AI interior design is software that takes a photograph of a room and redesigns it in a chosen style, with a list of the furniture and materials shown and a quote. It is also called an AI room planner. Interior design platforms use it to cut the first design from weeks of work to hours.
How does it work? First, computer vision reads the photograph. It finds the walls, floor, windows, doors and existing furniture, and estimates the size of the room. Next, an image model redesigns the room. This model is a kind of foundation model: a large AI model trained on huge numbers of images and their descriptions, which can create a new image from a description. It keeps the walls and windows where they are, and changes the furniture, colours and lights to match the chosen style. Finally, the software matches each item in the new image to a real product in the platform's catalogue, and adds up the prices.
Say a home owner in Chandigarh photographs her living room, which is 14 feet by 12 feet. She picks a "warm minimal" style. Within a minute, the app shows her three versions of the room. She likes the second one, which has a three-seat sofa, a low TV unit, wooden slats on one wall and two pendant lights. The software matches these to 11 products in the catalogue and gives a quote of ₹1.9 lakh. She asks for a lighter sofa, and gets a new image and a new quote in seconds. Then a designer from the interior design platform checks that the furniture really fits the measured room, and turns the picture into a design that the factory can make.
The designer is still needed. The image model may draw a sofa that is too long for the wall, or a light where there is no electrical point. So the measured design, not the picture, decides what is made. The designer's job moves from drawing every option to choosing among the options and checking them.
How is this different from augmented reality? Augmented reality places one real product, such as a sofa, over the live camera view of your room. AI interior design creates a whole new picture of the room. Many apps now offer both. Apps of this kind are one of the generative AI applications built on large models.