VR Home Viewer

Technical Architecture & Walkthrough

The core of the Home Viewer application relies on translating the physical world into an interactive digital space. By reading the physical environment and layering dynamic materials on top of it, the tool provides a nice visual experience. Here is a breakdown of the general concepts that make this real-time spatial computing work.

1. Spatial Understanding

The app first has to understand the physical space using two tracking systems on the Apple Vision Pro:

• Plane Detection: The system identifies flat, continuous surfaces. When it recognizes a wall, it generates a clean, invisible digital rectangle over the space to act as a canvas.
• Scene Reconstruction (LiDAR Mesh): Simultaneously, the headset’s LiDAR scanner builds a raw, bumpy 3D mesh of everything else in the room—including furniture, windows, and door frames.

2. Managing the Mesh

Real-world walls are mostly perfectly flat, making the raw LiDAR mesh inherently a little bumpy. If digital paint is pasted directly onto the wall, that bumpy mesh will poke through and ruin the visual.

• The Buffer: To fix this, the app manipulates the depth of the objects. It pushes the bumpy physical mesh backward into the wall, and pulls the clean digital paint slightly forward.
• The Result: This allows the interactive paint to float perfectly smooth just above the physical wall, keeping the jagged geometry safely hidden from the user's view.

3. Physically Based Rendering

To ensure the materials don't look like glowing digital plastic, the application relies on Physically Based Rendering (PBR) to simulate real-world paint and lighting.

• Material Properties: By adjusting settings like roughness (matte vs. glossy) and clearcoat, the digital paint mimics the exact finish of interior paint.
• Dynamic Environmental Lighting: The app does not use fake digital light sources. The headset actively samples the actual light in the room—like sunlight from a window—and reflects that exact lighting dynamically off the virtual walls.

4. Dynamic Occlusion (Handling Furniture and People)

For the simulation to feel immersive, the digital walls must respect physical objects. If a couch sits in front of the wall, it needs to be covered up smoothly.

• Static Object Occlusion: Using the generated LiDAR mesh, the app applies an invisible occlusion material to physical furniture in the room. This effectively blocks the digital paint from rendering over couches or tables that sit in front of the wall.
• Dynamic People Occlusion: When someone walks through the room, the operating system uses machine learning models to identify human shapes frame-by-frame. This seamlessly masks out the virtual paint, keeping the person completely in the foreground without leaving permanent holes in the wall mesh. *Supposedly*

Video Example of the Mesh in Action