Prudential Real Estate Collaborative Innovation Partnership (PRECIP)

Global real estate giant Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Services has launched a

collaborative, virtual research and development laboratory, the company announced at its annual

convention in Austin, Texas, this week.

The venture, Prudential Real Estate Collaborative Innovation Partnership (PRECIP), will be a

“collaboratory,” or virtual lab “without walls,” to marry the expertise of outside technology

companies and the Prudential Real Estate network, the company said. Owned by Prudential

Financial Inc., the network has about 60,000 sales associates and about 1,700 offices.

“It’s not a traditional laboratory in its own right. It’s a combination of three things: innovation, a

research and development effort, and collaboration

The company says the laboratory will focus on four areas: video gaming and sensory spaces;

social networking and media sharing; mobile computing; and the application of semantic Web

search engines research.

The latter refers to search engines that display results based on word meaning rather than

keyword page rank. The point is to actually answer a user’s question, such as, “What is the best

Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood?” — rather than give them the

information to figure out the answer for themselves.

“If you ask Google a question, it doesn’t give you an answer, it gives you a list,” Van Anden said.

“We want to give (users) a very specific answer.”

The company has already signed a letter of intent with Montreal-based virtual world developer

Immersive Design Studio (IDS) to create one of the project’s first priorities: a virtual,

We demonstrated how (two people) could both be in

different rooms at opposite ends of the country and be holographically next to each other. Buyers

can start to experience homes and what they would do with (a home) even before they actually

see it,” Mallozzi said.

While the tour prototype uses traditional navigation with a mouse or joystick, the project hopes

to incorporate technology that IDS has already developed that tracks the body as it moves, Van

Anden said. People will be able to project a to-scale version of a room onto a wall and “walk

through” a room without clicking or wearing any special equipment.

The prototype’s sensory-rich, immersive-world technology comes from already existing gaming

platforms, the company said.

“IDS has been working in ‘hybrid space’ trying to look at how you can merge the virtual and the

physical where those forces are not opposed as one over the other. Hybrid space is the core of

IDS research and development and especially for virtual house tours it makes a lot of sense,” said

Thomas Soetens, co-founder of IDS.

Although the tours are not ready for release yet, Mallozzi said the project could be ready in the

“not-too-distant