This week was actually the last official working week before halves presentation, because the following weeks in between will be spring break, GDC and SxSW that we won’t have core hours at office.
Our biggest breakthrough for this week was we solved the real time background culling problem. First, we allow users to scale the bounding box to cover the furniture they want; second, we will use the function of Occipital’s framework to get the mesh of the furniture inside the box; third, Jack added a new path in rendering process that as long as we find a pixel is rendered from the mesh, we will replace it with the pixel from camera feed. That’s the basic process of how we managed to cull the furniture from the background in real time.
We visited Modsy which is an interior design studio funded by an ETC Alumni. Modsy allows users to see inspirational designs and decor within the context of their own home. Basically they will reconstruct the user’s room into 3d model by using 12 room pictures from the user as reference. Then they will design it based on user’s prefered style and offered a previsualiztion with a list of furniture info and links. It’s very cool and inspirational. We had a productive meeting with them and demoed our project there. The biggest take away was to think about about how to lower the user experience barriers.
After visiting Modsy, we want to a fancy furniture store called HD Buttercup. We demoed our app to their manager and retailers and explained our vision. They really liked our idea of the reverse version of visualization. According to them, they have a 7 days return policy with a full refund without covering the shipping fee. So it’s actually bothering for both of the customers and the store. Therefore, they thought we were definity in the right direction that can solve a real world problem and gave us great encouragement.
Before spring break, we finished the skeleton of our presentation slides. During spring break and GDC week, we will finish our individual slides and script and then rehearse together.