Project Showroom: Let there be paint

To be able to work at the One Market office in San Francisco, California instead of being a remote employee in Scottsdale, Arizona, we are moving back to the Bay Area. Since the home market is sluggish in Arizona, we are doing everything we can to make our home more attractive to a potential buyer. We are in the process of having our master bathroom remodeled. The floor and shower have been retiled. The counter top has been replaced with granite. There are new under-mount sinks. The fixtures have all been replaced with brushed nickel. The wallpaper has been removed - the walls have been textured and painted a gold color (Dunn-Edwards W411V-Light Base 1147803 L88 0123). Therein lies the problem. Our master bedroom was yellow (Valspar 92-4A Roman Candle Interior Satin 105-14 111-1Y10 114-32).

Note how I am specifying colors using the paint supplier part numbers. There is that much precision in the paint industry. Though the gold we have selected for the master bathroom is not drastically different than the yellow in the master bedroom, you can really see the difference where one room ends and another begins. So this weekend my wife and I painted the master bedroom to match the bathroom. Now there is one consistent color throughout both rooms.

The saddest part to me is that in parts of the master bathroom itself, some of the walls look yellow. I know the paint color is gold, but it does have a yellow-ish appearance. We have a block window that lets in natural light. The light hits our bathroom mirror. It then reflects off of that and on to our medicine cabinets. The medicine cabinets have mirror doors. After the double bounce off the two mirror finishes, it casts on parts of the wall. In turn, the light bounces off of the walls and on to other items in the room like tile. With all of this reflecting going on, there are sections that get so much light, the gold actually looks yellow. Now why did we paint the master bedroom again?

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. When we say visualize, we mean view a photorealistic rendering. The process used to create the rendering is called ray tracing. It gets its name because it involves calculations that trace rays of light and their impact on the pixels (dots) that comprise the image. All of these calculations are computationally expensive. The more bounces you have, like off of bathroom mirrors and again off medicine cabinet doors, the more computations are required. Project Showroom includes paint effects in its ray trace calculations.

Look closely at these two pictures. I have changed nothing but paint color:

If you look closely, you can see wall color reflections on the tile.

So there's more that's going on here than just swapping out one wall color for another. The whole image needs to be recalculated to get the effects of the new paint. We want consumers to be able to tell - "Hey with that window there, some parts of this bathroom will look yellow." They can experience this before its real. In other words, they can tell BEFORE they spend a Saturday painting.

Personally feeling the pain one of our technologies will address is alive in the lab.