Inside The Walkable VR Holodeck That Sells Real Estate

In 2012, Jonathan Coon backed the original Oculus kickstarter project and has a signed Rift DK1 to show for it.

In 2025, Coon and a team of technology integrators developed a functioning 5,000-square-foot holodeck on a hilltop overlooking Austin, working through a collaboration between Pureblink, Agile Lens, and DBOX.

This first-of-its-kind facility sells the idea of residing on the hill in a few years in a home with a "frictionless lifestyle". According to Coon, the 30-minute tour in VR is completed by everyone, even the guest who was aged 92.

"We've done $427 million sales and 52 contracts, and most of those I would attribute to people being able to walk around in this holodeck," Coon says.

He says his team completed 622 tours in the holodeck, putting a total of 1,529 guests on a walkthrough of the community, its homes and the world-class amenities. What's happening in that structure on the hill is so ambitious no single hardware provider has been able to make everything work that it needs to do.

And yet, it does work.

As prices come down for a holodeck like this one and sales teams see the potential, might new homebuyers be able to customize their purchases, and ultimately their communities, in ways which weren’t feasible in the 20th century?

"You cannot determine whether or not a good version of something is going to work by testing a bad version of it," Coon says.

How To Sell A Home With A Holodeck

Redirected Walking To Relocated Living In 3 Acts

Act 1: Set The Scene

In 1939, outside of Austin, Texas, the mighty Colorado River was dammed up providing flood control, hydroelectric power and a body of water to enjoy for the people of the area that’s become known as Lake Austin.

In 2025, Waymo cars route through the streets of Austin without drivers. It's easy to imagine a day traveling by autocar from arrival at the airport all the way to a home in a gated community.

In 2039, what will it mean to seek the American Dream living in the United States? And what might we learn about the way land might be bought and used in the future from the path I walked in this first-of-its-kind holodeck?

On a recent weekday, I rode by human-driven Uber car to the entrance of the Four Seasons Private Residences on Lake Austin. I entered a building there. The first sight inside the sales center is a 12 foot wide display showing images of the hillside.

The hillside on the TV is covered in homes. Homes aren't actually there on the hillside yet, but the images on the TV look absolutely real. A solid walnut 3D model on the table offers an overview of the area at diorama scale.

I sat for a well-produced video promising the amenities planned for the people of this community, ending with that memorable line about friction.

Act 2: Show The Present View

I rode in the back of an Escalade climbing to the hill overlooking a bend in the waterway. We came to a stop at the top of the hill, I got out, and climbed step by step up an observation tower.

This is where the restaurant should be located with a world-class chef running the place. I took in the view of Lake Austin and city beyond it.

"Wow."

My own “wow” was carefully planned by Coon and the people building Four Seasons Private Residences. The word escapes many when the view frames perfectly what it could mean to live here.

In the foreground is where the neighbors will live, in the middle is the local community and waterway, and in the distance there's the city of Austin.

Back down the observation tower, in a spot that might as well be the center of this planned community, is a temporary structure unlike any other.

Act 3: Walk The Future View

The 5,000 square foot open space of the holodeck is housed inside a tent with a metal rail around the interior and a series of cameras mounted to it from OptiTrack.

Near the entrance, a tiny control room is outfitted with a bank of PCs carrying top of the line graphics cards from NVIDIA. Facing these powerful rendering engines, on the opposite wall, is a line of humidifiers filling the air with moisture. Those reduce big static discharges which tend to build up in the dry air.

For a four person tour, the holodeck draws around 3200 watts of power through the room.

11 screens in the control room monitor eight total potential client slots, the host, and the motion capture camera system, with a 60-inch screen in the corner charting out the performance of Meta’s AirLink Wi-Fi streaming technology as it beams the world drawn on each of those PCs to linked Quest Pro headsets in the next room.

Track. Render. Display. It's the magic cycle that makes VR work everywhere in the world. Headsets like Bigscreen Beyond 2 still use a wire and many location-based VR setups of the last decade deployed backpacks. The Austin holodeck uses Wi-Fi, a connection system that was never intended for this kind of continuous low latency high throughput data transfer.

There are no VIPs here today, so Amanda Watson, the creator of the AirLink streaming technology who has long since departed from Meta, sits on the ground next to a Wi-Fi router trying to eke out every bit of performance she can from the system before the next set of potential buyers comes for a walkthrough.

They're using Wi-Fi 6E "in a proprietary configuration" to connect all the clients in an active multiplayer session with the host. The routers beam to headsets each modified with what look like antlers. The antlers create a distinctive shape for the overhead cameras to spot and relay back by wire to the PC rendering engines, and then back over Wi-Fi to the head-mounted displays.

I asked Watson to estimate the data load across the network for a standard five-person tour. She estimates the 30-minute event with five people going through together sees more than 200 gigabytes of streamed data traversing the local wireless network. The challenge isn't the amount of data, but in consistent delivery of each new frame generated by that cycle of track, render, display.

"The challenge is creating an experience where guests feel comfortable at every moment," Watson explains. "In the Holodeck, guests never experience a break in immersion, and they never feel the need to remove the headset. This is difficult to achieve in VR, but especially challenging with *wireless* (streamed) VR. Router placement, maintaining clear line-of-sight between the router and the headset, and minimizing environmental interference all serve to maximize the quality you can get out of a streamed experience."

OptiTrack is just the latest attempt at making tracking work smoothly for a tour with four guests at a time, following Meta’s Shared Spatial Anchors and Antilatency’s ceiling-mounted lights. They’re still trying to make Meta’s Shared Spatial Anchors work for their needs, and I tested some of that out during my visit on Quest 3. I found that brief experience smoother and more walkable, and their latest experiments also include passthrough camera access on Horizon OS-based headsets too.

For the tours, they modified Quest Pro with a custom forehead pad with foam taken from a bicycle helmet and top strap with memory foam pads, as well as a counterweight in the back and an additional battery with more foam. There's no wire to get tangled with and the facial interface allows participants to see their actual feet below them for a bit of grounding while walking around.

Even the wood planks on the floor of the physical holodeck align with the virtual wood planks in most of the scenes.

Visitors now have memories of five different places. Now it's time to sell a house.

From Redirected Walking To Desire Paths

For purposes from safety to sales, a holodeck worker redirecting the walking of someone in VR might be one of the first new jobs available in this medium.

The "holodeck" was originally an idea in Star Trek that imagined a perfected version of the technology they have today in Austin. For crew thinking too much about the void of space outside their ship, the holodeck was the ultimate form of distraction. Just walk into the gigantic grid-lined recreation room and ask the computer for an adventure featuring the desired characters and intrigue. The holodeck of fiction uses suspension of disbelief to work, so key features like steering people away from the hard physical walls is just magic.

In the Austin holodeck of 2025, redirected walking is managed by a sales pitch delivered by a human guide. The guide wears a headset too, but their view also shows the name of each other person wearing the Quest Pro floating above the headset in VR. The loading program between scenes resembles SteamVR's empty home grid, except a gigantic screen floats nearby showing everyone the same kind of photorealistic imagery as on the TV near the entrance to the community.

Once the scene is loaded on those 4090 rigs in the other room turning electricity into polygons and texture, the sales pitch really begins.

The guide draws attention to specific sights on a carefully planned path. They might ask if the bar they are standing next to should be stocked with a favorite drink. In the private restaurant, I was told I could read the menu. I spotted a piece of paper on the corner table with the napkins and cutlery, sitting in front of the view of Austin and that waterway I saw from the tower. I walked over, leaned in close and read the menu.

If carefully directing attention doesn’t work, there are safety spotters in black outfit stationed just out of sight in the physical world to prevent participants from walking into real walls.

Private & Public Amenities From The 1900s To 2000s

What if the way most people live 25 percent of the way into the 21st century is very different from 50 percent, 75 percent or 100 percent?

They spent about $3 million to make this holodeck work through trial and error like Thomas Edison's light bulb. And what if, like the bulb, a holodeck illuminates spaces which can't be seen by the naked eye with both scale and efficiency that really matters?

What shape might communities take if members of the public could see what a new facility would look like by walking around a model of it? What if we could vote on revisions to the simulation two, five or 10 years before ground breaks on the property in physical reality?

In the film A Mighty Wind from 2003, the actor Bob Balaban is on a stage learning about stagecraft: "Can you have an actual three dimensional object that represents the thing that it actually is, can that be next to something that it pretends to be?"

While pure comedy, Alex Coulombe understands conversations like that one too well. Working through his company Agile Lens, he is one of the lead technology integrators behind the holodeck on the hill in Austin. He's been working for more than two years to realize the idea for Coon and his team at Impossible Ventures, working in collaboration with Pureblink and DBOX.

For Coulombe, the project is the latest step in a journey more than a decade in the making as he works between architectural and theatrical VR projects pushing the limits of what’s possible on present-day hardware.

“I was getting frustrated as an architect working with people who did not understand spatial ideas we were trying to convey,” Coulombe said of the way things were circa 2013. “They might be nodding their head along, being like, ‘yeah, I understand, I'm gonna go through the lobby and I'm gonna sit in a seat and I'm gonna watch this Broadway show,’ but then they'll ask these questions that show that they actually do not understand what's going on at all. They'll say, but you know, ‘I’m really far from the stage here, right?’ Or ‘the person in front of me is gonna be like way too close.’ and it's like, “no, like this is a normal row depth, this is a very normal distance from the stage.”

In the 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite, Uncle Rico hopefully asks his nephew Kip about his findings on the Internet: "You ever come across anything like time travel?" Kip disappointedly explains that cyberspace of the era could not provide.

In 2025, if you type the URL for Impossible Ventures into a browser you'll be redirected to Jonathan Coon's personal LinkedIn page where you can learn about his involvement in getting that film made. You can also read about him starting 1800contacts in his dorm room during the same decade, and selling it in the next.

In the Austin holodeck one could argue Coon actually built Uncle Rico's time machine. At the very least, it's clear he believes in VR the same way he did when he backed that Kickstarter project in 2012.

"Just make me feel like I'm somewhere I'm not, with someone that's not with me, doing something we can't do together, and everybody will have a VR headset," he says.

That sounds like time travel.

Floor Plan On A Floor At 1:1 Scale

I progressed through my tour of the homes and amenities the people of Four Seasons Private Residences are supposed to enjoy in a couple years, finishing with a sit down in a chair in a virtual movie theater with powerful 5.1 sound.

Coulombe then showed me some of their latest experiments in the holodeck.

He made the walls that grid-lined room much like Star Trek with the floor a 1:1 scale floor plan of a home. He dragged the surface around to put the front door at my feet. I could step forward into the home, looking at the floor and reading the labels of each room without walls or furniture to distract me. I could simply follow lines on the ground, like tracings on paper, with each step letting me feel the distance of the space.

This is VR at walkable scale.

The emptiness above the floor left space for my imagination to merge with spatial understanding. I could move confidently between rooms as my mind filled in the spaces with activities I might want there.

Imagine a new building project in an average American town and the first thing built on site there isn’t a model home but a large multipurpose recreation center outfitted as a holodeck like this one. Schedule tours of the land and then see the plan for it in VR. You could leave public comment or vote while passing through.

After lunch with the engineers behind the Austin holodeck I was driven back down the hill. They handed me a box and a coffee table-sized book on my way out.

The box contained a copy of the menu I saw on the table in VR and a 3D image viewer much like a View-Master. Both the book, and the viewer, are filled with photorealistic computer generated imagery of what the property and its amenities should look like.

One of the buyers could put that book on their coffee table or bookshelf while waiting for construction to finish, as a showpiece to friends and family who might want to see where they'll be living in a couple years.

After all, the buyers already have memories there.

Journalists have covered the Four Seasons Private Residences project elsewhere, but with UploadVR you're reading the first behind-the-scenes breakdown of exactly what's selling homes here. Please consider becoming a member or patron to directly support our independent reporting.