RenovAR

Choice of Technology

After careful consideration, we chose to develop RenovAR using AR on the Meta Quest 3 headset. AR allows users to experience their unique remodeled space by physically walking through it, providing a more immersive and realistic experience compared to VR, which often relies on fixed viewpoints or awkward teleportation movement. The Meta Quest 3 headset's high-fidelity passthrough and wide field-of-view deliver the level of immersion necessary for visualizing a remodeling project, surpassing the limitations of small mobile device screens.

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Testing the Water

As newcomers to the AR features of the Meta Quest platform, we began by downloading and building a demo game called Phanto, provided by Meta, on the Quest Pro. This game showcased several crucial AR features needed for our project, including passthrough, scene recognition, and object placement. Although we successfully compiled and ran the game on the Quest Pro, we discovered that it does not support the scene mesh API required for room scanning, scene recognition, and object placement. Moreover, the passthrough quality was unstable, grainy, and lacked color. These limitations made it clear that the Quest Pro could not deliver the immersive AR experience required forRemodAR. As a result, we decided to purchase a Quest 3 to further explore its potential for our project. The Quest 3 exceeded our expectations. The Phanto game worked seamlessly on the Quest 3, and we were impressed by the high precision of its room scanning capability. The device allowed us to place virtual weapons on any physical surface with remarkable accuracy, and the enemies spawned at realistic, unoccupied locations within the room, enhancing the overall immersive experience.

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First Proof-of-Concept

Encouraged by the Quest 3's capabilities demonstrated in the Phanto game, we proceeded to follow the first part of a Meta Quest Scene API YouTube tutorial to implement the most basic features of home remodeling: changing floor tiles and painting walls. This initial proof-of-concept allowed us to lay the foundation for our RenovAR application. The demo video below was filmed in an occupied room with furniture but we intend the experience to be taken place in a new, empty, unfurnished room where the customer can walk around more freely. In the coming week, we plan to expand on this by enabling users to select from a variety of floor tiles and wallpapers, as well as experiment with adding furniture to the virtual room.