I Tried Zillow’s New Aerial 3-D Search Tool, And I'm Obsessed

Lowe's in North Bergen, New Jersey, is set to host a limited-time pilot program for its innovative Lowe's Style Studio™ for Apple Vision Pro. This cutting-edge tool is designed to revolutionize how homeowners approach kitchen renovation projects, offering an immersive 3D visualization experience. The North Bergen location, situated at 7801 Tonnelle Avenue, is one of only three Lowe's stores nationwide selected to offer this service, which will be available from June 22nd to June 25th, 2024. The Lowe's Style Studio leverages Apple Vision Pro's spatial computing technology to create a high-fidelity, three-dimensional renovation simulator. This system allows customers to design their dream kitchen virtually, utilizing a curated collection of designs developed by Lowe's kitchen designers. The tool's intuitive input system, controlled by the user's eyes and hands, enables exploration and customization of kitchen layouts in minutes. This initiative marks Lowe's as the first home improvement retailer to integrate such advanced technology for in-store design experiences, aiming to enhance the visualization process for customers. Customers can schedule a 45-minute one-on-one appointment to experience the Lowe's Style Studio. During these sessions, a Lowe's associate guides users through the program, explaining its functionalities. The system offers a virtual environment where customers can explore nearly limitless design combinations, incorporating hundreds of real-world materials, fixtures, and appliances available at Lowe's. This eliminates the need for extensive online searching, centralizing all design choices within a single platform. Upon finalizing a design, customers can save their selections as a PDF. This document can then be easily shared with family, friends, designers, or contractors, and conveniently used for shopping at Lowe's. The company emphasizes that the system works best without glasses, advising contact lens use for optimal experience. Lowe's, a FORTUNE® 50 home improvement retailer, continuously seeks to innovate its services, providing a wide array of products and solutions for home renovation projects across North America. The pilot program at the North Bergen store is a significant step in Lowe's omnichannel strategy, as highlighted by Seemantini Godbole, Lowe’s Executive Vice President, Chief Digital and Information Officer. The company is optimistic that this technology will serve a broader customer base in the future, making kitchen design more accessible and engaging. Homeowners in the Hoboken, Jersey City, and surrounding areas who are planning kitchen renovations or working with contractors are encouraged to make an appointment during the limited pilot period to utilize this advanced design tool. #Lowe's #KitchenDesign #AppleVisionPro #HomeRenovation #NorthBergen #Innovation #SpatialComputing #HomeImprovement #RetailTechnology

Jenni Yolo, a renowned DIY designer and founder of I Spy DIY, transitioned her business from New York City to Milwaukee in 2014, driven by the city's affordability and charm. Initially focused on fashion, her blog shifted to home design after she acquired and renovated her first house, a fixer-upper in Walker's Point, for $24,000. This experience ignited her passion for home renovation, leading her to purchase four more properties in Milwaukee with her husband, David Yolo. The Yolos' latest project, "The Loft," in Walker's Point, presented a unique challenge as it was a modern build from 2003, unlike their previous renovations of older homes. "The Loft" was originally conceived as "The Milwaukee Idea Home," a prototype for accessible, affordable, and energy-efficient housing, supported by former Mayor Tom Barrett and Bob Greenstreet. Independence First initially owned and operated the home as a transitional residence. The concrete walls of the loft meant that the original layout had to be maintained, offering Jenni a creative constraint during the pandemic, when lumber costs were high. She focused on adding her signature aesthetic, characterized by warmth, charm, and refinement, within the existing structure. The design of "The Loft" showcases an open-concept first floor where spaces flow seamlessly. Custom elements include a built-in banquette, vintage rugs on concrete floors, and a DIY plaster fireplace that extends to the 25-foot ceiling. Jenni implemented cohesive tile selections, often repeating patterns in different colorways across rooms to unify the design. Upstairs, a DIY built-in bookshelf painted in Behr’s Muted Sage provides a display for her collection of design books and thrifted items. The Yolos maintained the home's original wheelchair-friendly features, such as threshold-free first-floor access and a roll-in shower. The article also highlights five DIY projects from "The Loft" that readers can undertake. The banquette project involved using pole wrap on butcher block to create a wood fluting effect, stained dark walnut, and adorned with an upholstered cushion made from vintage fabric. To add character to a kitchen column, Cream City brick veneers from The Brickyard in Milwaukee were applied with heavy-duty adhesive and mortar. A statement-making basket light fixture, inspired by a vintage fisherman cross-stitch, was created by drilling holes in various baskets and threading light cords through them, suitable for vaulted ceilings. For the banquette seating, DIY wall cushions were crafted from velvet pillow shams and foam, secured with brass rails and leather straps. Finally, the plaster fireplace, while requiring some advanced framing, features an accessible plastering technique using a mix of joint compound and gray paint applied with a trowel to create a marbled texture. These projects demonstrate Jenni Yolo's approach to incorporating personality and intricate details into home design. #DIYDesign #HomeRenovation #MilwaukeeHomes #IspyDIY #JenniYolo #InteriorDesign #AccessibleDesign #ModernLoft #CreativeProjects

The Apple Vision Pro, a first-generation spatial computing device, has garnered attention for its immersive qualities in media consumption, video conferencing, and virtual workspaces. Despite its high price, potential physical discomfort with extended use, and a current scarcity of third-party applications, the device is seen as a foundational technology, much like the original iPhone. Among the early applications available for visionOS, Lowe’s Style Studio stands out as a promising tool for home renovation. Developed in-house by Lowe’s Innovation Labs, the Lowe’s Style Studio is a kitchen design application leveraging the Vision Pro’s spatial computing and augmented reality capabilities. This app is designed to provide customers and design professionals with an enhanced understanding of dimensional, color, and lighting options available through Lowe’s extensive product catalog. A demonstration of the application highlighted its functionality, allowing users to explore curated designer kitchens in a navigable 3D environment. These virtual kitchens represent various styles, including Maximalist, Mid-Century, and Farmhouse. Users can interact with the virtual kitchen environment using the Apple Vision Pro’s gaze-and-tap gestures to switch between different materials, fixtures, and appliances. The application integrates shadows and lighting effects to create a more immersive and realistic simulated kitchen setting, helping users visualize potential designs more effectively. Lowe's estimates that the app offers nearly 80 billion possible kitchen combinations, reflecting the vast array of products available from the retailer. A key feature of the Lowe’s Style Studio is the ability for users to transform their finalized virtual design choices into a style board. This style board includes itemized products, which can then be easily shared with others, such as significant others, contractors, or interior designers, via email, text, or AirDrop. This streamlines the communication and decision-making process in renovation projects. It is important to note that the current iteration of the Lowe’s Style Studio operates within pre-set showroom environments. This means users cannot overlay virtual materials or products directly onto their actual physical kitchens. The Lowe’s Innovation Labs team acknowledges this limitation, along with the somewhat modest polygon count of the current 3D models. However, they anticipate future updates to the software, coupled with advancements in Apple’s hardware, will lead to a broader range of interactive capabilities and greater integration with real-world environments. The application represents a significant step towards a future where home improvement and renovation planning can be significantly enhanced by the ability to accurately preview and select design options before making purchasing commitments. #AppleVisionPro #LowesStyleStudio #HomeRenovation #AugmentedReality #SpatialComputing #KitchenDesign #InteriorDesign #HomeImprovement #TechInnovation

Generating floor plans, traditionally a time-consuming task involving tape measures, sketches, and CAD software, has been revolutionized by the advent of smartphone applications. Modern iPhones, equipped with LiDAR technology, can rapidly scan interior spaces and produce detailed floor plans and 3D models. The process, demonstrated with an iPhone 12 Max and the Polycam app, took less than five minutes to scan a 600-square-foot hallway, a task that would typically consume half a day using conventional methods. These applications leverage artificial intelligence to identify and define walls, doors, and windows, even when obstructed by furniture or other objects, presenting a significant leap in efficiency. While these mobile scanning solutions offer remarkable speed and convenience, it is important to acknowledge their limitations, particularly regarding accuracy. While a traditional tape measure can achieve precision up to ± 1/16 inch, smartphone-based scans typically have an error margin of 1 to 2 percent, meaning a 10-foot wall could have a deviation of up to 2.5 inches. This level of accuracy is generally sufficient for quick and preliminary floor plans, such as those used for real estate listings or rough estimations for flooring materials, where adding a 5% buffer can compensate for potential discrepancies. However, for applications requiring high precision, such as construction where tight tolerances are critical, manual verification with a tape measure remains essential. Various applications cater to different needs and preferences within the mobile scanning ecosystem. Polycam, for instance, offers a "room" setting for optimized floor plan creation, capable of intelligently completing wall sections. Alternatively, its default LiDAR setting provides a more comprehensive 3D model, capturing furniture and other room details, which is beneficial for realtors showcasing properties with detailed inventories. The cost structures of these apps also vary, ranging from free trials to per-square-foot charges or unlimited usage subscriptions. For example, Polycam provides an unlimited use option for around $100, while Canvas charges based on the square footage of the generated model, which can sometimes exceed initial estimates. Another innovative app, CamToPlan, provides a more intuitive experience for those accustomed to traditional measuring. It superimposes a virtual tape measure onto the camera view, allowing users to trace walls by simply walking and tapping the screen. While simplifying the 2D scanning process, it may not offer the precision for perfectly right-angled measurements. Other notable applications in this space include Matterport, popular for virtual property walkthroughs, 3D Scan by Luxolis, Magicplan, and RoomScan by Locometric. Despite the minor inaccuracies, these apps represent a significant advancement in quickly generating visual representations of interior spaces, making them invaluable tools for professionals and individuals alike, provided that critical measurements are cross-referenced with traditional methods or accompanied by disclaimers about AI-generated data. #FloorPlan #LiDARScanning #iPhoneApps #BuildingInformationModeling #AIinConstruction #3DModeling #MobileTechnology #RealEstateTech

The traditional process of creating high-quality 3D content is known to be complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive, demanding specialized skills for 3D modeling, texturing, and scene assembly. This is particularly challenging when digitally recreating real-world elements. Reality capture technologies, such as LiDAR scanning, Photogrammetry, and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), offer a simplified solution by digitizing real-world objects or environments through the capture of multiple perspectives to estimate scene depth and geometry. While these automated approaches bypass manual 3D modeling and produce high-quality results faster, they typically involve expensive, specialized hardware, are compute-intensive, and often yield poor real-time rendering performance. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting emerged as a new technique with the potential to accelerate 3D scene reconstruction and rasterization while maintaining high quality. Before delving into this technique, it's crucial to understand 3D reconstruction, which involves recreating a 3D scene or object from 2D inputs like photos or video. Unlike LiDAR, which provides explicit depth data, 3D reconstruction infers depth from 2D images, employing computer vision techniques like multi-view stereo and structure from motion. Photogrammetry, an older method, uses these techniques to generate a point cloud, which is then converted into a polygon-based 3D mesh. NeRFs, introduced in 2020, represent scenes as volumes using neural networks to estimate light radiance, offering faster generation but sometimes inferior detail compared to photogrammetry. 3D Gaussian Splatting, introduced in 2023, builds on NeRFs but generates novel viewpoints by populating 3D space with view-dependent “gaussians.” These fuzzy 3D primitives, with adjustable colors, densities, and positions, mimic light behavior to create volumetric representations. Unlike NeRFs, 3D Gaussian Splatting avoids neural networks, instead utilizing traditional machine learning optimization methods like stochastic gradient descent, making it more computationally efficient. This technique provides photorealistic 3D reconstruction with improved visual quality and faster generation times, reducing noise and handling challenging elements like transparency and reflectivity more robustly than previous methods. The benefits of 3D Gaussian Splatting include shorter generation times due to direct rasterization of gaussians, superior real-time performance enabled by its volumetric, point cloud-based nature, and more robust outputs with fewer artifacts. These advantages significantly lower the barrier to entry for 3D asset creation, allowing non-specialists to create complex 3D objects using only a smartphone camera and a 3D reconstruction pipeline. It also increases accessibility to interactive, real-time 3D content on consumer devices, mobile platforms, and AR/VR, even without expensive accelerated computing. This technology could transform industries like virtual production, digital twins, and e-commerce product visualization by providing scalable, distributable, and performant interactive 3D experiences. Deploying 3D Gaussian Splatting at scale can leverage cloud infrastructure such as AWS for asset generation, management, and global distribution. An example workflow on AWS involves ingesting 2D media, processing it through modular pipelines (image processing, structure from motion, 3D Gaussian Splatting training, and viewing), and outputting a 3D object viewable in a web browser. This workflow can be implemented using services like AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) for infrastructure deployment, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for artifact storage, Amazon S3 and CloudFront for hosting and distribution, Amazon Cognito for authentication, Amazon DynamoDB for data storage, AWS Step Functions for workflow orchestration, Amazon ECS and ECR for containerized processing, and Amazon SNS for notifications. AWS services also support elastic processing, content storage, graphics-accelerated computing (e.g., Amazon EC2 G6 instances), content delivery, analytics (e.g., Kinesis, Athena, QuickSight), AI/ML integration (e.g., SageMaker, Bedrock), and digital twin applications (e.g., AWS IoT TwinMaker). The field continues to evolve with contributions from NVIDIA (Text-to-4D with Dynamic 3D Gaussians) and Meta (Robust Gaussian Splatting), highlighting ongoing advancements in integrating AI diffusion models and improving robustness for real-world captures. #3DGaussianSplatting #3DReconstruction #SpatialComputing #AWSCloud #RealTimeRendering #ContentCreation #MachineLearning #ARVR #DigitalTwin