Previewing your Renovation in Virtual Reality costs less than you think

Walking through your planned renovation in VR, used to require an architect's services and an expensive setup. Today you can do it with a rented VR headset for as little as $35...

Here in the UK, from 2019 to 2023, we had a TV show called “Your Home Made Perfect”. In each episode a family with a home that really wasn’t working for them was paired up with two architects, who would create visualizations of what their home could become. Once the architects had completed their designs, the family got to experience them both in Virtual Reality, and decide which of the options they preferred. They would then go on and complete that renovation project in line with the architect’s vision.

Just a few years ago, experiencing a renovation in Virtual Reality before starting work was a very exclusive experience. It required architects to build comprehensive 3D models of the space, and expensive VR headsets to experience it.

Over the last couple of years, with our own home renovation project, I have seen the transformtive power of even a really basic VR walkthrough, in helping us to make decisions about layout, spacing and room structure with confidence. With SimpleDraw, I want to make this accessible to as many people as possible, so that anyone undertaking a renovation can afford to gain this level of insight into their plans before they start work.

I’ve recently added the ability to walk through any SImpleDraw floor plan in immersive VR, and I’m continuing to work on improving the quality of the experience. This feature is available as part of SimpleDraw Plus, priced at just $10 for an entire year (hopefully that’s long enough to see you through your renovation project!).

But if you don’t already own a VR headset (and that’s probably most of you), theres aother cost to consider, which is the VR headset itself. The good news is that prices are falling dramatically here as well.

The Meta Quest 2 was released in 2020, and is a standalone headset — no PC, no cables, just the headset and two controllers. Originally priced at $299, refurbished units can now be obtained for below $200, and is perfectly adequate for viewing SimpleDraw’s VR walkthroughs (see our guide to VR headsets for the full lowdown on the Quest 2 vs 3 vs 3S).

If you tried Google Cardboard back in the day (the one where you slotted your phone into a makeshift cardboard holder) and came away unimpressed, the Quest 2 is a different class of device. Cardboard gave you 3DOF: you could look around from a fixed point, but you couldn’t move through the space. The Quest 2 has full room-scale tracking, which means you can actually walk through your floor plan. That is the experience that matters for renovation planning, and it is genuinely good enough to give you real insights about the shape and structure of the space you are planning.

If a second-hand Quest 2 still feels like too much of a commitment, there are also a range of rental options available. In the US, Canada, UK and Scandinavia, Hygglo operates a peer-to-peer rental platform for Meta Quest headsets, with prices ranging from $15-25 per day and good coverage in major cities. In India, SharePal offers a similar service.

If you can find a suitable rental option, you could be looking at a total cost of around $35 (including a SimpleDraw Plus subscription) for the opportunity to step into your renovation using a Virtual Reality headset, and experience how the spaces will actually feel, before you even start work.

Architects who regularly offer VR walkthroughs to their clients report that almost every single client spots something that they want to change. Being actually immersed in the space gives you insights about how the space will feel, and how it will work for you, that it’s almost impossible to get just from looking at 2D floor plans, or even from 3D renderings.

Just $35 for the peace-of-mind and confidence of having actually walked through your project before you build it. That’s got to be worth it, right?