Versatile use for video floors: ASB GlassFloor visualises floor plans

When building a house, buying a flat or planning conversions, the floor plan often forms the basis for the decisions that need to be made. This is challenging for the human imagination, as it is difficult for untrained onlookers to translate drawings into life-size dimensions. Real estate expert Lea Dörrmann has addressed this problem: With her (T)Raumerlebnis, she can virtually recreate rooms in their original size. To achieve this, she uses the versatile ASB GlassFloor video floor.

Lea Dörrmann has a handy comparison when explaining the advantages of her new venture (T)Raumerlebnis: “You go to the furniture store, find a nice couch and think: This will look good in the living room. Then when you get it home, suddenly it doesn't quite fit. While a couch can be returned without any problems, it's more difficult with real estate. Moving a wall, enlarging a room and reducing another, is associated with enormous costs - assuming that it's even structurally possible. This gave Lea Dörrmann the idea to not just visualise spaces on the computer, but to temporarily reproduce them on a digital surface. That was the beginning of (T)Raumerlebnis.

Inspiration from Rome

Lea Dörrmann has a degree in real estate economics. Her company takes over for the developer “... everything unrelated to construction: We look for the plots of land, take care of the coordination with the architects and the municipalities or cities. We handle the sales of the units. For capital investors, we take care of the letting.” As part of her work, she has experienced time and again in a wide variety of situations how difficult it is to transfer abstract building drawings or room layouts calculated on the computer screen into realistic dimensions. The main idea came to her on a city trip to Rome. “We were always looking for a way to show floor plans in a 1-to-1 format. In Rome, I noticed so many video screens all over the city - and I thought to myself: couldn't we just put a screen like that on the floor and have a structure so you can walk over it?” Back in Neumarkt, Bavaria, an internet search brought her to ASB GlassFloor. Bull's-eye!

A high-profile floor for (T)Raumerlebnis

With the ASB LumiFlex, ASB GlassFloor has developed exactly the floor Lea Dörrmann had in mind. The company, also based in Bavaria, has been on an exciting journey, ranging from innovative architectural projects to the world of sport, where ASB is one of the world's leading suppliers of squash courts. ASB has made another step towards the future with its glass sports floors, which in turn have become interactive sports floors thanks to LED technology. With a click of the mouse, the floor can change the lines required for different sports. It quickly became clear that the video floor could also be used in many other ways: It was used on TV by Joko & Klaas, welcomed visitors to the Microsoft headquarters in Dublin using a digital waterfall, surprised customers at the Philipp Plein flagship store in Paris and is used at numerous events, from the ISPO trade fair to elaborately staged shoe displays by Nike.

The video floor turns the entire floor space into a multifunctional monitor. The floor is driven via an HDMI interface and provides a clear display with a pixel pitch of 4.8 millimetres. The floor also fulfils another important requirement of (T)Raumerlebnis: As it was created for professional sporting events, it can be walked on. This is made possible by two 5-millimetre-thick panes of safety glass and a stable substructure. A special foil ensures that light reflections are avoided while ceramic dots create the perfect non-slip surface.

Testing the practicality of the plans beforehand

Here's how Lea Dörrmann's idea became reality. She had 220 square metres of the high-tech LED floor installed in a building in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz and celebrated the grand opening in November 2022. Those who take advantage of the service are provided with a realistic room experience: The floor plan is displayed on the LED floor, flexible walls make the rooms even more realistic and furniture is also possible. “The demand is great and comes from a wide variety of sectors,” she sums up some four months later. “We turn imagination into something tangible with (T)Raumerlebnis. This is not only useful for people who are designing a house or a flat”. Commercial clients have also benefited from the offer in various ways - including a company that wanted to refurnish its offices and brought all its employees to test the room layout. This helped them to get an idea of what was going on and to decide how to proceed.

Relevance beyond the real estate industry

It is important to Lea Dörrmann that her second business is not exclusively reserved for the real estate industry: “We have created a cosy ambience with an open bar and the general interior design. It has been very well received. On the one hand, the property developers I look after with my real estate company have included the installation as part of their standard services. On the other hand, we also get requests for events. It's only logical. There are hardly any limits to what you can do with the floor, you can do the craziest things”. A good idea that has caught on - just like the flooring from ASB GlassFloor, which is once again expanding its portfolio of applications with (T)Raumerlebnis.