It is Alive in the Lab

Project Showroom 1.0.20 Now Available

We're on vacation this week.

Today is the first day of our company-wide vacation, so I will be brief. On Friday we released Project Showroom 1.0.20. Recall that Project Showroom is our software as a service approach to kitchen and bathroom design software. You just use your browser to configure a room with items you can actually purchase. Project Showroom uses a bank of computers in the cloud to show you what your choices look like by rendering the room photorealistcally. If you did this yourself on one computer, it would take minutes. With a bank of computers, it takes seconds. Project Showroom is in the technology preview stage, but you get the idea.

Whereas Project Showroom 1.0.19 had some dramatic UI improvements, release 1.0.20 is really "under the hood." Many of you have provided direct feedback to us at labs.showroom@autodesk.com with your thoughts on Project Showroom. We appreciate that. Release 1.0.19 is more about indirect feedback. We have improved our metrics gathering. So that our efforts have not gone to waste, please visit Project Showroom today and take it for a spin:

http://showroom.labs.autodesk.com/

It would be great to see if we can get visits from 6 of the 7 continents. Actually if someone visits from Antarctica, maybe we should send him/her some sort of prize. I am also curious as to what operating systems and browsers people are using. These metrics will help shape the future of Project Showroom. If you would also like to see what an integration of Project Showroom into a manufacturer site might look like, here is a mock-up we did for the K/BIS show in Atlanta for Jenn-Air:

http://jennair.showroom.labs.autodesk.com/

Getting even more analytical is alive in the lab.

YouTube Project Showroom Overview Video

Electrolux kitchen appliances with Behr wall paint

Electrolux kitchen appliances with a different Behr wall paint

Project Showroom is a technology preview that establishes a vision for a service for home furnishing suppliers to enable their customers to visualize their products in real-life room settings. It is our software as a service approach to kitchen design software and bathroom design software. The basis of Project Showroom is photorealistic rendering using a farm of computers that are "in the cloud." Accessibility to numerous computers in the cloud makes solutions like Project Showroom practical. Typical consumers would never buy 120 computers just to see a synthetic photograph rendered in 8 seconds. Normally users have one computer and wait 960 seconds (16 minutes). On the other hand, manufacturers might be willing to rent 120 computers for 8 seconds. Eight seconds later, it could be another user's turn. You get the idea.

A tenant of Project Showroom is photorealism. Consumers and manufacturers have to get the sense that they are experiencing something before it is real. The products are real. The manufacturers are real. The computer rendering looks real. Our Product Manager, Noah Kennedy, was keen to point out how blue wall paint reflections appear on white cabinets in his YouTube video:

• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i15PcjMGLqo
• non-YouTube: showroom_overview.mp4 (5957.0K)

The video also features a demonstration we participated in with Jenn-Air at the Kitchen/Bathroom Industry Show in Atlanta.

Keeping it real is alive in the Lab.

Project Showroom 1.0.19 Now Available

On May 6 the Revit team released the RDB Link Tool for Revit Family via the Autodesk Labs site. Our team also released a Project Showroom 1.0.18 update on May 6. On Friday the Revit team released an update to the RDB Link Tool. Our team also released a Project Showroom 1.0.19 update on Friday. One might think we are copying off of the Revit team's paper, but it is just a coincidence. Another odd coincidence is that the updates of both technologies were on 05/06 and 06/05 in some sort of palindromic convergence.

Actually if anyone was to accuse us of copying it might be Project Dragonfly. Project Showroom now looks more consistent with Project Dragonfly. You can actually tell that both teams work for the same company. I kid. I kid. Actually we all feel that the new Project Showroom look looks fantastic. Thanks to our Product Designer, Mark Anderson, for his design. Thanks to Allen Ban, Ben Cochran, Brian Budge, Eddy Kuo, Frederic Loranger, Garfield Yin, Gyorgy Ordody, Jacky Lee, Jay Gao, John Hutchinson, John Schmier, Lily Gao, Richard Lu, Roberto Ziche, Rosella Conanan, Seema Jaisinghani, Sudheer Guntuka, Sydney Xu, Terence Wang, Tony Xu, and Yongmei Wang who turned that design into the service you see today. That was no coincidence. That was hard work. Make sure you check out the cool new scene fade in/out effect as you customize your own kitchen or bathroom. Remember - what you are seeing is not a photograph, It is indeed a computer rendering.

Updating our software as a service approach to kitchen and bathroom shopping software is alive in the lab.

Project Showroom: Consumers and Manufacturers - win, win

As our software as a service approach to shopping, consumers will benefit from Project Showroom in that they can visualize fixtures, appliances, and surfaces in real world settings as part of making purchasing decisions. Customers can experience these new items before they are real - real as in really purchased. This approach also provides benefit to manufacturers. With the previous blog postings, there has been a small amount discussion of "trickery" related to how real the rendered images are:

• Project Showroom: Life Imitates Art
• Project Showroom: Realism is in the eye of the beholder
• Project Showroom: Life Imitates Art Redux
• Project Showroom: I Can't Believe It's Not Butter

The aim is not trickery. The goal is that manufacturers can experience the fixtures, appliances, and surfaces before they are real - real as in really manufactured. The approach of Project Showroom is to provide views of these models that will approximate the physical objects after they are created. That is why the lighting models in Project Showroom are physically accurate. So a Project Showroom approach allows manufacturers to see combinations of appliances in real life settings with the click of a mouse.

stainless finish

stainless alternative

In addition, it also allows the manufacturer to see their appliances staged in various rooms without the cost of physically changing/remodeling the setting.

swapped lights for range hood

This makes Project Showroom a cost effective approach for all involved - consumers and manufacturers.

Sharing some of our thinking regarding photorealistic rendering is alive in the lab

Project Showroom: I Can't Believe It's Not Butter

Project Showroom is a technology preview that establishes a vision for a service for home furnishing suppliers to enable their customers to visualize their products in real-life room settings. It is our software as a service approach to kitchen design software and bathroom design software. Last week in blog posting Life Imitates Art Redux, I asked if you could tell the difference between a real photograph and a synthetic photograph generated from a computer model.

COMPUTER MODEL

Click for higher resolution view

ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPH

Well 50% of you guessed incorrectly. So it's a safe assumption that the model looks reasonably real. Some of what you told us included:

• This one is much more difficult to figure out than the first round! [Project Showroom: Life Imitates Art]
• The second one appears to be more realistic because of the blown out window. The photographer needs to do some exposure blending (HDR or LDR) to correct this.
• I agree it s very hard to tell. I think the second one is the rendered one. [Oops.] I imagine that a real photographer for a manufacturer should know about HDR, so there is too much light coming from the window in the second one.
• Yeah, I'll second the this one being more difficult. Not being right up on the towels [rendered towels] makes it much tougher to distinguish. Also, the pro photographer doing the light balancing makes them both look almost too perfect. Honestly, I would assume they both were either rendered or heavily photoshoped.
• If I have to choose one, I'll take a stab and say the second one though, but that is mostly because I think you are trying to trick us by using a bloom effect and a shortened focal length to seem more like a camera was involved.
• I'm certainly no expert in this area but my guess is that the top one is rendered. My reasoning is that why would you make a rendering with that much light from the window.
• I was going to say the 2nd one was the rendered image, it's very hard to tell between the 2 though. For me, looking at them, the vase in the 2nd picture, not only seems out of place, but almost as if it's not part of the picture.
• I'm going to go with the second one being the real one. Clearly no one but a silly human would put a flower pot under the table.
• The view angle is the giveaway, the 2nd is the rendering. [Oops.] I've never understood why computer renderers insist on using a more narrow angle than a typical 35mm/digital camera. To me it seems imitating the view angles of a typical camera (54 degrees, give or take, with no zoom) is one of those little extras you shouldn't overlook.
• It would be funny if you put up two renderings and had us debate which one is real or not!!
• I think the bottom one is real, due to the light levels coming from the window. A renderer would surely do something about that. Also to the right of the window are a couple of built in ovens, the display controls look more realistic than the one in the above image.
• I think the second one is rendered. [Oops.] There are a lot of little things in the second that don't seem quite right, like finish on the floor. Even so, the quality that makes it "not quite right" is an over-precision - everything is almost too well defined.
• I’m going for the top one. The bottom one is prettier but the top one is less perfect and looks more ‘Real’.
• It was really hard to tell. The one thing that made me wonder about the top image is that the plates do seem to be floating just above the counter. Other than that, I was pretty sure it was the real deal. Very impressive!

We're happy that this technology shows promise as a virtual showroom for buying household appliances. With regard to the title of this posting, there's a butter substitute product sold in the United States that goes by that name. Based on our results, it's safe to say I can't believe it's not a photograph.

Sharing the results of the feedback you provided is alive in the lab.

Project Showroom: Life Imitates Art Redux

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

In a previous blog posting, Project Showroom: Life Imitates Art, you had the chance to compare a photograph of the bathroom in my house to a photorealistically rendered bathroom of a computer model from one of our Project Showroom scenes. Let's up the ante. Here are two images. One is a photograph of a physical room taken by a professional photographer. The other is a photorealistic rendering from an internal Project Showroom site. Which is which?

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Is it live or is it Memorex? If you thought yesterday's CAPTCHA test was hard on the eyes, how about this? Let us know your guess at labs.showroom@autodesk.com.

Having fun with advances in photorealistic rendering is alive in the lab.

Kitchen Bathroom Industry Show Starts Today

Today starts the Kitchen/Bath Industry Show in Atlanta.

If you are attending this show, please stop by the Jenn-Air booth and talk to our own Mary Hope McQuiston or Noah Kennedy about Project Showroom. Kitchens and bathrooms are the most frequently remodeled rooms of  a home. They are also where people tend to spend the most money on remodeling - so it has to be done right. Hence software as a service solutions like Project Showroom can help homeowners experience their new kitchens and bathrooms before they are real. The old saying applies - Measure twice, cut once. Photorealistically view twice, physically remodel once.

Sharing our excitement about participating in a trade show is alive in the lab.

Project Showroom: We've been robbed

In a blog posting from way back I talked about When Images Go Bad.These errrant images are the results of when our rendering server encounters a problem and the pixels go awry. The other day one of our lead developers, Seema Jaisinghani, was testing on her development machine and saw this:

Object IDs not included in the scene

This was not a case of the rendering process trashing the pixels. This was a case of the appliances getting dropped from the scene. George Peppard used ro star in a show called Banacek where he was an insurance investigator who would figure out how valuable items disappeared. Perhaps we should get him on the case? Nahhh. Seema has already figured this one out. That's why we test this stuff before we go live on Labs.

Sharing a bit of humor is alive in the lab.

Project Showroom 1.0.16 Now Available

This is not a photograph. It is a rendering of a 3D scene. Click to enlarge.

Project Showroom is a technology preview that establishes a vision for a service for home furnishing suppliers to enable their customers to visualize their products in real-life room settings. It is our software as a service approach to kitchen design software and bathroom design software. Whereas Project Dragonfly lets you sketch out your own room with Simms-like renderings, Project Showroom lets you drag and drop purchasable objects and see photorealistic results.

Project Showroom 1.0.16 is now available. As the numbering implies, this is our sixteenth update of Project Showroom. I updated the servers on Thursday. You can check it out at:

Project Showroom Site Page

Like the previous release, this release was a minor update with changes "under the hood." Think of it like a service pack, but you do not need to download and install anything. Once again - the beauty of software as a service.

1. Function versus Form
   We continue to make progress on separating out styling from functionality. This will allow Project Showroom to show up in other forms and have the look and feel of where it's found.

2. Robust Error Detection and Recovery
   We applied additional defensive programming techniques to handle the occasional hiccup that can occur in any web-based application. By all means, please let us know at labs.showroom@autodesk.com if you ever see:
   

3. New Environment
   We outgrew our data center in San Francisco. Project Showroom is now housed and monitored in the same data center as Buzzsaw and Constructware.

4. Find Your Center
   The Project Showroom site is now centered on the HTML page. Thanks to Product Designer, Mark Andersen, for the improvement. Mark is always looking for ways to improve the user experience for Autodesk customers. You can make suggestions via labs.showroom@autodesk.com.

5. Seek is Where Our Heart Is
   With this release, the process for getting content into Project Showroom is now more closely aligned with the process used to submit to Autodesk Seek. In fact, Project Showroom uses a Seek database to find the list of rooms available and what is available in each room. At Autodesk, the left hand does know what the right hand is doing. Thanks to the Seek team for working with us on this.

6. Let's get Viral
   When we added a watermark to Project Freewheel, we found that usage went up. It helped spread the word. So we did the same thing for Project Showroom. An inconspicuous watermark appears in the lower right - much like what you see on Google Maps.

Developing Project Showroom at a fast and furious pace is alive in the lab.

Project Showroom: Realism is in the eye of the beholder

Project Showroom is a technology preview of a service for home furnishing suppliers to enable their customers to visualize their products in real-life room settings. It is based on computer renderings that look like photographs. It's our version of kitchen and bathroom design software provided using a software as a service model. You don't install anything. You just visit a web site.

Thanks for the feedback on Life Imitates Art. We got wonderful comments. Here's some of what you said:

• The bottle of hand soap in the real image is partially full. All containers in the computer image look to be new or full.

• The real image has a receptacle on the wall. There are none to be seen anywhere in the computer model.

• The real image has visible caulk at the edge of the counter top and back splash. Manufacturers want scenes to look as nice as possible - not necessarily as real as possible, so it is unlikely that Project Showroom would ever model caulk.

• The towels in the real image look more naturally folded,

• The computer image had much colder lighting.

• The toothbrushes in the first image make one feel that it is real.

• The light source in the first image is more universal and fills the area more. The computer image's light source is more concentrated.

• There is a "spot" in the drywall under the counter in the real image. That actually covers a plumbing cleanout.

• In the computer image, the counter-top edge shadow falls off too consistently as it goes down to the floor, and the intensity of the shadow on the floor would not be the same as the one on the wall.

• The scale of the stone/quartz surfacing is a bit large in the computer model. Most counter-top products, natural or artificial, have smaller particulates.

• The real image has two different types of light sources - natural and incandescent. You can see the color of the light change from the top to the bottom.

• In the computer model, there’s something a bit artificial looking where the back-splash meets the mirror.

• There is no toe kick in the computer model and the base molding cuts into the cabinet door.

• There would most likely be a spacer between the end cabinet and the wall, or at least a little bit of space in the base unit. In the rendering, the door seems to touch the wall.

• The real image has the camera at head height. The image from the computer model uses a wide angle lens.

Indeed the first image was a photograph and the second was a rendering of a computer model. As we move forward, we can incorporate this feedback into the Project Showroom experience. I guess the ultimate would be a wadded up towel on the floor, toothpaste in the sink, and a half-empty bottle of soap.

Learning from our users is alive in the lab.