There’s no shortage of tech on hand to help you plan a home makeover, but UK startup Shortbite has come up with one of the best solutions that we’ve seen – DigitalBridge.
The technology allows you to take a photo of a room and then work with that photo to change the wallpaper and flooring, hang pictures and even add new furniture.
While this isn’t the first time this has been done, it’s usually achieved through real-time augmented reality –such as in the case of Cimagine. Here, it’s instead being done through deep analysis of still images, making the results more accurate, and (importantly) shareable.
Shortbite’s DigitalBridge demo video
DigitalBridge won’t be available as a standalone, own-brand app, but instead the technology is being offered to third-parties such as home decor retailers and paint manufacturers.
Shortbite founder David Levine says that while an augmented reality approach offers faster results, his team has taken the “really difficult” route of processing the images in a way that takes variable lighting conditions into account and produces results that can be easily shared with others.
The results aren’t 100 percent perfect. In the demo I saw at Shortbite’s Manchester HQ in the UK, there were grainy patches where new wallpaper didn’t quite cover small, semi-obscured parts of a wall, but it gave a much better impression of what a made-over room would look like than the competition did. Another downside is that processing an image for editing currently takes about a minute, although the company is working on getting that down to 30 seconds.
We’ll be keeping an eye on DigitalBridge and where the technology ends up being used.
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