Meet The Firm Using Fortnite Gaming Tech To Speed Up How Buildings Get Built

Software engineer Dan Harper's pitch to Epic Games co-founder Mark Rein in 2006 might not have been the most compelling, but it worked: Let my company use the technology you're licensing for video game Unreal, but not for your usual fee. In fact, we can’t pay you now, though the potential application of the technology is huge. 

Rein and Epic went on to use the technology they first developed for Unreal to create the wildly popular Fortnite, the game that allows players to build and wander entire worlds. 

Harper and his colleagues went another way. He and others at a new consultancy are using the technology to create virtual versions of cities and buildings, allowing developers to upend the way buildings are designed, engineered and built to save time, reduce risk and help the world decarbonise. 

“In games like Fortnite, you have groups of mates controlling avatars, roaming around a virtual world and creating things really quickly,” Harper told Bisnow. “That’s what we’re allowing people to do in real estate, to create and collaborate in real time.”

When Harper came to Rein, he was with design and development consultancy Cityscape Digital. Since then, he and fellow Cityscape Directors Damian Fennell and Ben Johnson launched a consultancy aimed at building a business around the technology created by Epic and refined by Cityscape. 

The company, MaxQ Consulting, has worked with some of the biggest investors and developers in London on major new developments, including Landsec’s 55 Old Broad Street and retrofits like J.P. Morgan's 65 Gresham Street, both in the City. 

The combination of gaming tech and consultancy has allowed developers and owners to drastically cut the time needed to get a scheme to the point that development can commence. It has also won plaudits from clients and planners alike. 

“I’ve been to their offices and put on the VR goggles and gone on a walkthrough of a scheme we’ve been talking about with the project team and my officers,” City of London Corporation Planning and Transportation Committee Chair Shravan Joshi told Bisnow. “You get a feel for what a scheme looks like. It’s very different to seeing it written or seeing a picture.”

Earlier this month, J.P. Morgan Asset Management received planning permission from the City for the £200M retrofit of 65 Gresham Street. The project will see four floors added to an existing building to create a modern 385K SF office scheme. Construction will begin in the second quarter of 2025, with completion expected in 2028.

“We were able to achieve this in a highly innovative way, using MaxQ Consulting to lead a more agile and transparent way of design team collaboration, delivering greater transparency in planning negotiations with the City of London and a tech-led preletting campaign,” J.P. Morgan Asset Management Executive Director Paul Harris said in a statement.

The technology incorporates interesting and eye-catching features of Fortnite, allowing users to virtually walk around re-creations of areas where buildings will be constructed, inserting the new scheme. MaxQ also helps developers change the process of how buildings are designed and put forward for planning.

Agile working, iterative processes allowing product teams to work at the same time on different elements of a project from different places, has been common in the tech world for years. In real estate development, not so much. 

Typically, in the early stages of a building’s development, different parts of a project team will work separately, Fennell and Harper said. Architects might do their bit, followed by engineers, sustainability consultants, planning consultants and so on. Finally, a development manager pulls their work together to determine what works and what doesn’t before sending the groups back to the drawing board. 

This process can take months, if not years. When it comes to engaging with planners like Joshi’s team in the City, a developer might have 10 or more different designs that it puts forward, taking feedback from planners about what works before abandoning some and refining others. 

MaxQ’s technology allows different parts of the team to work simultaneously, designing and planning in real time, in the same room or from different locations via fully immersive virtual reality technology, augmented reality or more traditional screen-based technology. 

The process allows changes to the design and the ability to see how that looks or feels, and the visual model is linked to data such as carbon emissions, project costs and project returns. It answers questions like how adding a floor or reducing the massing in a certain way would increase costs, impact the return, and raise or lower carbon emissions.

That saves a lot of time and reduces risk, Harper said.

“It is predictive. We can see what might go wrong before it happens,” Harper said. “Minority Report is what people should be imagining.”

Equally, he said, planners might be taken through a scheme using the technology and say, “No, we would never agree to that massing. Shave off a bit here or there and we’d be minded to approve.”

At 55 Old Broad Street, MaxQ worked with developer Landsec and its project team and advisers to get from RIBA Stage 0 to completion of Stage 1 in four weeks, a process that would usually take months, if not more than a year. RIBA Stages, published by the Royal Institute of British Architects, organises building projects into eight key stages.

“That meant Landsec resolved the business case and the scheme parameters very fast and only had to do it once,” Fennell said.  

MaxQ’s method also incorporates later design phases, advancing projects along the process if necessary. J.P. Morgan and others are looking at using it to assist with leasing, with the City’s Joshi pointing out that the immersive technology is likely to appeal to potential tenants. 

“Our method also generates a coordinated scheme design, so it's tackling some RIBA Stage 2 and even [Stage 3] elements very early on, which in turn saves significant time in later concept design for planning and detailed design after planning,” Fennell added.

At 65 Gresham Street, the core design work for pre-application was completed in less than four months. 

Fennell, Harper and Johnson set up MaxQ as a consultancy rather than just selling a tech product or platform because of the problems that any industry faces when adopting new technology.

“If you thrust a new technology at people, then they just turn it off after 10 minutes,” Harper said. “New technology can be threatening. That’s why we facilitate using the technology with project teams, to show them the best way to use it to create value.

“We all want to experience what it’s like to fly a 747, but you need to be a pilot to understand how to do it.”