| Photographer Ansen Seale stands in a composite panoramic shot of the Riverwalk and Weston Centre taken with | a digital camera he created. Seale’s work allows clients to tour commercial real estate properties without leaving their offices. |
| By Elizabeth Allen EXPRESS-NEWS BUSINESS WRITER Imagine that you represent an insurance company seeking office space in San Antonio and you want to inspect a block of buildings —from your North Carolina headquarters. Or maybe you’ve built apartments on one side of a golf course and want to see how three-story condos would look perched on the other side. Supposedly, you’re as good as there. Even if “there” doesn’t exist yet. While virtual visits are not new, digitally sharp tours of commercial sites with 360-degree views have become available to the commercial real estate industry through the work of Ansen Seale, president of Seale Studios. Kim Allio, research director of Grubb & Ellis, a real estate brokerage firm, waxed enthusiastic over the program’s possibilities. “I thought, ‘This is going to change commercial real estate,’“Allio said. The technology could prove valuable to companies by enabling them to tour sites without leaving their offices many states away, she said. Marilynn Glasscock, a broker with REOC Corp., called it “mind-boggling.” “The kind of presentation you could do could be much more meaningful,” Glasscock said, adding that showing views from a proposed building would he very useful. Seale does this by going to the site of the proposed building and, with the help of a boom lift, elevating himself 40 or 50 feet to take a photograph using a panoramic digital camera he built. The shot can then be inserted beyond the simulated windows of the office building with the help of special software. “We could set it up in such a way that you could click yourself down onto the ground,” said Patrick Woosley, director of business development for Seale Photography, “and then you could jump back up into the sky.” “We’ve invented a platform now that I think, in all likelihood, will become the industry standard,” Woosley said. It’s not there yet, Seale acknowledged. Although interest has been high in San Antonio and the Dallas-Fort Worth area for the better part of a year, he said, sales have not taken off. “The response is always tremendous. The follow-through is not always tremendous,” Seale said. Woosley attributed the hesitation to “technological overload,” adding that “they know that they want to use it.” back to the top HOME |
Seale has done work for about a dozen companies, such as Gore Design in San Antonio, Radian Corp. and Brown & Root in Austin, Grubb & Ellis in Dallas and Santa Anita Stoneware in Saltillo, Mexico, he said. He expects the orders to double, perhaps triple, in the coming year. The concept began with aerial photographs of commercial real estate, Woosley said. Then Seale thought they should be made three-dimensional, with the use of computers and numerous still photos. Add QuickTime software and AutoCAD renderings of yet-to-be-built structures, inside and out. The result is a blend of technologies that allows real estate brokers to show prospective clients the view from their future fourth-floor corner office. A client taking a virtual tour of an apartment complex could see the views from one patio by benefit of panoramic photography, then go to another part of the building to check out the property from there. “You can’t view the apartment building from (just) any location,” Seale said. “In that sense it’s still advertising. ... You’re giving them the freedom, but you’re really showing them what you’re out to show them.” Seale has produced some virtual tours available on the Internet, including Web sites for the Heart of San Antonio and the National Wildflower Center in Austin. He invented the camera to save himself time, and because he likes to “get his hands dirty” with creative work. “It cuts out a lot of steps,” he said. He’s been building his own cameras for more than 15 years, he said. All of his high-tech machinery has a surreal low-tech look because he builds it out of everything he can find; obsolete camera bodies, plywood and old chains from junked copy machines. “Actually, it’s not even a prototype,” Seale said of the digital camera. “This is just a proof-of-concept camera.” Engineers are working on condensing the camera, he said, and he’s patenting the design rather than the camera, which has already been invented. Its results, what attendees of the Commercial Women in Real Estate meeting saw last week, were hardly rustic. They oohed and aahed over the presentation that sparked ideas ranging from electronic marketing to inventory for insurance purposes. A ground-based visual runs about $1,000, Woosley said, while an aerial view is closer to $5,000. “I can think of a lot of ways to use it,” said Victoria Muniz, a designer with Facility Consulting Group, Ltd. “For $1,000, that’s pretty cheap.” Here are some Web sites to which Seale Photography has contributed: •sealestudios.com • downtownsanantonio.org/ • www.citypublicservice.com • heartofsanantonio.com |
Press