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RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

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Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#51

Post by ssmoot »

scott_s wrote: post #48
runjake wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My HOWTO: 1. Obtain laser tape, pencil, and paper. 2. Sketch out floor plan with pencil on paper in rough scale. 3. Take laser tape and take needed measurements. Annotate measurements on your rough scale paper drawing. 4. Go back to desk and open OmniGraffle (or Visio or whatever). 5. Draw up a scale floorplan, exportable into any needed, industry standard formats. 6. There is no step 6. Some variation of this HOWTO…

This app seems valuable to non-professionals who may want a digital floorplan of a room. Since you are a professional with 20 years of experience, you have an established workflow, and know how to deal with the variations. Experts will often be able to out-perform automated solutions, which is fine. Those automated solutions are for non-experts.

I don't think you're giving his argument enough credit. Since he's a pro, he probably knows what he's talking about.

I've tried Magic-Plan, and yeah, it was frustrating and too inaccurate to be useful.

Start at the use case: Why would you need this? As a home-owner who's done it, I can't think of any except remodeling. Wether you're replacing the carpet, getting rid of a half-wall, putting in a new beam, measuring out a bathroom for a remodel, you need good, accurate measurements for this stuff.

If just eyeballing it was good enough you wouldn't need the tool in the first place. Guess. Look at your 1' floor tiles, count 'em, and you've got a probably better read on everything.

What would've really helped me out when doing this was a great, simple to use tool to help me build floor plans. Most of what I found on the App Store for the iPad was pretty shoddy, or just difficult to use effectively. Like I want snap-to-grid. But once I put a wall in the exact location I want the option to lock position. Or lock length.

So I dunno. I feel like he/she has a point. When approaching this problem, and needing to make a compromise, you don't compromise on accuracy or you've made your tool irrelevant. If they'd just focused on a really great floor planning tool that would have been the better compromise.

That said I haven't tried it yet, so maybe that's there. I'm gonna give it a shot.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#53

Post by roel_v »

uptown wrote: post #29
runjake wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My HOWTO: 1. Obtain laser tape, pencil, and paper. 2. Sketch out floor plan with pencil on paper in rough scale. 3. Take laser tape and take needed measurements. Annotate measurements on your rough scale paper drawing. 4. Go back to desk and open OmniGraffle (or Visio or whatever). 5. Draw up a scale floorplan, exportable into any needed, industry standard formats. 6. There is no step 6. Some variation of this HOWTO…

I bet someone once said the same thing about the laser tape replacing traditional tape measures.

No, absolutely nobody ever said that. The only con of a laser measure is the price (compared to a foldable analog one), but apart from that (and for the purpose of measuring rooms and buildings), a laser measure is superior in every way.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#54

Post by eternalban »

uptown wrote: post #9
roel_v wrote: post #6

Quite disappointed - was hoping this was done through computer vision. Aren't there are apps that do this? By the time I've 'scanned' a room the way it's shown in the article, and if that method doesn't even give me heights, doors, windows and outlets, and is only accurate to within half a foot - by that time I've measured it with my laser tape measure 3 times over.

And your laser tape translates those measurements into a floorplan that's digitally sharable?

Sounds like an opportunity for an app ..

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#55

Post by greendestiny »

btown wrote: post #42
nobbis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built an Android app, Forge, that does just that. No feedback loop needed - the reconstruction is streamed back to you as you go: http://aboundlabs.com

Is monocular SLAM good enough nowadays that this can be done without depth cameras, just from a single camera?

Probably for some version of done - download VisualSfm and give it a shot yourself if you want: http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ or for a purely mobile approach try http://seene.co/

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#56

Post by yincrash »

ssmoot wrote: post #51
scott_s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This app seems valuable to non-professionals who may want a digital floorplan of a room. Since you are a professional with 20 years of experience, you have an established workflow, and know how to deal with the variations. Experts will often be able to out-perform automated solutions, which is fine. Those automated solutions are for non-experts.

I don't think you're giving his argument enough credit. Since he's a pro, he probably knows what he's talking about. I've tried Magic-Plan, and yeah, it was frustrating and too inaccurate to be useful. Start at the use case: Why would you need this? As a home-owner who's done it, I can't think of any except remodeling. Wether you're replacing the carpet, getting rid of a half-wall, putting in a new beam, measuring ou…

floor plans when finding renters, determining furniture layout, how much paint to buy. to name 3

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#58

Post by radley »

onedognight wrote: post #26

Here's an alternative with a more interactive work flow: http://magic-plan.com/ .

Tried it. More bells but difficult to make accurate. Hard to use if you can't see the floor corners of a room or if dealing with short narrow spaces.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#59

Post by marcosscriven »

digikata wrote: post #34
untog wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever manage to get it to be accurate, though? I tried something similar but the accelerometer and gyro were nowhere near accurate enough.

It's unlikely to be standard inertial navigation, mems sensors drift with dead reckoning integration pretty quickly, even applying more sophisticated kalman filtering may not improve things indoors without GPS (or sufficient travel for GPS even if you could receive it consistently)... But, if you were to add "room-like" assumptions it might improve things pretty well, eg. when integrating a rotation, fit it to a 90 d…

I wondered about doing something like this a while back - and it was the very quick cumulative error from double integration of acceleration data that stopped me from even trying. Clever idea getting the user to place the phone on the walls - as you say that would correct a lot of the errors. But also, as you say, unconventional room layouts get you back to square one so to speak.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#60

Post by namenotrequired »

roel_v wrote: post #53
uptown wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet someone once said the same thing about the laser tape replacing traditional tape measures.

No, absolutely nobody ever said that. The only con of a laser measure is the price (compared to a foldable analog one), but apart from that (and for the purpose of measuring rooms and buildings), a laser measure is superior in every way.

Has that been true from the beginning? It's very rare for the first iteration of a new technology to immediately be superior in nearly every way.
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