Hacker News Reader

Comment by Redimo | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works in the professional smart home business and in a comapny with close to 15 years of experience, using "3D" based house plans are usually a waste of resources. In most cases, this leads to the following problems:

- Having to create a 3D house plan from scratch

- Having to add textures, objects to it, as otherwise it would look bland

We only use black/white 2D house plans, which bring all the positive aspects of a house plan without the negative one from 3D, as a flat 2D plan does not need any objects in it to look good.

Here is an example screenshot of my apartment https://i.imgur.com/99qos7l.png

View on HN

Your floorplan example has very little in the form of indications or metrics, seemingly nothing beyond switch on off status and maybe light intensity level.

I feel like the next frontier for home automation is going to be sensors and monitoring. Early forms of this data gathering being proximity or motion detection for triggering actions such as lights or displays, including thermostats, which also monitor temperatures indoors and from local weather stations. While outlets with power monitoring are available, wall switches don't seem common yet, which is odd as they'd have the awesome application of detecting bulb burnouts. Individually customized replacement bulbs delivered automatically as a service

Air handling seems also like an easy area for improvement, humidity based switching exists, but coordinating bathroom fans exhausting with an intake running can efficiently recycle hot summer air with cool night air. If the fans were somehow reversible, bathrooms could intakes and exhaust on opposite sides of a building, while also monitoring air temps and humidity to detect with thermostats when they've sufficiently cycled through outside air.

Plumbing especially needs innovation, it would be nice if there was accurate flow metering, something ubiquitous you could put on a compression valve supply line that could measure usage, detecting drip leaks and left on taps, ideally with a valve inside for regulating flow. Can we get a power line over plumbing (PLoP) standard?

While not necessarily hard to display in 2D, certain aspects, like building airflow, might require 3D stimulation. It seems like 2D floorplan or walkthrough video to 3D model would be an ideal automation workflow, with generic textures and object models sufficing.

Yes, you don't have any detailed information in this view. By pressing any Icon you toggle it, by long-pressing anything with a "+" you open a popup that displays light levels etc.

For example, we have this for anything heating-based: https://i.imgur.com/evaKP07.png

The same case here:

Ventilation is toggle based, temperature is connected to a sensor and pressing the icon opens a popup to change the temperature threshold.

What you're suggesting for ventilation efficiency is a solved problem - new buildings with ventilation systems all lead to a single input and output. By regulations it's mandated to use a heat exchanger. So the hot air you want to suck out during cooking loses a big of it's heat and gives it to the air being sucked in.

For older buildings it's in the realm of possibilities. As soon as any integration is possible (Be that IP based or trough switches), any logic can be programmed. The fact is that most people don't care about those technical details, they just want it to "work". You don't spend money on such an infrastructure to be adjusting everything yourself - albeit for the customers that specifically demand it, making these options accessible is always a possibility.

The only thing I can say is that 3D simulations for airflow are something you'd do on dedicated software, as the aspect of simulating such a thing:

- requires a lot of computational power - requires a larger amount of detail avaliable for each room

This means you'd have to place all the objects you have in your house in the 3D plan, which can be a lot of work as there won't be fitting objects avaliable to each variant.

That screenshot looks on the one hand very useful and on the other hand somewhat user-hostile since you have to build your own mental mapping from the architectural-style floor plan to the rooms in your house without any hints - I can imagine it being much easier to get used to or share with guests if there were sufficient icons or furniture shown in each room to make it obvious which room it is and which direction it's facing without having to consider the measurements and position relative to the other rooms.

If I were to use the 2d floor plan I’d look at it for a moment, and then I’d flip a couple of lights so that I could tell which room is which. It’s not complicated imo.

I have to disagree a bit. For new users it will always take a bit of time to get used to it - be it in 2D or 3D. But after some time, the usability of 2D and 3D will be the same. And guests will have that problem either way - for that reason, one could just render their usable rooms on a separate UI.

Creating a 3D house plan from scratch and adding textures and objects is a solved problem.

The Sims was published 21 years ago, and it makes it quite easy for kids and even adults to build, decorate and furnish models of their own homes and families.

See my other posting in this thread about "Towards a mixed reality intelligent campus".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27174053

Here's an even earlier pre-release version of The Sims that we released internally at EA in 1998 to The Sims Steering Committee, which convinced them to let us finish and release the game in 2000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY&ab_channel=DonHo...

That pre-release version is quite crude, with ugly graphics and a klunky user interface, but you can look at youtube videos of The Sims 4 to see how far the state of the art has advanced in the 23 years since that pre-release demo of The Sims 1.

Here's a slightly more recent demo of the architectural editing tools, pie menus, and visual programming tools that I developed in The Sims 1 (this is the released version, but with the unreleased internal "Edith" object editing and "SimAntics" visual programming tools built in):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs&ab_channel=DonHo...

>The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo. This is a demonstration of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and Edith visual programming tools that I developed for The Sims with Will Wright at Maxis and Electronic Arts.

Here's one of LGR's reviews of The Sims 4 from 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohwbklm3w_E&list=PLXtVXmQQAA...

>LGR - The Sims 4 Review

>Gameplay and overview of The Sims 4. What are the new features? How does it compare to The Sims 3? Is it worth buying? Questions, answers, snark!

He's published many other reviews of the Sims 4 expansion and stuff packs, too:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbBZM9aUMsjH0ugWCCkcF...

This one from 2014 focuses on build mode and the architectural editing tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PstU5SsEAX0&list=PLbBZM9aUMs...

>LGR - The Sims 4 Build Mode Gameplay Revealed

>Commentary on the latest gameplay from The Sims 4, showing the trailer footage for build mode. New scalability, wall options, movable rooms, and all that!

I'm not saying it's not a solved problem. It is, and we don't even have to take Sims for that. Close to all, if not all, architects around here already create 3D simulations of the buildings to show to customers.

What I am implying is that the total gain you get from fabricating, setting up and rendering a 3D model of a house plan is barely more than the one you get from a 2D version

Reply on news.ycombinator.com