Using Vision Pro to Visualize Your Dream Home Before Building
The coolest use for the Vision Pro
I discovered an incredible way to use the Vision Pro for designing our new home. By modeling floor plans in Fusion 360 and importing furniture from IKEA and 3D Warehouse, I created an immersive virtual walkthrough. This process helped me understand the true scale and feel of the space, solving the difficulty of committing to permanent decisions based on flat PDFs. A custom app called Prospector now allows me to navigate the design like a video game.
In software if you don't end up liking a feature after playing around with it for awhile, you can tweak it or remove it entirely (try doing that with a poorly placed wall).
- jondiggsit
My team uses this technology on a daily basis at my company. I run a design / build firm in the Hamptons, USA. We start all of our design projects with a 3d-first approach. Schematic design starts in 3D using Rhino3D or Revit. We use visualization plugins, like Enscape, to render the models and stream to a Quest 3 headset.
So when clients come in, and feels adventurous, we'll setup the headset, set the display height to their actual, and let them walk around their beautiful new home.
The response has been powerful. My clients are able to truly understand the scale, the proportion of rooms, ceiling heights, and the smallest details.
We're able to make real-time changes to the model (within reason) and provide instant design feedback.
I've been using this technology for years and I'm surprised it's not being adopted faster - good for us right now though!
- vanviegen
Yeah, we did the same thing when designing our house almost ten years ago now, using a HTC Vive running https://irisvr.com/prospect/
Just like the article says: Within a second after putting on the headset you just know if things are proportioned right, or need some fine tuning. That's really valuable!
Also, when the house was actually (partially) built, it felt exactly like the simulations we knew pretty well by that point.
- gwd
Leveling this up: Calculate sun angles at different times of the year to simulate light entering the house. Find out if some room is going to be unbearably hot in the summer because it's got too much full sunlight; make sure there are windows that can take maximum advantage of sunlight in the winter months; maximize opportunities to accidentally catch the sunset / sunrise.
- marcogarces
Christian is a brilliant developer, that made simply the best experience for reddit that ever existed; after the ban, and when Apollo was dead, I simply stopped consuming reddit (other than an occasional kagi search that takes me there).
I hope he knows that a lot of iOS users really appreciate his work, (I even convinced one hardcore Android user to get an iPhone just for this one app, it was that good).
For that, thank you Christian!
- abcd_f
Good time to mention TwinMotion - a real-time archviz software from Epic, built on top of Unreal Engine. Free for personal and small-scale commercial use.
Basically, you do the geometry modelling in Sketchup, Blender or what have you, import that into TM, texture it, place lights and then walk around Doom style. VR headsets are supported natively. There is also a decent (and very easy to use) support for "scenarios", so you can open/close doors, turn on/off lights, etc.
Highly recommended.
PS. There is a free desktop version of Sketchup Make 2017. Got everything one needs for a single-person setup. There is a copy on the Internet Archive.
- bredren
That's neat. Once it is built, I think a cooler use is to trace wiring and plumbing through your walls of your existing house. Your revit model may include all of this data, or at least the plan. Things change. :)
Though this is especially helpful for old homes where you have to sort of improvise ethernet wiring.
I normally just use it to consume 4k hdr media though.
It has not lived up to being a utility player device, but so far it is so good at media delivery that is sort of okay.
- js2
Here's a low-voltage wiring installer that wrote his own Vision Pro app to help visualize in-wall studs to make it easer to run wiring:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1ut1atj/how_i_ret...
https://old.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1tq34lj/created_...
Submitted previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48867417
- knolan
For those of us who can’t afford a Vision Pro try the Reality Composer app for iOS. You can create a scene and place 3D models on walls or the floor and then navigate in AR.
It’s useful for placing furniture in your home. The IKEA app used to offer something similar.
Technically there’s no reason you couldn’t do something like a full house too.
- nxc18
It seems like everything here can also be done with any iPhone using ARKit. Obviously the headset is better, but not $3500 better than just looking through your phone.
Just thought I’d raise this since it weirdly isn’t mentioned in the article.
I used a similar technique the last time I moved - scan the apartment using the iPhone, then I had a 3D model for measuring and planning out the space before/during the move. It’s a big help when planning out furniture etc.
And I scanned my old place before leaving so I can virtually step into it any time I want. iPhone via finder/preview handles showing 3D models in AR out of the box.
- a_c
I scanned my local climbing gym and have climbing videos mapped onto the wall
https://kmcheung12.github.io/climb-preview/w/a6ece004
I think 3D application is massively under utilised. There is whole family of interaction the textual web cannot provide