6th: House hunting with matching furnitures

Posted on 1000 Ideas

We have been house hunting lately, because I am about to switch job, hopefully we can move to somewhere in the middle of where my wife works and where I work. If we stay where we live now after I switch, both of us will be driving almost 2 hours a day. Sigh…

We have been seeing houses over a few months now. We both hope this next house will be our home for at least next 10 years, so we really want something perfect and give us a homey feeling. It will be OK to be less ideal or require some work, but we still have our visions and would need the bone of the house meet our expectation.

There are a lot of house listing website, such as Redfin, Zellow, or even MLS, they just give you a set of pictures. Most of those pictures are photoshoped, or taken from an angle giving the best impression. Once you are there physically, you will realize it’s actually smaller, or the layout is completely off the chart.

Some websites do provide a 3D walkthrough view, which is very nice. It does help us to understand the layout before going there. However, I always feel something is missing.

I think most house buyers will share the same intention:

We want to see ourselves living there.

But it will be dumb to put our pictures or hologram inside the 3D viewer. I am going to make this statement here: if technology is really evolving to a point that a home user can do a full body scan to generate a hologram, don’t use this technology to sell houses. That’s dumb.

What I want is: if I put our ideal stuff in the house, will it look like my home?

For example, I really want a pool table and a bookcase with ladder, such as this one:

Quick question: Has anyone else notice something annoying when looking for furniture, the furniture is never placed in your home?

Right, that’s why there exists AR application helping furniture buyers to place the furniture digitally in their own home to experience it. It is close to what I am looking for, but this requires the user must physically be there and own the place.

Now, I want an AI to fuse the house picture and the furniture picture together, using the data of both items, intelligently place the furniture at the most ideal room.

More exciting features are:

  • the AI will recommend if I should change the color of the wall, or choose a different color of the bookcase;
  • the AI will detect there is no room fits the bookcase I select, but will try to recommend a similar style bookcase (with a ladder) that is smaller and will fit in the house I am looking at;
  • the AI will recommend other furniture that can match the bookcase I just pick, with the understanding how much space I have in the room; for example, recommending a piano in a big room with such a bookcase is acceptable, but it will not do so if I move the bookcase in a small room intended as a library. And also, it will never recommend a dining table under this context.

I am actually not a big fan of houses with all the staging furniture. They usually look very nice, and once I move my own stuff in, the house suddenly is not so pretty (don’t judge my taste of furniture, if I know how to stage a house, I am not writing this idea at this moment).

This engine (fusing an empty house with furniture) will significantly improve the buyers’ experience (mostly, me). I will see how the house look like if I put my ideal items in it, can I see myself living there?

Of course my wife has some her own flavor as well. She also wants a study place for our kid. And we have some existing furniture. So the engine will allow users to upload some custom picture with dimension attribute (or hologram scan furniture, now this use case will not be dumb), and smartly place them in the house.

You may ask, wow, it sounds cool, but who would invest building such a thing? I believe home builders, real estate companies, or even designers, contractors, furniture companies all of them can benefit from such an application.

From my superficial understanding of AI and 3D rendering, this application sounds very complicated, but should be still feasible to do. I will leave this idea for other people to do. I was going to call this application “HomeFusion”. Ugh, the name is taken!