How Virtual Reality is Changing Your Decor
Design
You’d be forgiven for thinking you still need to
draft a 3,000-word speech to explain to your interior decorator what your vision
is for your design. Virtual reality only started revolutionizing the industry
in 2016, but it’s changed everything. It lets you
experience and tailor a vision for your home before it’s even built, let alone
furnished. 3-D modelling has, until now, only been able to give you an
impression of your evolving design that’s small enough to fit on your monitor.
Now, virtual reality brings your fantasy to life.
More than a Photograph
Your floor treatments and lighting pull your
entire design together, so no application can do much good unless it can build
on what’s already in the room. 3-D software extrudes photographs into
three-dimensional images, which means you can place your chosen furniture, MaestroBath fittings,
and wall treatments into your rooms before they're fed into the virtual reality
application. As you shop, you can upload individual items into that space, even
getting an impression of new lighting should you change your window treatments.
Because everything is to scale, you can rely on absolute accuracy.
As yet, virtual reality is an expensive
solution, so only a few large retailers are experimenting with it. Other
developers have been working hard on alternatives for those with more
reasonable budgets.
Augmented Reality
Image Courtesy of
PicJumbo.com
Virtual reality applications require you to wear
goggles, while augmented reality functions out of a screen or, in the future, a
pair of glasses. Rooms are modeled in the same way, to scale, and you are still
able to wander around your house looking at it from all angles. The image on
your mobile phone simply changes as though you’re looking through a camera.
Light and Hue
Image Courtesy of
Pixabay.com
Your palettes affect your design more than most
other elements, but it’s far from uncommon to approve a color set that doesn’t
quite work at night as well as it does when the sun’s rays are at their
brightest. Your lighting and window treatments need to be selected according to
both night and day, and this is where all augmented and virtual reality
applications truly shine. They let you view what your room will look like at
all times of the day. It’s imperative that you have an accurate impression of
how color works early on so that you can adapt your lighting to suit your needs
and preferences. This is something that a set of swatches simply cannot compare
to.
Decorators and Architects Unite
With design communities being colossal in so
many parts of the world, it’s difficult to get your architect and decorator in
the same room with your contractors. 3-D modelling achieves this without
requiring you to create a complex schedule. Each facet of your team simply
works with the same software, building your design in layers.
The Race
Augmented reality will work best if it can be
transmitted onto a pair of glasses far smaller than Google Glass, and Mark Zuckerberg intends on leading the race. In future, 3-D
images will be scaleable to your preferences, and Zuckerberg hopes that
augmented reality apps will cost a mere $1. The lenses will need to block out
the external world so that you can see a clear image of your design details and
hues.
The ability to communicate your vision with your
decorator is key to being able to develop the interior of your dreams. With the
help of technology, this is already achievable, but Zuckerberg predicts that
large-scale virtual and augmented reality will eventually merge to achieve
greater design ambitions.
