I'm Nick. This is Roometron, my first project that I managed to launch by myself while being a web developer and having a full-time job.
I started working on it in 2019, so it took almost 5 years to deliver a beta version now.
It was both a fun and challenging journey. I didn't expect things to go so slowly, but anyway, I'm happy to announce it's finally launched.
What is Roometron?
Roometron is a tool that converts floor plans into 3D apartments. It is VR-ready, highly performant, fast, efficient, and affordable due to its incredible automation.
Hi Nick, I have nothing more to say but congratulations, the whole project is put together really well, one can see that this thing was crafted with love.
I hope it does well in the market and you can profit off your work in here.
Feature request: In the top/overview view I would like to be able to tap on each room and then the pivot point should move to the center of that room. After a double tap or tap on the top view button the pivot point should move back to the apartment center point. This will help zooming easily into each room from above.
I'm probably not in the target audience, but still, it looks lovely, I've enjoyed exploring the 3d part.
As a suggestion, a full screen button for the 3d scene would be nice, as I don't have VR, just a regular monitor. And if you're feeling adventurous, you could maybe even add WASD support for greater immersion. But that's a bit of work, as you would probably also have to include a physics lib for dealing with collisions.
Agree - WSAD or just cursor keys would make it really 'walking' - currently it's more like 'click to jump' :)
Also, could you tweak you algorithm to have the geometry deform less at the edges of the viewport? At the moment it's a little extreme and distracting.
I created an account with the intention of kicking the tires, but I have hit wall after wall and I never actually got to the cool 3D part.
If you take one thing from this message, I strongly urge you to make sure that new accounts start with a sample project in the list which people can play with to see what to expect.
In my case, I don't have a floor plan or know my square meters. I went onto Google images and borrowed a plan to upload. The TL;DR is that it seems like I have to pay $33 to see what this place would look like in 3D, and that's when I bounced. I'm curious, but I'm not that curious.
After the sample project, I hope that you will add a 2-3 minute onboarding video to show people how to get started. Getting dropped into any interface with only a vague idea of what is supposed to happen is a guaranteed way to lose 90% of your visitors to unnecessary friction.
Make it stupid simple to get started. Give people a look at the outcome so that they know what to covet.
I didn't really expect such a curiosity and my initial idea is to make this tool beneficial for real estate agencies and builders and only then try to make it useful for a wide audience :) Thanks for you interest and feedback.
Almost as large as the early access button or more eye catching, I would've skipped the Try It Out button had I not read someone else's comment. Fantastic site design, amazing demo app and clean 3D for a solo project, much luck.
And props for launching! Going from 80% launch-able to 100% is not an easy task, especially when balancing other work. There’s so many small things that add up, even things like privacy policies or ToS’es.
So would the user be able to specify what furniture to be placed in the different rooms in the floor plan? And how do you source the 3d models? e.g. if I want to have specific IKEA furniture?
I’m wondering because I once spent some time writing a 3d design app that could be used for room planning, and the main challenge was striking the balance between user control (e.g. the user wants the couch to be changed or moved) and automation. Because the user doesn’t want to fiddle too much with the 3d software, as it is the entire premise of building such an app that it alleviates the need for 3d skills, but there is still the need for expressiveness and making changes.
The landing page is refreshingly well done. It looks good, loads fast, feels smooth and stable. I also like the price point. It sounds like a lot for a saas, but doing it yourself takes too much time, and hiring someone is an order of magnitude more.
This is pretty neat! I’m on mobile right now, but you mentioned that it’s VR ready - does the landing page work with WebXR? I’d love to try it out on my meta quest 3
There is https://floorplanner.com
They are used in a variety of situations and have been doing this for over 15 years. Floorplanner is used in high end shops to show arrangements of furniture, on website to showcase apartments etc. that are for sale and a lot of different use cases.
What is the use case of Roometron that you see it does best?
I have not seen any of nice looking 3D apartment viewer yet,
most of the companies offer users to draw apartments yourself and furnish it, thats mostly not considered as a user friendly experience and then they ask to render your work into an image, there are no real 3D to play with.
So I’ve used something similar to tour apartments virtually from a 3D camera. One thing I’m noticing when walking through the space is it feels like the perspective is really distorted compared to the actual 3D 360 photos in current apartment tours.
The Birds Eye view is neat though. Curious, have you gained traction with apartment management companies to adopt this?
“Time spent” isn’t the best thing to call out first when talking about a project.
Yes, it matters a lot to you but is it the most important thing for anyone else to know?
I’d much rather know what you built + key reason it exists.
I get that the 5 years thing is “just” marketing and a way to farm engagement — which is totally fine. This is just an alternative perspective on how to do that.
Damn neat, congrats! Some minor feedbacks to get potential users hooked perhaps even more likelier:
Took me a while to hit the "Walk" feature, given that this is perhaps for many the major showcase highlight here. First, having to scroll down on home page to "Try it out", then it defaults to "Fly" mode and the Fly/Walk toggle is kinda down&right, would suggest top&left (unless RTL default in user agent =). And when this default Fly mode first opens up, the apartment box is pretty small (1/5 of horizontal space here), might consider defaulting to the biggest zoom level that will still show it completely in all rotations (that's what the user'll do next).
Nice that the glassy surfaces reflect in Walk mode! Was surprised about lack of specular-highlighting, isn't that fairly cheap compared to reflections? Or maybe planned. Not a dealbreaker on the user side tho I'd guess. But given all the gfx goodies from reflections to ambient occlusion in there, I was a bit curious.
Another thing is that sometimes the canvas goes white with Chromium (Version 126.0.6478.182 (Official Build, ungoogled-chromium) Arch Linux (64-bit)). But the slightest redraw provocation (click-that-actually-moves, or drag-that-rotates) resolves that. (But if you know under what conditions your canvas would fill white, you can look around for what might mistakenly cause such conditions..)
The UI on the Landing page are slightly different from the original one(when you open the viewer in a new tab) it was done that way to fit the LP content.
The Chrome based bug came with the recent Chrome updates and I didn't have time to fix it and migrate all the HTML elements to the Canvas, but I will have to do it I guess
I also think that the walk feature should have wasd and arrow movement. Maybe it should transition more slowly if you use those keys but when I read "walk" then my expectation in a 3d environment is that I can navigate more freely with keys.
I would think that WASD movement would be very unintuitive for most people who don't play first person 3D games (although it would be nice for the minority who do expect it, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement either).
Oh my god same. Until I found this comment I couldn't even figure out how to trigger 3D mode at all, I was just staring at the 2D plan in utmost frustration clicking "3D plan image" over and over. This is a great product hampered by a not great UI right now.
I'm pretty sure that "3d plan image" are the orthographic top-down renders. To me they look very 2d, but I guess technically they are 3d renders (that do everything in their power to not be 3d)
I didn't understand that the icon (logo?) on the Interactive Space section was actually a button and thought it was just screenshots. Maybe a labeled button would be better.
Yes, I did think to render the whole site with multiple buildings and even started to work on it, but decided to finish it later and launch the current version faster.
Do you mean that it works with ha-floorplan? If so, can you please explain to me how I'd proceed to make that work because it'd be awesome.
I always wanted to do something like this but the time it takes to get the proper render and plan is just too big of an investment for me.
awesome work. The demo is incredibly smooth and I love the disappearing walls
As a renter, I would love to be able to measure distances in the 3d render. 'Will my couch fit here?'; 'How High are the ceilings?'; 'can I fit my bike above the tv?'; 'how far down the hall is my roommate?'; 'can I fit my desk and dresser next to each other?'
Every apartment I've rented started with me taking a Laser Distance Measure with me and making my own floor plan with height measurement as well.
I see the room square footage, but that's honestly less useful to me than the dimensions (again from a renter's perspective)
No constructive feedback, just wanted to say this is really well done. Congrats on the project, I'd be incredibly proud to build something of this quality.
210 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadI'm Nick. This is Roometron, my first project that I managed to launch by myself while being a web developer and having a full-time job.
I started working on it in 2019, so it took almost 5 years to deliver a beta version now.
It was both a fun and challenging journey. I didn't expect things to go so slowly, but anyway, I'm happy to announce it's finally launched.
What is Roometron?
Roometron is a tool that converts floor plans into 3D apartments. It is VR-ready, highly performant, fast, efficient, and affordable due to its incredible automation.
Feel free to ask any questions.
Cheers.
I hope it does well in the market and you can profit off your work in here.
Best of luck!
You probably should mention that on the front page somewhere
You plan to add VR in the future?
Feature request: In the top/overview view I would like to be able to tap on each room and then the pivot point should move to the center of that room. After a double tap or tap on the top view button the pivot point should move back to the apartment center point. This will help zooming easily into each room from above.
I'm probably not in the target audience, but still, it looks lovely, I've enjoyed exploring the 3d part.
As a suggestion, a full screen button for the 3d scene would be nice, as I don't have VR, just a regular monitor. And if you're feeling adventurous, you could maybe even add WASD support for greater immersion. But that's a bit of work, as you would probably also have to include a physics lib for dealing with collisions.
Also, I almost didn't see the "try it out" link.
All the best with your project!
Also, could you tweak you algorithm to have the geometry deform less at the edges of the viewport? At the moment it's a little extreme and distracting.
Looks cool at a glance and wishing you all the best with it!
I created an account with the intention of kicking the tires, but I have hit wall after wall and I never actually got to the cool 3D part.
If you take one thing from this message, I strongly urge you to make sure that new accounts start with a sample project in the list which people can play with to see what to expect.
In my case, I don't have a floor plan or know my square meters. I went onto Google images and borrowed a plan to upload. The TL;DR is that it seems like I have to pay $33 to see what this place would look like in 3D, and that's when I bounced. I'm curious, but I'm not that curious.
After the sample project, I hope that you will add a 2-3 minute onboarding video to show people how to get started. Getting dropped into any interface with only a vague idea of what is supposed to happen is a guaranteed way to lose 90% of your visitors to unnecessary friction.
Make it stupid simple to get started. Give people a look at the outcome so that they know what to covet.
The account settings page is empty. I logged in via Google's OAuth provider. There's no option to change anything.
I also can't make a company profile, but to save or upload a floor plan, your front-end code is expecting that to exist.
Edit:
> const {companyName: Z, logo: Q, measurements: K} = b.sessionDataSchema.userData.companyProfiles[0]
In your minified code. There is no `companyProfiles` for my logged in user.
I’m not your target market but…….
I’m a big advocate of not having pages the tell you what it is, rather take the user straight into it.
If that is not practical then your website should:
1: state what it is
2: show demos of it
You want people to experience and use the thing, not read about it and close the page.
Also, how does it compare to other floor planner apps and relatively more advanced products like SketchUp?
It's not a floor planner, it offers to transform a floor plan to 3D, so users don't have to draw anything:)
I’m wondering because I once spent some time writing a 3d design app that could be used for room planning, and the main challenge was striking the balance between user control (e.g. the user wants the couch to be changed or moved) and automation. Because the user doesn’t want to fiddle too much with the 3d software, as it is the entire premise of building such an app that it alleviates the need for 3d skills, but there is still the need for expressiveness and making changes.
What is the use case of Roometron that you see it does best?
It needs to be nicer/easier/faster. Which it does.
Thats enough not to use floorplanner.
So I’ve used something similar to tour apartments virtually from a 3D camera. One thing I’m noticing when walking through the space is it feels like the perspective is really distorted compared to the actual 3D 360 photos in current apartment tours.
The Birds Eye view is neat though. Curious, have you gained traction with apartment management companies to adopt this?
Yes, it matters a lot to you but is it the most important thing for anyone else to know?
I’d much rather know what you built + key reason it exists.
I get that the 5 years thing is “just” marketing and a way to farm engagement — which is totally fine. This is just an alternative perspective on how to do that.
Did I miss a button or a link to get a VR demo?
Very exciting space; I think this has great potential!
(that's a guess. the error is Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: b.sessionDataSchema.userData.companyProfiles is undefined )
Took me a while to hit the "Walk" feature, given that this is perhaps for many the major showcase highlight here. First, having to scroll down on home page to "Try it out", then it defaults to "Fly" mode and the Fly/Walk toggle is kinda down&right, would suggest top&left (unless RTL default in user agent =). And when this default Fly mode first opens up, the apartment box is pretty small (1/5 of horizontal space here), might consider defaulting to the biggest zoom level that will still show it completely in all rotations (that's what the user'll do next).
Nice that the glassy surfaces reflect in Walk mode! Was surprised about lack of specular-highlighting, isn't that fairly cheap compared to reflections? Or maybe planned. Not a dealbreaker on the user side tho I'd guess. But given all the gfx goodies from reflections to ambient occlusion in there, I was a bit curious.
Another thing is that sometimes the canvas goes white with Chromium (Version 126.0.6478.182 (Official Build, ungoogled-chromium) Arch Linux (64-bit)). But the slightest redraw provocation (click-that-actually-moves, or drag-that-rotates) resolves that. (But if you know under what conditions your canvas would fill white, you can look around for what might mistakenly cause such conditions..)
The UI on the Landing page are slightly different from the original one(when you open the viewer in a new tab) it was done that way to fit the LP content.
The Chrome based bug came with the recent Chrome updates and I didn't have time to fix it and migrate all the HTML elements to the Canvas, but I will have to do it I guess
I will increase the button size and will make the animation more aggressive now.
I imagine it also works for houses since those are just 2 or 3 appartments stacked on top of each other, if you think about it.
As a renter, I would love to be able to measure distances in the 3d render. 'Will my couch fit here?'; 'How High are the ceilings?'; 'can I fit my bike above the tv?'; 'how far down the hall is my roommate?'; 'can I fit my desk and dresser next to each other?'
Every apartment I've rented started with me taking a Laser Distance Measure with me and making my own floor plan with height measurement as well.
I see the room square footage, but that's honestly less useful to me than the dimensions (again from a renter's perspective)