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

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.

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..)

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.

Some feedback.

I’m not your target market but…….

I’m a big advocate of not having pages the tell you what it is, rather take the user straight into it.

If that is not practical then your website should:

1: state what it is

2: show demos of it

You want people to experience and use the thing, not read about it and close the page.

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?

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?

Am I missing an option to swap from meters to feet for measurements? Seems low hanging.

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.

The video tour seems to be AI generated as well. What is the reasoning behind using that over a path traced / light-baking approach?

Also, how does it compare to other floor planner apps and relatively more advanced products like SketchUp?

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.

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)

No, no, oh God please nooooo. People will use this tool for their listings on real-estate classifieds portals like Zillow.

The real estate listed there is never a bespoke design for you and your family. In some locations, there are plenty of affordable homes so you actually can choose one with the layout nearest to your goals.

In the most cases though, affordable homes are rare so people don't really care about the current layout: they will buy any home and remodel it in according to their tastes.

To estimate the remodeling costs, it is better to work with the bare, empty layout plans, not cluttered with furniture and 3D effects, and having all measures specified.

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".

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/

Oeh I could use some of this for Home Assistant, get all my devices actually represented in a 3d model so I can just tap a lamp in stead of a button.

I imagine it also works for houses since those are just 2 or 3 appartments stacked on top of each other, if you think about it.

Nice, but can we have some technical information about it. What is your stack etc?

The landing page is refreshingly well done. It looks good, loads fast, feels smooth and stable. I also like the price point. It sounds like a lot for a saas, but doing it yourself takes too much time, and hiring someone is an order of magnitude more.

I had similar idea but looks someone's actually made it.

Absolutely blows my mind one person wrote this in their free time

I visited the website in my Quest 3 VR headset's browser and clicked "try it out", but was disappointed to not get it in VR.

Did I miss a button or a link to get a VR demo?

Very exciting space; I think this has great potential!

Looks really great.

Absolutely stunning. From quick play, in first person mode, moving from room to room isn’t as obvious, maybe consider adding a translucent clickable item at the rooms entrance.

Can you give us some insights about what your infrastructure and tech stack are? Great work.

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 ;-).

Damn... that bathroom mirror reflection!

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.

I love this!

I have an AirBnB with multiple rooms in Mexico (https://laotraaldeita.com/) and I get relatively often questions about floor plans.

I feel like showing floorplans directly isn't as intuitive for showing off the space, and that using 3D scanners is a huge overkill.

I do have the floorplans so I may give it a try!

Very cool! I was about to work on something similar inspired by my NYC apartment hunt.

I'd HIGHLY recommend advertising to the NYC renters market if you haven't already.

Often it's the one with the least amount of info and there's a lot of well to do people who won't mind paying for this.

Congrats on shipping, love your the vibe of your website. Will share with our architect

I'm curious if you've seen Matterport yet? IIRC they had a 3d virtual tour embed that works by capturing apartments using real camera images (vs from floor plan). They seemed pretty common in SF Bay Area.

Is there any way to preview the 3d model created from the floorplan? Some floorplans I have are a bit blurry and I have no idea how this will translate into floorplans so to have to pay $100+ without any guarantee of success is not ideal

awesome! did you do it fulltime?

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.

Seems to be a bug - you can't save if you haven't entered a company profile (Firefox, Windows)

(that's a guess. the error is Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: b.sessionDataSchema.userData.companyProfiles is undefined )

It looks nice, well done, but so far I see nothing more than a static 3D model ... so it is difficult to form a good opinion, unfortunately.

Not something I need, but after following the "Try it now" button - that is really smooth. Nice work!

@streakolay - What's the reason for the checkout price changing at the last minute? I see several people mentioning that they were quoted $17 and then charged $33 (x2) or $50 (x3), but I don't see any replies explaining the reason or confirming that it's a bug.

Surely it's not an intentional bait-and-switch, right? That would be an extremely scummy anti-pattern; the cart price should always match the final checkout price aside from reasonable surcharges like tax and shipping that should be displayed as soon as the needed information is collected.

The fact that the mentioned higher amounts are almost perfectly double or triple the quoted amount makes it sound like some kind of error, like either a server-side bug or a user accidentally adding several copies to their cart without realizing it.

Can you please clarify the reason for the discrepancy?

I'm most interested in the AI interior design. Is it using products that are available? Can we set budgets for the designs? Seems like a product in and of itself in that one feature.

Congrats. Looks pretty good. Better than what I can hack together in Blender with BIM plugin

Look cool, I used HomeByMe for similar stuff when planning an extension. It had the benefit of optional offline render for photorealistic output, nowadays you could perhaps export the scene as GLTF and send it to blender.

How do I delete my account?

Have you read this? https://acko.net/blog/i-is-for-intent/ I thought at first you were the author!

I have used ArchiCAD to do the same thing before. My question is, what’s the advantage of having it as a web app? Can I, for example, embed it into my site?

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.

Am I missing something? This needs you to have the room layout already, and then creates some kind of 3d view from that?

Amazing job! Have you ever thought about porting this to a desktop app?

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?

Love the name.

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.

“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.

Wow, that interactive demo was beautiful! Incredible job!

For recent-construction and modern gut-renovation apartments, these simple geometric abstraction renderings are nice and helpful.

For older apartments, such as dominate many older cities or older parts of town, that existing competitor's tool, which includes photograph textures and more "organic" 3D modeling, seems more useful in getting a sense of what the place is actually like.

I'm not the target customer, but I just wanted to say I think the UX is beautiful.

Ran into the same payment bug mentioned elsewhere, also would like to mention the tech support gives "Oops a problem occurred" when trying to submit.

Looks schmick tho, and have been looking for a tool to plan out my place before I move in, found most tools expensive or lacking.

I admire people who are able to really believe in an idea they come up with and spent many years building it. I'm sure OP when you started off, you saw competitor offering, what made the turning point that made you realize and committed, "you know out of a million other ideas, this is what I want to work with".

I have a million ideas on my diary and have yet to build any of them. They aren't truly unique but I see them as a "practice" that when one Mythical day I don't have worried and have ample time, I can take the first step. My current free time is occupied by job hunt and LC..

Also, in term of technologies, what is the core idea/tool that converts 2d drawing into 3d. Is it truly automatic or some core principles behind it, like OCR but for 3d models? I have zero exposure in OpenCV

This is pretty neat! I’m on mobile right now, but you mentioned that it’s VR ready - does the landing page work with WebXR? I’d love to try it out on my meta quest 3

Pay a copywriter. Language like "boost up" instead of just "boost" risks making the product feel very amateur on first impression.

Wow, nice work.

Our attempt was providing tools making vrchat-like worlds in Godot Engine. We have many of the mesh construction tooling but we never made to the product.

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.

Is anyone aware of a tool for residential apartment building design to split up an apartment unit envelope into reasonable floorplans for review?

Fairly confusing UI - I thought I had lost my room plan I had made until I saw it in the "Submit for UI" queue. I see some broken images too.

Is the "Video Tour" AI generated? The showcase obviously is, but is that also what you want to ship?

This is fantastic! Excellent work. Congrats on shipping this.

Sent this to a friend who's a realtor. Good luck!

Typo on landing page

“as just $16”

should be

“at just $16”

Is it intentional that the 3D plan image doesn't show the positions of doors and windows? They seem kinda important to me.

I love that it offers features like 3D floor plan images, video tours, and AI-powered interior design at an affordable price. This could really enhance the way properties are showcased online. Have you tried their service yet, and how was your experience?

The messaging around potential use case seen on the landing page is so concise and clear, further, product itself felt interesting and very interactive to me. Wish you good luck with your journey!

Just another post saying well done. You found a niche and filled it with an excellent product in your free time.

I hope you get offered lots of money for this project.

That this renders smoothly on mobile is quite impressive. Congratulations on a fine job.

I've been working on my project for "only" one year, so I feel I'm in great shape :) Kudos for pushing through!

No constructive feedback, just wanted to say this is really well done. Congrats on the project, I'd be incredibly proud to build something of this quality.

Minor nitpick: having a big TV in the child bedroom feels wrong. Put some toys or something more indicative of a child instead.

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

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.

A lot of real estate agents pay photographers to do virtual walk-throughs of their properties. You might be able to partner with the photographers and get them to up-sell their customers with your product.