Advantages of a Home Design IT Platform: HomeLane

Home design platforms are becoming popular nowadays as they make the work of interior designing convenient. Puneet Gupta, Senior VP & Head, Engineering, HomeLane, discusses some aspects of a home design platform in this interaction

What do you think should be the advantageous features of a home-design platform?
A home design platform needs to use technology effectively to bridge the gap between a designer's drawings/inspiration images to the actual visualization of the home being designed. Essentially, the customer should be able to translate something from his imagination to a real physical visual that he/she can see, interact with, print and even share with family members.

A home design platform should essentially enable a dimensionally accurate floor plan design and enable physically-realistic rendering of 3D visuals with walls, windows, tiles, wallpapers etc. It must have options to manage the 3D space in terms of the colour, texture, size or layout of the interior design and perform design operations (measurements, annotations, scaling, rotation, etc). Keeping the customer preferences in mind, the tool must recommend the most relevant products, catalogue items based on the customer budget and design requirements. It is most helpful to provide instant pricing and ensure that the customer has a 100% transparency on the fiscal impact of their design decisions. In a nutshell, while a good design platform would have a lot of design features, it also needs to provide an excellent customer experience where the customer feels a part of the design journey rather than viewing it being an esoteric software to be used by experts only!

Does it integrate environment-friendly, green ideas of home design? How?
Design platforms should offer a range of wide catalogue options to suit lifestyle choices, including eco-friendly variants and energy-saving home automation solutions. This way, the customer can decide which option makes the most sense for them, while keeping an eye on the price of each decision.

What kind of low-cost power usage and tech-usage can be achieved with an efficient home design platform?
Design platforms can offer remote collaboration - the designer working from the comfort of their studio or home-office, and the customer from their office/home. That way, there is no fuel wasted on travel or air-conditioning for expensive meeting spaces. The design platform should provide an audio video and graphic collaboration bridge that provides the same experience remotely as one would otherwise achieve in physical proximity.

Has there been a technology transfer or an import of technology in building a home design platform?
Home design platforms have certainly leveraged new emerging trends in gaming technologies, graphics acceleration and cloud platforms to provide an enhanced experience to the users. VR and AR are also prevalent trends used to provide rich visual tours to users during interior or space design journeys.