What’s behind the walls? This is a common problem every contractor and homeowner is familiar with. Whether you’re installing new windows or doors, expanding a room or just looking for the right place to install a new electrical outlet, cutting a hole always runs the risk of hitting some hidden-but-critical element of a building’s construction.
There are a number of handheld stud finders as well as wire and pipe tracers on the market. They work pretty well but do require you to go wall-by-wall, inch-by-inch to find the location of what’s behind layers of drywall and insulation. For a small project, this can be a practical solution, but may not work so well for larger scale projects.
What if you could see through the walls? And not just one wall, but all of them. Mountain View’s Virtual Experience is a powerful tool that builds a three-dimensional representation of what’s inside your walls, so you or future contractors will never have to guess again.
The Virtual Experience is like Google Street View just for your building. It has many advantages, including:
Providing a permanent, digital log of what's behind the walls before they're covered.
The ability to collaborate with stakeholders and team members anywhere in the world.
Instantly viewing detailed areas of a building from any internet-connected device.
Giving building owners or homeowners a record of the locations of wires, pipes, ductwork, etc. for future needs.
The Virtual Experience lets you walk through the entire building, floor-by-floor, so you can see the work as it was documented. Use the dollhouse view to see the entire structure, or the floorplan view to see how hidden elements like ductwork are connected from one floor to the next.
How do we do it?
Each model is custom built. When the space is ready and clean, a professional photographer will take pictures of all 360 degrees of each room. The photos are then stitched together and built into a complete representation of the building. You can move room to room and floor to floor with the click of a mouse.
Once your building is complete, a second set of photos showing the finished walls—and even the furniture and decor if you like—is taken and overlaid across the previous images of wiring, plumbing and ductwork. The model is now set up that you can look at any finished room in the building, click on a wall, and see the layer behind it.
To use the Virtual Experience, all you need is a Wi-Fi connected device. You can stand in a room and know exactly where the wiring is without using a single tool or making one cut. Or you can use it to prepare for a job remotely and arrive on-site confident that you have brought the right materials and tools. Every job immediately becomes faster and more cost effective.
And the transferability of the tool means it can be easily be passed on from one building owner to the next. How many times have you met with a new client who has recently taken possession of a new building, but doesn’t have the mechanical drawings to go with it? The Virtual Experience viewer is cloud-based and always available.
Plus, you can add educational tags to the structure. With this tool, you can embed any information you want directly onto each item in the house and make it easily viewable for later. For instance, you can add the make and model of your windows and doors, when they were delivered and when they were installed. This way, if there’s ever an issue or you need information for warranty reasons, it’s easy to access and share. The tags also allow you to embed videos, images, and audio, allowing the virtual experience to be your one-stop shop for keeping and accessing any and all information related to the project. Doesn’t that sound way easier than hunting for an Excel file or web link stored deep in your computer files?
We’ve even created virtual tours of two of our award-winning experience centers: the Grand Junction Experience Center and our Denver Showroom. Click the links to tour each of these amazing buildings to see the beautiful and luxurious windows and doors that we offer.
This truly is a powerful tool, and we’re excited to share it with you. To find out more, or to get started with the Virtual Experience, contact Mountain View Window and Door.
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