Diminished Reality: empty and refurnish rooms as if by magic

July 28th, 2022

Two years of research on Diminished Reality and Artificial Intelligence for indoor planning have produced exciting results. Starting with the diminishing of objects based on a photo and the automatic room suggestions using Artificial Intelligence, new features will become available in the Roomle app. 

The idea behind this is quite simple: with Roomle, users can map their rooms to scale, set them up with digital furniture, and then use augmented reality (AR) to experience them live in the room and also buy them. This is the Roomle app as we know it today.
Soon, Roomle users will have the ability to scan their rooms completely. All objects within this room scan will be recognized and can then be removed fully automatically (Diminished Reality) and replaced with new ones. Both replacing existing items with new furniture (from Roomle's extensive, ever-expanding brand catalog) and getting suggestions for alternative furnishings using artificial intelligence are possible. "In the future, furniture will search for its space, not users for their furniture - thanks to the simple digital mapping of spaces," says Roomle CEO Albert Ortig.

Expanding technology portfolio
The leading players in this field are Apple and Google, which will make the hardware and operating systems available to the masses in the future. Roomle is expanding its technology portfolio to include DR technology to address the following challenges:

• mapping rooms virtually,

• to remove the furniture one no longer wants from existing rooms, and

• to redecorate rooms at the push of a button using real purchasable furniture in the form of high-quality configurable products .

For users, this is a new source of ideas, fires their imagination and supports them in the planning process of their rooms. This is what the four project partners, Joanneum Research (Graz, Austria), CERTH (Thessaloniki, Greece), Usability Partners (Stockholm, Sweden) and Roomle (Linz, Austria) have been working on intensively in the EU project for the last two years.

What is Diminished Reality? 
In contrast to Augmented Reality, where virtual objects are inserted into the user's environment, Diminished Reality removes components of reality from the user's view. Unwanted image elements are detected and replaced by other image elements, creating a plausible and consistent overall impression for the viewer.

About Atlantis:
Atlantis is an EU Horizon 2020 project (July 2020 -June 2022) in which augmented and diminished reality technologies, as well as artificial intelligence, play a major role for the interior design of spaces.
The goal of the project: to capture rooms to scale, recognize desired objects in the room and remove them at the push of a button. Rooms can subsequently be re-furnished with digital furniture from an extensive catalog, or furniture layout suggestions can be created based on the user's tastes. This creates a mixed reality situation with high added value for the user.