How  video games  have shaped the way we communicate

It’s impossible to deny the influence video games have had on society over the past 50 years. The active role a user plays has long-proved a winning formula for sustained engagement that traditional media struggles to match. Prior to our use of 3D game engines as the backbone to Vantage, iDEA has a long history of using gaming platforms to help visualise our ideas...  

Early on, we wondered if this formula for engagement could be utilised for information sharing - taking dry numbers that would traditionally be shared via physical spreadsheets and outputting via a more interactive method. Today we do this in Vantage - but it was back in the 2000s our journey towards 3D game engines began. 

Keyframes and coffee

Macromedia Flash (as it was in those days) was a popular choice for developers producing simple, online games in the early 2000s. Although iDEA’s “media” department was in its infancy at this point, we were fortunate to have some prior knowledge with this software. We saw this technology as the ideal vehicle to make complex, simple - in this case, building information. 

It was always our goal to keep pushing the boundaries of Flash, incorporating plugins to provide a richer experience. The heavy lifting was done behind the scenes, but visualised in our typically straightforward way. 

We continued to push the limits of flash - optimising various plugins to ‘Cover Flow’ through building floors and ‘fly through’ 3D environments. But we had greater ambitions for a fully-fledged 3D experience. Steve Jobs’ now infamous “Thoughts on Flash” open letter proved to be the final nail in the coffin. 

We needed a new game engine. 

Estates Directors, start your engines

Flash, brilliant as it once was, ran its course. Our dream was a true 360 Degree model of multiple buildings - with the ability to filter data in real time. A change was required. A modern game engine - the sort of thing used for free-roaming sandbox games - was the way to go.

We took everything we've learned from Flash over the years (and HTML5 following that) and applied it to Unity - a game engine more famous for free-roaming Playstation titles than property presentations. This powerful new platform gave us the ability to develop Vantage: a complete 360 degree vision of a building estate from floor-plans to furniture. 

Using a video game engine as a base has opened up masses of opportunities. We can now realise our goal of something which can cut and slice data in a highly visual way - but more critically, be handed over to our clients to explore for themselves. The possibilities are endless.

Learn more about Vantage here.