Show HN: My weekend project - preview TV sizes on your wall | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My weekend project - preview TV sizes on your wall

tvsizematters.com

179 pointsweirdcat51 comments

I recently went through this exercise, but it involved cutting up large pieces of cardboard and holding them up against the wall while my wife looked on disapprovingly.

Or you could have just held up a footrule and done some math. Ratios are all you need, but the cardboard is more fun.

Clever, but steal some ideas from here:

http://tvcalculator.com/

Compare 4:3 and 16:9 content in the box as an option.

I use that to try to figure out what to get to replace my 32" 4:3 CRT TV (yes it's a dinosaur - I'm waiting for black friday). Oh and the answer is 40" 16:9 will replace a 32" 4:3 TV for viewing 4:3 content sometimes.

This site just triggered my anti-virus, any one else?

It might be because of the iframe which loads a script from http://golden-corps.com. The website is dead so I'm not sure what its there for.

I received: "The Websense category 'Malicious Web Sites' is filtered."

"I'm waiting for black friday"

Not sure that's worth it. Black Friday is increasingly becoming a gimmick, more lottery than deal, and on the other side, if you're not too worried about exactly what you end up with there's pretty much continuous deals on all the major retailers for deep discounts on one model or another of TV. I doubt you're going to be able to do much better on Black Friday that just cruising Amazon's site for the next couple of weeks and waiting for a good deal to pop up.

At the risk of going (further?) OT, the new black-friday is the "PRE-black-friday" sales in early November where they try to get you to spend money before the supposed sales later in the month. I actually got some unprecedented prices early last November.

Agreed on this one... just before BF, I haggled with the local appliance places showing them some online offers and ask them to match (equating for taxes and shipping).

Awesomely clever. Can you do something about the browser history bloat? A couple drags of the slider and I'm stuck on the page forever, that might piss people off.

Good point. Didn't think about it, thanks. I removed the hash update for the time being.

Your links should have affiliate codes. Make some money out of it.

But of course, and they do! :)

Did you compile a static list of recommended TVs in different sizes, and just display relevant ones (it looks like it from the markup) or are you actually searching Amazon and pulling back relevant products? (or something in between)

For the MVP I precompiled a list of 3 top selling TVs of all sizes. If it proves to be worth it, I'll add periodic autoupdate for the list and visitor country check, but it still will be prefetched (so yeah, something in between).

Make this for furniture and you will be rich.

You could estimate sizes based on perspective.

Ikea (among others) has this http://freshome.com/2010/08/18/10-best-free-online-virtual-r...

That's nothing compared to how they could have it.

Imagine, I take a movie of my front room. The app calculates the lengths and widths of my room and everything in it based on something (perhaps perspective). I go to a furniture store (or online), and want to see how that sofa will look in my front room. Maybe I take a photo of that sofa, maybe there's a qcode on it. I want to see how that sofa will look, how it will fit into my front room. Will it be too big/too small? Is it too dark/too light/the wrong colour?

The biggest barrier left between buying some furniture is imagining how it will look and fit into the space you already have. Some people can't imagine colours accurately, some people can't judge sizes accurately, many people can't do both.

I cannot do both!

There is an augmented reality furniture app out there. Can't remember the name off hand, but some googling will probably reveal it.

Saw a demo at a meetup recently of the iPad version. Pretty slick :)

http://www.snapshopinc.com/

Nice, just the sizing part and the photo of an item you like parts to go :)

Augmente is doing something like this: http://www.augmentedev.com/drupal7/content/new-video-summari...

See roomeon.com ... 3D interior designer for mom+pop at least that's the idea. Old buddies of mine are doing this. Only desktop app though if I were them I'd get busy writing a WebGL version Real Soon Now.

Not sure if they have an English version... gotten pretty popular since their launch a couple months back. Not sure if rich yet though ;)

Nice work. The first thing I tried was to drag the corner of the TV, to make it bigger. Is it possible to add this feature?

This is actually something I've removed in the process, trying to simplify things.

When you reach over 80" you should switch to recommending projectors. For example, I have a 120" screen and a Panasonic AE200U projector.

Yeah, that's definitely in the plans. I'm a projector guy myself. :)

I'd love to see a compare feature. For example, someone with a 40" screen might want to see how that compares to a 60" screen. Right now, you can drag back and forth to try and get an idea of the comparative size. Having two sliders would be great to overlay the smaller size on top of the larger size. You could then also display the relative screen area of each -- 60" is 50% larger than the 40" screen diagonally, but 125% larger in terms of area which is what really matters.

By the way, I'm looking for a partner to release it as an iOS app. Anybody game?

Hit me up at notabing --- gmail.com

Hi you could also try and submit it to http://www.weekendhacker.net

+2 for the iOS execution.

Cool, but why is the default picture behind the sofa. It would make more sense simulating sitting in it.

Good point. There's some psychology to be thought about here.

You need an element in the picture that is of a known scale. The couch is pretty good, but maybe include something on the wall so you can compare the two... a door frame is the best I can think of, since they are pretty standardised.

I don't know, I kind of like the sofa. Standing behind it you can take in the whole room, not just the compare the screen with the speakers. Besides, this was the coolest photo I could buy. :)

Wicked idea, nicely executed, wish I'd thought of it!

You say that like this would be hard to replicate in a weekend.

My wife is a hobbyist artist and is thinking of displaying some of her art work in online shops. SHe was talking last week about a technology such as this that would enable her to demonstrate her artwork in its intended environment, in the same way as this project for the TVs. I knew this could be done, just didnt know how. I'd be curious to learn how this is achieved, or if there are any services out there that provide this service?

I'm adapting it for other uses; hit me up at notabing -at- gmail.com

Seeing the title, I thought this was like SnapShop (http://www.snapshopinc.com/), where you hold your iPhone, point at the wall, and you see the picture with the TV added, as in virtual reality.

Could you make it like that? It would be so much simpler than having to take a picture, upload it, etc...

I did think of that, but that would be quite tougher to build and hardly a weekend thing.

Feature suggestion: show minimum viewing distance (not visual, just a number in meters/feet)

Looks like you've been featured on LifeHacker. Not bad for a weekend project.

http://lifehacker.com/5829786/tv-size-matters-lets-you-try-n...

Now this would be more powerful if it was 3 Dimensional... Another weekend project :)

I expected a VR-type application where you have a reference something the user has to place on his wall and then he can move backwards, film the wall and see the device rendered on the wall as if it was there.

Sony have built something similar to this for their TVs. Although it only works with photographs rather than video: http://www.sony.co.uk/article/tv-size-guide

Good idea and great execution.

What else can this type of app be applied to?

Great idea. You might also want to show links to compatible wall mounts to go with the TVs.

are you going to tell us how much you make on affiliate sales?

+1 for this. I'd be really interested to see what kind of return you can get on this kind of site.

I don't expect much really, but who knows, maybe I'm totally wrong and it buys me a jet. We'll see. :)

I'll probably cook up a blog post about the experience and post it here.

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