Office VR Simulation

A corporate facilities team needed remote employees to experience their office before their first day — find their desk, locate meeting rooms, understand the layout — without flying in for a walkthrough. The brief: capture a real office in photogrammetric detail, reconstruct it as a navigable VR environment, and deploy it for both headset and browser access.

Feative Studios photographed the 2,000-square-foot office using a hybrid LiDAR-photogrammetry approach. LiDAR provided the geometric skeleton — centimeter-accurate walls, floors, and structural elements. Overlapping photographs layered photorealistic texture on top. The combined mesh was imported into Unreal Engine 5, cleaned up, and optimized for real-time VR rendering.

The result is a true-to-scale digital twin that remote employees explore in VR or in a browser. They navigate corridors, peek into meeting rooms, and get spatial awareness of the workspace before setting foot inside it.

Photogrammetry of interiors is harder than exteriors. Offices have large textureless surfaces — white walls, carpet tiles, glass partitions — where feature-matching algorithms struggle. Glass and reflective surfaces produce artifacts. Uniform lighting eliminates the contrast that photogrammetry relies on for feature detection.

The client also needed the model to be navigable in VR without causing cybersickness. Raw photogrammetric meshes often contain holes, thin geometry (chair legs, cables), and irregular surfaces that create collision issues during locomotion.

The capture had to happen during a working office day — no shutdowns, no empty rooms. The team needed to work around desks, equipment, and people while maintaining the overlap and coverage that photogrammetry requires.

The capture team used iPhone Pro LiDAR for geometric anchoring — quick, automatic, no post-processing required — then followed with a structured photogrammetry pass: three perimeter walks at different heights (low, mid, high) with 80%+ overlap between shots. The LiDAR mesh served as the reference geometry; the photographs provided texture detail.

RealityCapture processed the combined dataset. The resulting mesh was imported into UE5 with Nanite enabled, eliminating manual LOD work. Feative Studios cleaned up scan artifacts — filled holes in thin geometry, replaced chair legs and cable runs with proxy collision meshes, and added invisible navigation colliders for smooth locomotion.

For VR comfort, the team implemented teleportation navigation with snap turning as the default. Smooth locomotion is available as an opt-in for experienced users. Fixed foveated rendering and single-pass instanced stereo keep the frame budget under 11ms on Quest 3. A browser-based Pixel Streaming mode provides access for users without headsets.

Remote employees now tour the office in VR or browser before their start date. The facility team uses the digital twin for space planning — testing furniture configurations, evaluating sightlines, and planning renovations without physical site visits. New hires report faster onboarding because they already have spatial familiarity with the workspace.

The model captures the office at 1-2cm geometric accuracy with photorealistic texture mapping. It serves as a living document — the client can re-capture and update the model as the office changes, keeping the digital twin aligned with reality.