A More Realistic House Viewer

A buyer configurator only delivers value if the buyer actually trusts what they see. If the 3D model looks like a video game, that trust evaporates. If it looks like a photograph, the conversation changes entirely.

We've added a new "Realism" mode to the Alpha house viewer — a real-time rendering pipeline based on screen-space global illumination, denoising, and proper post-processing. The result: light bounces realistically off surfaces, shadows soften the way they do in real rooms, and materials read the way they should.

Crucially, it's all real-time. There's no waiting for a render to finish. A buyer flips a switch and the same configurable home now looks photoreal. They turn off realism mode for fast navigation, and back on for the moments where they want to take in a room.

We've also solved a long-standing problem in 3D house viewers: clean cross-sections. When you slice through a building to see the floor plan from above, walls usually look like hollow shells with ugly open edges. We rewrote how the viewer handles slicing — walls now show clean, filled cross-sections, so a top-down floor plan view actually looks like a floor plan.

Combined with our existing VR support and the Vision Pro work, this brings the visual quality of a buyer's experience much closer to what an architect sees in their professional tools — without the buyer needing any of those tools.

The most important shift is a quiet one. When a home looks real, buyers stop second-guessing every choice and start actually living in the space, mentally. That's where good decisions get made.