Redecorating Is in the Eye of the Computer
I like to think I have as much faith as the next guy, agreeing as I do with St. Augustine’s definition of that very helpful quality: to believe what you do not see. There are lots of handy things in our universe that do us a lot of good and are invisible, like God and piston rings, and I’m perfectly glad to give them their due.
But I can’t bring myself to believe that my furniture can be rearranged. Simple logic and physics tell me that it’s perfectly possible, but my imagination vapor-locks when I try to visualize how the living room would look, for instance, without a piano. When I try to mentally remove the faithful old Knabe upright, I start hearing the crackling sound of neural synapses shorting out and, before I know it, I’m sitting in a corner flicking playing cards into a hat.
It’s all very selective. I have imagined 40-foot putts dropping; I have imagined an immense string of zeros appended to my checking account balance; I have imagined fully clothed women in spectacular lingerie, and I have mentally keelhauled at least one editor. But when I try to visualize a tan carpet on my floor instead of a green one, I start smelling burning wire insulation and suddenly find myself standing in line at the DMV trying to order a Big Mac.
Fortunately, imagination is for sale. And I’m not talking only of the legions of interior designers out there who would be happy to tell me how one of my rooms would look with different furniture. They could talk until their faces cramped, and I still wouldn’t be able to see the result in my mind’s eye. But now computer-aided visualization is beginning to enter the home design world.
You’ve seen this sort of thing before among hairdressers and plastic surgeons: Your face goes into the computer and a jangling variety of haircuts, noses and cheekbones get slapped onto the screen for your perusal and delight/horror. Now there is similar software for interior designers, in which the raw material is the dimensions of your room.
At the Interior Designers Institute in Newport Beach, that’s about all it takes to get started. As part of its curriculum, the school for designers teaches its students how to run Computer-Aided Design and Drafting programs on one of several desktop computers. The room dimensions are fed in; the computer constructs either a two- or three-dimensional model, and the designer then fills the room with furniture, wallpaper, carpet, even plants.
The institute’s CADD program, called “Roomer,” more closely resembles a draftsman’s work than something one might see animating Monday Night Football, but it is a precursor of more sophisticated programs, said Don Gardner, an institute instructor and a commercial interior designer.
The two-dimensional model, for instance, is a view of the room as it might look from a hovering helicopter--more of an electronic blueprint showing location and basic relation of objects in the room rather than their effect on the eye.
The three-dimensional part of the program, however, gets more lifelike in a hurry, thanks in part to the capability of the computer to show a view of the room from any point of view inside its walls. For instance, you can view the room at the eye height of a person seated in a chair near the window and looking toward the rear door. Or, for that matter, from the point of view of a fly perched high on one wall and staring at the coffee table.
Furniture, color schemes and wallpaper and fabric patterns can be interchanged and shuffled according to the whim of the client but, Gardner said, some steps may take some time for the programmer to engineer using the available software.
The future, however, looks about as gee-whiz rosy as one might expect from the computer biz. Gardner said that a program in use by some landscape architects allows a Polaroid photo of a site to be fed into the computer, then altered using several photo-quality images already stored in the software.
In fact, Gardner said, highly sophisticated software is available, but he drew a parallel to the Cray super-computer: It’s out there, yes, but it costs a mint.
The good news: If, as expected, the evolution of the interior designer’s super-software conforms to the familiar pattern, it will get progressively less expensive and more widely available. Within a few years, he said, designers may be using computer graphics as showy--and as animated--as those used on the dazzling opening credits of Monday Night Football.
All very well, but what will all that do to the concept of true faith? People could become reluctant to take a designer’s word that green carpet will too look good in their bathroom. Everyone will be from Missouri. Fire up that Mac and show me.
Actually, there should be no dearth of unseen things to believe in. For instance, maybe some imaginative designer could computer-project an image of the Super Bowl trophy into the Rams’ front office.
Nah. Doesn’t look right. Maybe a nice upright piano instead.
