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Show HN: I've spent nearly 5y on a web app that creates 3D apartments

694 points| streakolay | 1 year ago |roometron.com | reply

200 comments

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[+] paulgerhardt|1 year ago|reply
Nice. I'm remodeling a place now. Observations from trying the flow:

Fell off the flow when I had to rasterize our plans, when I tried to add multiple rooms, and again during checkout. PDF support should be a must, ideally multiple room support. Making sure checkout works is also a must.

Path was Navigate to Roometron.com=>create account=>create new project=>go to upload my plans=>couldn't select my plans=>saw site didn't support pdf but did webp=>google "pdf to webp" converter=>found some suspicious sites to upload pdf's to=>went to chatgpt to write a script to convert pdf to webp=>saw the script was converting to png anyways=>went back to the roometron site and saw png was supported=>brew install poppler webp =>`pdftocairo -png plans.pdf page`=>upload page 1=>can't find where to upload the rest of the pages for multiple rooms (also my plans have multiple rooms per page)=>exit out=>seeing as this is a "shown hn" decide I'll try again and push through with just the first page of plans only=>see I need my square footage for the first page=>see its only listed for the floor=>manually measure my square footage for the uploaded page=>convert to square meters=>go to checkout=> enter in my credit card info=>can't scroll down to click "complete purchase" because of a rendering error presumably because the info was autopopulated=>quit the credit card flow=>attempt the paypal flow despite absolutely loathing paypal=>sign into paypal=>receive a payment request for $50 not $17=>think this doesn't look right=>quit the flow=>try to find a different payment option=>exiting the payment flow deletes my project=>completely give up here.

[+] onion2k|1 year ago|reply
This is why releasing as early as possible to get customer feedback is key. The app clearly gives enough value to pay, but there's a problem in the payment flow that's a showstopper. That's the sort of thing you need to understand before you start scaling.
[+] sharkbird2|1 year ago|reply
As a developer who works a lot with frontend, this kind of feedback is gold! I wish I could get testing/usability reports like this.
[+] streakolay|1 year ago|reply
Sorry for making you struggle, I will try to make the order process more straightforward. Please let me know about the refund, I guess I did message you on gmail.
[+] btbuildem|1 year ago|reply
Can't say you didn't try to make it work!
[+] throwaway2037|1 year ago|reply
Jesus. Give this man a freebie! Any user that tried that hard is worth money to the devs & QA teams.
[+] streakolay|1 year ago|reply
Hi friends,

I'm Nick. This is Roometron, my first project that I managed to launch by myself while being a web developer and having a full-time job.

I started working on it in 2019, so it took almost 5 years to deliver a beta version now.

It was both a fun and challenging journey. I didn't expect things to go so slowly, but anyway, I'm happy to announce it's finally launched.

What is Roometron?

Roometron is a tool that converts floor plans into 3D apartments. It is VR-ready, highly performant, fast, efficient, and affordable due to its incredible automation.

Feel free to ask any questions.

Cheers.

[+] indigoabstract|1 year ago|reply
Hi Nick,

I'm probably not in the target audience, but still, it looks lovely, I've enjoyed exploring the 3d part.

As a suggestion, a full screen button for the 3d scene would be nice, as I don't have VR, just a regular monitor. And if you're feeling adventurous, you could maybe even add WASD support for greater immersion. But that's a bit of work, as you would probably also have to include a physics lib for dealing with collisions.

Also, I almost didn't see the "try it out" link.

All the best with your project!

[+] peteforde|1 year ago|reply
Hey Nick, congrats on the launch.

I created an account with the intention of kicking the tires, but I have hit wall after wall and I never actually got to the cool 3D part.

If you take one thing from this message, I strongly urge you to make sure that new accounts start with a sample project in the list which people can play with to see what to expect.

In my case, I don't have a floor plan or know my square meters. I went onto Google images and borrowed a plan to upload. The TL;DR is that it seems like I have to pay $33 to see what this place would look like in 3D, and that's when I bounced. I'm curious, but I'm not that curious.

After the sample project, I hope that you will add a 2-3 minute onboarding video to show people how to get started. Getting dropped into any interface with only a vague idea of what is supposed to happen is a guaranteed way to lose 90% of your visitors to unnecessary friction.

Make it stupid simple to get started. Give people a look at the outcome so that they know what to covet.

[+] johschmitz|1 year ago|reply
Nice.

Feature request: In the top/overview view I would like to be able to tap on each room and then the pivot point should move to the center of that room. After a double tap or tap on the top view button the pivot point should move back to the apartment center point. This will help zooming easily into each room from above.

[+] moralestapia|1 year ago|reply
Hi Nick, I have nothing more to say but congratulations, the whole project is put together really well, one can see that this thing was crafted with love.

I hope it does well in the market and you can profit off your work in here.

Best of luck!

[+] dackdel|1 year ago|reply
i work for a large swedish furniture company. can we chat?
[+] matthewhartmans|1 year ago|reply
Hey Nick, Congratulations on the launch and well done for getting it out there in the wild!

Looks cool at a glance and wishing you all the best with it!

[+] blensor|1 year ago|reply
VR ready? Well that's interesting, I have to check it out.

You probably should mention that on the front page somewhere

[+] yieldcrv|1 year ago|reply
Have you consulted a language model on other possible product names? Wasn’t very possible in 2019 but has been my goto since 2022
[+] megadal|1 year ago|reply
What BIM formats does it support?
[+] dualogy|1 year ago|reply
Damn neat, congrats! Some minor feedbacks to get potential users hooked perhaps even more likelier:

Took me a while to hit the "Walk" feature, given that this is perhaps for many the major showcase highlight here. First, having to scroll down on home page to "Try it out", then it defaults to "Fly" mode and the Fly/Walk toggle is kinda down&right, would suggest top&left (unless RTL default in user agent =). And when this default Fly mode first opens up, the apartment box is pretty small (1/5 of horizontal space here), might consider defaulting to the biggest zoom level that will still show it completely in all rotations (that's what the user'll do next).

Nice that the glassy surfaces reflect in Walk mode! Was surprised about lack of specular-highlighting, isn't that fairly cheap compared to reflections? Or maybe planned. Not a dealbreaker on the user side tho I'd guess. But given all the gfx goodies from reflections to ambient occlusion in there, I was a bit curious.

Another thing is that sometimes the canvas goes white with Chromium (Version 126.0.6478.182 (Official Build, ungoogled-chromium) Arch Linux (64-bit)). But the slightest redraw provocation (click-that-actually-moves, or drag-that-rotates) resolves that. (But if you know under what conditions your canvas would fill white, you can look around for what might mistakenly cause such conditions..)

[+] iamjackg|1 year ago|reply
This is an incredible idea.

I decided to give it a try, but got discouraged because there's no guidance during the process on what will or won't work. I don't know if the floorplan I have will "work," and I don't understand why it's asking for things like the total area of the floorplan or how that will affect the AI's ability to parse the image and create the rooms. I imagine it's necessary to give a point of reference for the scale of the drawing, but does it also infer things from text on the floorplan or not? Or is the visual language of floorplans standardized across states/provinces/codes to the point where I don't have to worry, as long as it's a "real" floorplan?

It's hard to commit to a purchase when I have no idea what the end result will look like. It would be really helpful to have a gallery of examples showing floorplans and their corresponding 3D results. That way, I could better understand what kinds of input work well and which don’t.

[+] s1mon|1 year ago|reply
The demo is fluid and works well, but I'm not sure I understand what problem this is solving when things like Matterport are already doing this with real images of spaces. It doesn't require floor plans. In many cases floor plans aren't easily available. Polycam and others are helping with automating the creation of 2D and 3D models from real spaces using LIDAR scanning. How is Roometron different from any of the other tools that are on the market?
[+] fusslo|1 year ago|reply
awesome work. The demo is incredibly smooth and I love the disappearing walls

As a renter, I would love to be able to measure distances in the 3d render. 'Will my couch fit here?'; 'How High are the ceilings?'; 'can I fit my bike above the tv?'; 'how far down the hall is my roommate?'; 'can I fit my desk and dresser next to each other?'

Every apartment I've rented started with me taking a Laser Distance Measure with me and making my own floor plan with height measurement as well.

I see the room square footage, but that's honestly less useful to me than the dimensions (again from a renter's perspective)

[+] hansoolo|1 year ago|reply
But if you have a floor plan, shouldn't it already be measured? You could drop your couch on the plan and see if it fits.
[+] Fire-Dragon-DoL|1 year ago|reply
I second that and I love the pricing scheme, pay per usage allows common people to use it
[+] dougunplugged|1 year ago|reply
I was double billed and using your support chat widget resulted in "Opps.. Seems somethig went wrong". Nick, how do I get in touch with you? My user ID is "VvAShB".
[+] Daegalus|1 year ago|reply
I just paid for a project, but got charged $33 on Paypal instead of $17, and then it lost my project and no history of the transaction in my transactions on the dashboard.

I tried sending a message to support, and it threw an error, so trying here. I understand shit happens, I am not irate, but I would like to remedy this.

[+] streakolay|1 year ago|reply
Hi, if you didn't receive a refund, please contact me over the support form or email. Thanks.
[+] cyberbolt23|1 year ago|reply
There is https://floorplanner.com They are used in a variety of situations and have been doing this for over 15 years. Floorplanner is used in high end shops to show arrangements of furniture, on website to showcase apartments etc. that are for sale and a lot of different use cases.

What is the use case of Roometron that you see it does best?

[+] streakolay|1 year ago|reply
I have not seen any of nice looking 3D apartment viewer yet, most of the companies offer users to draw apartments yourself and furnish it, thats mostly not considered as a user friendly experience and then they ask to render your work into an image, there are no real 3D to play with.
[+] risyachka|1 year ago|reply
It doesn't need a new use case to be useful.

It needs to be nicer/easier/faster. Which it does.

Thats enough not to use floorplanner.

[+] rtb|1 year ago|reply
floorplanner.com does not appear to support VR (as far as I can make out)
[+] pockybum522|1 year ago|reply
Very cool, and very impressive work.

I want to preface this by making it clear that this is supposed to be constructive feedback. You may want to have GPT-4 give some alternate wording for some lines on the homepage.

"Child bedroom" would likely be referred to as "Children's Bedroom" or "Child's Bedroom" and "Allow to go through the 3d space for an immersive VR experience" might be "Walk-through generated spaces in immersive 3D" for some examples.

I've been working in 3D CAD for about half a decade now, and I would expect smoother copy. This is the only critique I have, because the actual product looks great.

[+] streakolay|1 year ago|reply
Thanks man, I've changed the text to your suggestion.
[+] siamese_puff|1 year ago|reply
Incredible work.

So I’ve used something similar to tour apartments virtually from a 3D camera. One thing I’m noticing when walking through the space is it feels like the perspective is really distorted compared to the actual 3D 360 photos in current apartment tours.

The Birds Eye view is neat though. Curious, have you gained traction with apartment management companies to adopt this?

[+] giancarlostoro|1 year ago|reply
Funny, I worked on something similar. My first job we needed to build up some fancy 3D alerting system for a client. I found a threejs based project on GitHub (I think it was called BluePrint 3D) and pitched it to my boss, it saved me screaming for help at figuring out how to build the same things in three JS with zero experience, but also saved us hundreds of hours to rebuild the same thing. It looked somewhat like this tool, though I'm sure this ones way more polished.

It too had a 2D editor for 3D, it was cool, but we were just building floorplans and displaying live data on those floor plans, so all the useful design stuff was scrapped for the most part. This looks nicely polished, good job.

It was a painful project due to the client asking for things that were just... well they were insane.

[+] westurner|1 year ago|reply
Neural radiance fields: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_radiance_field :

> A neural radiance field (NeRF) is a method based on deep learning for reconstructing a three-dimensional representation of a scene from two-dimensional images. The NeRF model enables downstream applications of novel view synthesis, scene geometry reconstruction, and obtaining the reflectance properties of the scene. Additional scene properties such as camera poses may also be jointly learned. First introduced in 2020,[1] it has since gained significant attention for its potential applications in computer graphics and content creation.[2]

- https://nerf.studio/

- https://smerf-3d.github.io/

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38636329

- Business Concept: A b2b business idea from awhile ago expanded: "Adjustable Wire Shelving Emporium"; [business, office supply] client product mix 3D configurator with product placement upsells; from photos of a space to products that would work there. Presumably there's already dimensional calibration with a known-good dimension or two;

- ENH: the tabletop in that photo is n x m, so the rest of the objects are probably about

- ENH: the building was constructed in YYYY in Locality, so the building code there then said that the commercial framing studs should be here and the cables and wiring should be there.

[+] btbuildem|1 year ago|reply
Do you want to see your future? Check out Homestyler [1]

I've used this several years ago to mock up some designs (eventually hired an architect). The tool was still helpful when I transcribed the architect-made plans to the online app, and twiddled around with some details, furniture layouts, etc etc.

It's gotten pretty bloated since, they've got libraries upon libraries of fugly elements (furniture, decorations, architectural details etc) that you can add, but some of the useful core functionality (3d renders, 2d plans with dimensions) still remain.

1: https://www.homestyler.com/

[+] lelanthran|1 year ago|reply
> Do you want to see your future? Check out Homestyler [1]

Doesn't appear to work in FF; provides a link to download google chrome instead.

[+] oulu2006|1 year ago|reply
True, they're both very good.
[+] strongpigeon|1 year ago|reply
Love it. Congrats on shipping! Most of the 3D floor plan stuff out there looks pretty bad I found, but yours looks really great. I love a good orthographic camera and disappearing walls like that! Really scratches that itch for me.

What I'd personally love is to have this but with the ability to see inside walls and have layers for, electrical circuits, network cables or even where my studs are. Basically a full model of my house (or as some people call it, a digital twin). This is probably too niche, but heh, just putting it out there.

[+] bdcravens|1 year ago|reply
It seems to me that the greatest risk in a 5 year build out is "obsolete" technology. No technology is really obsolete (you could totally build a startup on classic ASP or jQuery), but I know as standards change, polyfills are no longer needed, libraries become abandoned, etc, it can be tricky.

On a side note, I wish this was around in 2022. While I see it's designed for apartments, I spent a ridiculous amount of time converting our new house dimensions into a 3d model as we were planning out furniture, etc.

[+] streakolay|1 year ago|reply
It's also risky to be replaced by AI nowadays :D
[+] genezeta|1 year ago|reply
On Firefox, trying the demo viewer "Try it out":

If you click -particularly on a room's label, but also happens when clicking somewhere else-, everything disappears except for the labels. If you click again, everything comes back. Sometimes when click-dragging to rotate, this produces an annoying flash -white for an instant then everything's redrawn.

Also some textures seem to not be loading properly. All furniture remains black.

[+] tmikaeld|1 year ago|reply
Hm, I wish this could use a smartphone with lidar (Like iPhones/iPads) to scan the environment and create the 3D models. The viewer itself is very impressive and I see it will soon support VR. But I've never seen the viewer as the problem - capturing of the environment in an easy and affordable way - that's what's needed. Right now you have to resort to expensive 3D camera rigs.
[+] jillesvangurp|1 year ago|reply
Amazing stuff.

I'm CTO of a company called FORMATION. We build an app that uses indoor maps to allow workers in offices, factories, and other workplaces to interact with their workplace via search, QR codes, and just clicking around in the app. We are pretty early stage but a big bottleneck in onboarding new customers is getting decent quality indoor maps. There are a lot of apps and tools for this.

I'd love to see a 2D version of this. 3D is nice but a bit fiddly to interact with. 2D works much better. Especially on mobile. A second point is that the map is a the backdrop for our app and not the main focus. I think this is true for a lot of apps that use maps: the map is not the main feature but merely to context in which you present information.

So far, we've just been winging this. We work with external designers to clean up whatever images we receive to make them a bit nicer and then just georeference the bitmap on top of openstreetmap (via maptiler and maplibre).

If you want to discuss further, feel free tor reach out privately, my handle is globally unique ;-).

[+] LoganDark|1 year ago|reply
The rendering looks blurry on my display. It looks like the devicePixelRatio is not taken into account. If you want to improve the experience for the everyday user (who could have some ultrabook with a 125% to 250% scale factor, depending on model) I'd highly recommend adjusting the canvas resolution according to the devicePixelRatio
[+] streakolay|1 year ago|reply
It's taken, but there are some restrictions for the high ratios (better to make it blurry than laggy) and there are also a settings button allows to force high resolution
[+] paulcole|1 year ago|reply
“Time spent” isn’t the best thing to call out first when talking about a project.

Yes, it matters a lot to you but is it the most important thing for anyone else to know?

I’d much rather know what you built + key reason it exists.

I get that the 5 years thing is “just” marketing and a way to farm engagement — which is totally fine. This is just an alternative perspective on how to do that.