As someone who works in the professional smart home business and in a comapny with close to 15 years of experience, using "3D" based house plans are usually a waste of resources. In most cases, this leads to the following problems:<p>- Having to create a 3D house plan from scratch<p>- Having to add textures, objects to it, as otherwise it would look bland<p>We only use black/white 2D house plans, which bring all the positive aspects of a house plan without the negative one from 3D, as a flat 2D plan does not need any objects in it to look good.<p>Here is an example screenshot of my apartment
<a href="https://i.imgur.com/99qos7l.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/99qos7l.png</a>
Advances in miniaturization and better economics for lidar definitely are making floor plan creation and 3D room scanning far more accessible. For work I've been experimenting over the last few months with "RoomScan LIDAR" and "magicplan", using both an iPhone 12 Pro's built-in lidar and the ability to link with a bluetooth laser distance/angle tool. While the market is definitely still in its infancy and a number of things remain frustrating (as does dealing with more complex room geometries), the potential is obviously there and they've already been useful tools.<p>Being able to throw together decent floor layouts with fairly decent 3D point clouds for an entire building in a short period with just a few tools you have with you anyway can be fairly magical already. And there is a clear path for far more with another year or two of maturation. In some ways the biggest issue right now is lack of ability for other tools that could in principle make a lot of use of imported plans/point clouds to import them. Generating is getting better and better, but the pipeline after that is a weak point.<p>And case in point, there's this very post. Why can't I just give it my PLY|OBJ|XYZ cloud, or at least USDZ|DAE model? Why is there a need to reinvent the wheel here? For 3D House Plan stuff to take off, there has to be amortization of the work of generating something in the first place. While it's more accessible than ever, there is still time/money cost to throw something together, and it's silly to need it done more than once (with necessary updates after major renovations, but those are unusual events).<p>Of course for me this entire thing is an instant write-off as soon as I see any sort of cloud requirement. Optional maybe ok, another vertical silo/3rd party dependency? Hard no. And lack of leverage is an issue throughout for an effort like this, anything that doesn't work through existing Home Assistant or other ecosystems is also immediately on the back foot.
You know what’s even better UX? Light switches. The Hue dimmer switches are great.<p>The most value I get out of them being “smart” is that I can program a double tap of the “off” button to turn off all lights in the house, or multiple taps of the “on” button to cycle between scenes.
Systems like HomeAssistant or Apple’s Home app seem to become much more usable when home devices are properly organized or automated—but doing so is extremely tedious or difficult. When long device lists are not organized by function or room, it is prohibitively difficult to explain how to use these systems to guests, or less technical users.<p>There’s a floor plan add-on[1] for HomeAssistant, but creating a floor plan or rendering for your home is a lot of work with difficult tools.<p>I’m excited about this project because it makes creating high-quality floor plans more trivial and closely linked to the device organization and setup phase.<p>[1]: <a href="https://experiencelovelace.github.io/ha-floorplan/" rel="nofollow">https://experiencelovelace.github.io/ha-floorplan/</a>
I learned myself that a “house plan” whether it’s 2d or 3D or 4d or whatever is a horrible interface for a smart home. I prefer a much simpler “card” or page per room.