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

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.

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.

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..)

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-).

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.

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.

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

I have the floorplan & measurements of an apartment. I'd like to see how it looks with furniture. Does this allow me to generate multiple furnishing styles until I find one I like? Does it give me links to the product pages of the furniture?

I understand that this is a different use case from what you had in mind. I'm also open to recommendations of other websites.

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 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!

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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

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

Very exciting space; I think this has great potential!

Sell it to architects for an expensive subscription, don't bother with 17$ from random people online.

And good luck, because selling to small businesses is hard and expensive.

“as just $16”

should be

“at just $16”

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