Using a Vision Pro to walk through your future house

Christian Selig and his girlfriend are building a house. He used a Vision Pro to walk through it before the foundation was poured.

He started with floor plan PDFs. Black rectangles on a page. 13 feet by 15 feet. He could not feel the space. So he modeled the walls in Fusion 360. Extruded the floor plan into 3D. Added ceilings, doors, windows.

Then he walked through it on a Vision Pro. The high resolution screens and spatial sensors made it feel real. He could stand in the living room and look around. See how the hallway connects. Understand the scale.

Furniture from IKEA

Empty rooms do not help with scale. He downloaded 3D models from IKEA using a browser script. Imported a couch, a bed, a desk. Placed them in the virtual rooms. Suddenly the space made sense. The bedroom was big enough. The hallway was not cramped.

Textures and real furniture

Empty rooms feel like a warehouse. He added wood, stone, and paint textures to the walls and floors. Then he placed IKEA furniture models throughout the space. A couch in the living room. A bed in the bedroom. A desk in the office. Now the rooms had scale. You could stand in the bedroom and see exactly how much space the bed took.

Why this matters

A Vision Pro costs $3500. A house costs hundreds of thousands. Using the headset to preview the house before building it is not a luxury. It is a practical tool that saves expensive mistakes.

Selig is a programmer. He used Fusion 360, a free hobbyist tool. He learned the basics from YouTube. The hardest part was converting file formats, not the modeling itself.

Architects already use CAD. Most clients see 2D floor plans. The gap between what the architect sees and what the client imagines is where mistakes happen. VR closes that gap. A client can walk through the house before approving the plans.

Based on a blog post by Christian Selig. Selig is a former Apple engineer and creator of the Apollo Reddit client.