Looks like the 3D model is just for navigating the street-view-like set of panoramic photospheres. It's so far a necessary compromise, to get much more realistic photos before you can have perfect structure, material and lighting capture/rendering. (the benefit is clear looking at their scan of the old yc building), but if this is to be useful with VR (and it definitely would be) they'll need something in between those panoramic photospheres.
I couldn't help but notice that it doesn't let you zoom in on the "dollhouse" view, i.e. the one actually showing the 3D model. No way to see how these models look up close.
This'll work great for navigating buildings—I can imagine it being a hit with real-estate sites—but the hiding of detail in the 3D view suggests the tech wouldn't work as well for other applications, like VR. (I'd love to be wrong here, though!)
The dollhouse view is actually a low detail version of the 3d model, with low resolution textures, it's just really not meant for a close inspection :) Load time and performance has been high priority for us, particularly because we also support mobile devices. We might do something like streaming in higher quality mesh/textures in the future, and allow closer inspection.
As for VR... we're playing around with it a whole lot, and it actually looks really great! Hopefully it'll get in front of more people somehow soon.
As a second ask, why does the dollhouse view have all the noise and random parts of the ceiling visible? It makes it difficult to navigate to 'see through' to the ground, and I would suspect just cutting the ceiling off completely would make for a better visualization.
It's actually harder than it seems to cut off the ceiling, houses may have all sorts of weird heights, angles and corners, doors, arches... Any simple solution might work for 80-90% of models, but our viewer has to work for 100%. So we only remove faces with backface culling currently, we're going to do better soon though :)
I think it's early to know what will and won't ultimately work for VR. Ultimately, VR is going to be a very imperfect representation of physical reality for a while. But, I think representations that are unrealistic in all sorts of ways still have a lot of potential for tricking us enough to be fun and useful. There are going to be tradeoffs and we don't know which ones they are until they're tried.
This is a cool thesis. I would definitely like to see how this could work in VR.
