A “detox vestibule” sounds like something you might find at a high-end rehab center—or at the very least, an inventive day spa.

Instead, it’s what you have to enter to purchase a unit at the W New York Downtown Hotel and Residences in Manhattan’s financial district. One-bedroom apartments in the building start at $1.1 million.

The dark chamber is a dramatic introduction to the development’s sales office, which opens November 7. The space is decorated in red, black, and white and has a full bar, a hip ambient soundtrack, and a raft of interactive technology inspired by modern museums.

In a crowded high-end-condominium market, sales offices are incorporating sophisticated technology and elaborate marketing techniques in order to stand out from the crowd. Gone are the days of blah brochures, ho-hum artist’s renderings, and Styrofoam models.

At the W sales center, visitors spin a special globe connected to position sensors; stop on Europe and a high-definition video of W’s properties there is projected onto a curved wall. Sensors in the floor launch other presentations: Step on one colorfully lit area to learn about luxury shopping in the neighborhood; step on another for information about nightlife. A gesture-tracking system allows buyers to point to different areas on a screen to learn more about amenities and apartments.

“With technology, we’re bringing back a lot of the excitement into home buying,” says Michael Shvo, principal of the real-estate-marketing firm Shvo Group, who is handling the W’s sales. “It expands our conversation as marketers to the buyer; it gives the buyer a lot more reasons to want to buy into the building.”

Offering buyers an over-the-top, memorable experience is especially important in the current real estate market, which has seen demand for condos—particularly high-end condos, in many places—soften throughout the country. While Manhattan’s condo market remains buoyant, according to the National Association of Realtors, sales of existing condos and co-ops nationwide fell 4.3 percent between August and September, which represents a 14.7 percent decrease since September 2006.

“Technology is more or less required in the current environment,” says Jo Miller, a New York technology consultant who designs sales offices. “Obviously, it’s a much more competitive market now. The boom is over, when you could just sell a condo from a xeroxed Schedule A. Today, you have to lure buyers, almost take them on a Disney ride.”

That’s what happened to Vu Nguyen, a physician from South Bend, Indiana, who, in 2006, was shopping for a pied-à-terre in downtown Chicago. He had looked at several properties, but it was the Legacy at Millennium Park, a 72-story tower rising just off Michigan Avenue, in which one-bedrooms start in the mid-$400,000s, that really impressed him.

The sales center, which has views of Lake Michigan, features four 42-inch interactive touchscreens, where buyers can examine floor plans and a particular unit’s future view (courtesy of photographs taken by a miniature remote-control helicopter) and receive up-to-the-minute information on the availability of desired units.