rendering is the process; the render is the image, often called CGI in British property marketing. Quality depends on the model, the materials and the light more than on the software. Home View 3D renders in 4K with Cycles from the model of the home; the complete 3D model includes 6, from €490 + VAT. Market prices: 3D rendering cost guide.

It opens from a link in the browser and needs up-to-date versions of the Google app and Google Play Services for AR. If the phone does not support ARCore, it shows the model in 3D without the camera. Home View 3D delivers a 1:20 tabletop model (7.0 MB for our villa) and a real-size one for Android. Official guide on Google for Developers.

Home View 3D produces it with an orthographic camera over the 3D model, with no perspective, so room proportions hold and the image lines up with the redrawn 2D floor plan. It is delivered in 4K as part of the 3D floor plan, from €149 + VAT per floor, in 2 to 3 working days.

Without it, augmented reality will not open on an iPhone. That is why every Home View 3D home is also delivered as USDZ, in two versions: a 1:20 tabletop model and a real-size one for the floor, which weigh 5.3 MB and 8.2 MB for our villa. On Android the equivalent is GLB. Specification on openusd.org.

A physical model is built once and stays in the sales suite; a virtual one travels in a link. With augmented reality, buyers set it on their table at 1:20 scale or walk through it at real size. At Home View 3D, the development package starts at €1,490 + VAT.

A physical show home needs a finished, furnished unit, and only buyers who travel to the site see it. A virtual one can be shown before construction starts and reaches buyers abroad through a link. Home View 3D covers it with the development package: 3 unit types, 12 renders, a viewer and augmented reality, from €1,490 + VAT.

On a 3D model, a new style stays consistent across every view, the 3D viewer and augmented reality; with photos, each image is edited on its own. At Home View 3D it costs €60 + VAT per room. The images should be labelled as virtually staged, because the furniture is not part of the sale.

It is the open web’s route to augmented reality, but support varies by browser and device, and the specification is still a W3C Candidate Recommendation Draft (June 2026). That is why Home View 3D uses AR Quick Look on iPhone and Scene Viewer on Android. Draft on w3.org.