Design Your Dream House Online, Inside and Out

For first-time home buyers or families who have outgrown their current home, building a house can be a memorable and exciting prospect. From researching house plans to deciding on unique features, homeowners have control on all aspects of the final result. For future buyers, still in the beginning stages of planning a home, there are online resources to help visualize your idea.

A free online program from Autodesk called Project Dragonfly is one of these resources. Future homebuilders and designers can create realistic homes through the programs, and can even add appliances, furniture, and decorations. The rooms can be shaped to your specifications, and view the room in three dimensions. Some of the decoration and home appliances that can be added to a room include: rugs, lamps, washer and dryer, and windows.

The software allows users to add texture to design elements in the room, and eventually the game hopes to incorporate how light sources affect the appearance of the room. The final program, according to the creator, will be as realistic as looking at a photograph.

The design format is similar to the video game, The Sims, where users can design there own houses with furniture for avatar characters. The designers for Dragonfly hope that users with find the program fun and helpful toward building the outside and inside of their home.

Items used in the free programs come from another Autodesk service called Seek. Autodesk is now charging companies for placement into Dragonfly through Seek. Once the company provides information and pictures to Autodesk, the item is inserted into the database. Eventually Autodesk hopes to expand the program to act as a personal shopping device. Once the virtual room is created, users will have the option of totaling the cost and buying the furniture through their site.

The computing systems have arrived to users through extensive cloud computing, since all product information is stored through Amazon.com’s S3 cloud storage service, and it’s Amazon EC2 that creates the data to display the virtual images, which is the most expensive aspect of the project.

While the company tries to expand there client base and capabilities, the copy will continue to offer Dragonfly as a free service for customers to test their house designs and decoration ideas. However, due to the price of hosting and the amount of programming it require for three dimension imaging, the service may not be free much longer.