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.
I was a residential contractor until a few years ago. This would be great for estimating. Nice way to replace a pad of paper with less than stellar drawings on it. When estimating I'd still take pictures of the rooms to help me recall what it looked like.
For most projects a measurement to within half a foot is fine for estimating. If the total width of a room is close to 12 or 15' (standard carpet roll widths), get an exact number to know if your carpet sub needs to seam two pieces of carpet together.
Door heights are standard on most houses. Electrical heights are usually standard. Windows are usually dropped the height of a header.
For estimating many projects (painting, flooring, non-custom trim jobs), this app would be more than adequate.
When you get the job and go back to do the work, I'd suggest a Bosch LASER tape measure. Accurate to within 1/16" or better. It's great for trim work.
Yes, I have a Bosch. From the looks of it, this app isn't faster, nor does it add any other significant advantage. You still need to measure the location of windows and doors, width etc. And you need to manually add that to the plan. Or, what I usually do (although I'm a developer, not a contractor), is write down areas directly. I'm still not convinced, and if they're targeting the professional market, I am part of their target group. YMMV etc., obviously, and if they manage to build a business out if it, more power to them.
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.
How to start a startup: Find a process that requires tedious work with lots of different tools, and make that process simpler and easier. Start with something that works well enough to be of value to some people, and improve until the old process is laughably complex.
For only $15 ? I know a few people doing CAAD technical drawing, all day long. Often just recreating the sketches the structural engineer draw on a piece of paper.
Are you offering to do that manually (prolly outsourcing) ? You know, those paper drawings aren't 4 lines with 2 measurements :-)
Or are you looking into automating that ? That would be a very interesting side-project ... but that would be really hard to do character recog. on hand-written numbers that are all over the place :-/
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.
You can't see the laser dot in sunlight at a distance > 10m and for some measurements keeping the point steady is important but hard to do without a tripod. In both cases the laser can be inaccurate as you can't be confident in what you have measured. Obviously laser theodolites can solve these problems but are about 1000 times more expensive than a reel tape.
This argument depends on specifics, not the overall form. Just because another argument with a similar form was made and it was wrong doesn't mean anything about this one.
It could send a photograph of a floorplan, but it wouldn't be editable unless there's some interpolation of the image you photograph. When your original floorplan begins in digital form, it's more-flexible for editing.
I don't think we're quite at the point where a mobile CPU would be able to pull this off, however filming and uploading a well shot video to a server for further processing should be a workable way to make a full model. I think a big challenge there is a several-minute feedback loop to learn if it worked and if you need to try it again.
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/
What I imagine to be a real productivity boost would be a combination of both: A laser tape measure paired via blutooth to take exact measurements and an app using the accelerometer/camera for the general outline. In a best case scenario the app could even locate the laser tape measure to detect which measurement is taken.
Would Leap Motion or Kinect be able to do something like this? They basically detect physical objects in space so shouldn't they be able to 3D map a space? I know the current Leap device has a limited view area but I understand that's just a design decision for that particular device.
Very nearly. Google's project Tango. After you are finished oogling at real time SLAM using vision running on a phone, I invite you to check out Google's Project Ara. Both were spawned from Motorola ATAP - post google aquisition - and retained by Google after the sale to Lenovo.
Comments
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.
I was a residential contractor until a few years ago. This would be great for estimating. Nice way to replace a pad of paper with less than stellar drawings on it. When estimating I'd still take pictures of the rooms to help me recall what it looked like.
For most projects a measurement to within half a foot is fine for estimating. If the total width of a room is close to 12 or 15' (standard carpet roll widths), get an exact number to know if your carpet sub needs to seam two pieces of carpet together.
Door heights are standard on most houses. Electrical heights are usually standard. Windows are usually dropped the height of a header.
For estimating many projects (painting, flooring, non-custom trim jobs), this app would be more than adequate.
When you get the job and go back to do the work, I'd suggest a Bosch LASER tape measure. Accurate to within 1/16" or better. It's great for trim work.
Yes, I have a Bosch. From the looks of it, this app isn't faster, nor does it add any other significant advantage. You still need to measure the location of windows and doors, width etc. And you need to manually add that to the plan. Or, what I usually do (although I'm a developer, not a contractor), is write down areas directly. I'm still not convinced, and if they're targeting the professional market, I am part of their target group. YMMV etc., obviously, and if they manage to build a business out if it, more power to them.
And your laser tape translates those measurements into a floorplan that's digitally sharable?
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 has worked for me professionally for 2 decades. Sometimes, the old way is better than a novel, high tech solution.
Edit: And yes, I did try the Roomscan app. It was tedious and inaccurate.
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.
floor plans when finding renters, determining furniture layout, how much paint to buy. to name 3
No data is better than bad data.
How to start a startup: Find a process that requires tedious work with lots of different tools, and make that process simpler and easier. Start with something that works well enough to be of value to some people, and improve until the old process is laughably complex.
Would you be interested in a service that takes your paper drawing and does step 4 and 5, in Autocad and gives you the results within 24 hours?
Cost would be at $10 - $15 depending on house size.
For only $15 ? I know a few people doing CAAD technical drawing, all day long. Often just recreating the sketches the structural engineer draw on a piece of paper.
Are you offering to do that manually (prolly outsourcing) ? You know, those paper drawings aren't 4 lines with 2 measurements :-)
Or are you looking into automating that ? That would be a very interesting side-project ... but that would be really hard to do character recog. on hand-written numbers that are all over the place :-/
Here's a high-tech method that usable in a professional setting: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/melbournes-shri...
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.
You can't see the laser dot in sunlight at a distance > 10m and for some measurements keeping the point steady is important but hard to do without a tripod. In both cases the laser can be inaccurate as you can't be confident in what you have measured. Obviously laser theodolites can solve these problems but are about 1000 times more expensive than a reel tape.
"No, absolutely nobody ever said that."
http://www.woodweb.com/knowledge_base/Taking_Measurements_on...
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.
Until they tried to hold a tape measure straight to measure a 30-something foot room...
This argument depends on specifics, not the overall form. Just because another argument with a similar form was made and it was wrong doesn't mean anything about this one.
I wonder when the trend of "X, but shareable" ideas will stop.
His example didn't even yield X.
A digital (and therefore shareable) floorplan is plainly more useful in a variety of ways than one that exists only on paper
A smartphone camera very quickly turns a non-digital floor plan into a digital one.
It could send a photograph of a floorplan, but it wouldn't be editable unless there's some interpolation of the image you photograph. When your original floorplan begins in digital form, it's more-flexible for editing.
Sounds like an opportunity for an app ..
no,. the sharks do that bit.
I don't think we're quite at the point where a mobile CPU would be able to pull this off, however filming and uploading a well shot video to a server for further processing should be a workable way to make a full model. I think a big challenge there is a several-minute feedback loop to learn if it worked and if you need to try it again.
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
Also very impressive -- just posted
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474680
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/
I was talking about monocular SLAM (although since it's not really simultaneous... ALAM?)
Parent has a cool product too, as does http://structure.io/ - but that's not what I meant.
Incredible demo! You in the bay area?
Thanks! I was - moving to NYC Monday.
This is probably what you're looking for:
http://structure.io/
And while not germane to your particular use, this is still worth noting:
"Structure allows you to capture dense geometry. This enables you to simulate real world physics."
What I imagine to be a real productivity boost would be a combination of both: A laser tape measure paired via blutooth to take exact measurements and an app using the accelerometer/camera for the general outline. In a best case scenario the app could even locate the laser tape measure to detect which measurement is taken.
Would Leap Motion or Kinect be able to do something like this? They basically detect physical objects in space so shouldn't they be able to 3D map a space? I know the current Leap device has a limited view area but I understand that's just a design decision for that particular device.
Very nearly. Google's project Tango. After you are finished oogling at real time SLAM using vision running on a phone, I invite you to check out Google's Project Ara. Both were spawned from Motorola ATAP - post google aquisition - and retained by Google after the sale to Lenovo.