Room studio

Every conversation about a boardroom screen happens in front of a spec sheet. A fine-pitch LED wall, a laser projector and a large OLED all read as "a screen" on paper, and nobody in the room can picture how each will look from the far end of the table, in daylight, with the blinds open. We built Room studio to show it instead of describing it, and to find out how far a browser can be pushed towards a photoreal, physically measured space. The answer turned out to be: far enough to make decisions with.

Light you can measure

The room is lit the way a real one is. Its indirect light is baked in Cycles as two separate bases, daylight and the ceiling fixtures, and blended live as the sliders move, so a change of mood is a change of light and not a filter. The pendant, the window and the screen keep real-time shadows on top. The displays are modelled by what they actually do: reference white in nits, black level by contrast ratio, and the light each one throws onto the table, the walls and the people sitting there. Switch from the OLED to the LED wall and the room gets brighter because a brighter panel is now in it. Turn the lights off and the screen becomes the only light source, as it would on the night of a launch.

Photoreal, and honest about it

Leather, coated metal, lacquer and glass respond to the light as you move, with the room's own reflections in them: the screen's picture in the table and in the glazing, the chrome in the lacquer, the city through the window. The LED wall is drawn cell by cell at its 1.5 mm pitch, so it reads as a wall of pixels from close up and as a picture from the chairs. A visitor's own video shows its true colours whatever the room's exposure, and its soundtrack plays from the two speakers on the table, in stereo, from wherever the visitor stands. The view is the same on every device: the quality setting is an explicit choice, not something the page guesses from the screen.

What we learnt

Most of the work was not in making it beautiful but in making it stay beautiful under change. Every reflection in the room has to settle again when the light, the finish or the display changes, and a visitor notices a single frame of flicker on a polished table long before they notice a missing feature. Real-world scale mattered more than we expected: a chair a few centimetres too small makes a room feel like a rendering, and a table at 750 mm makes it feel like a room. And performance is a design decision. A 20 MB first load, one model shared by three display configurations, a panorama cropped to what the window can actually see and a capture pipeline that does only the passes that show are what let the same build run on a phone, a laptop and a headset.

Where this goes next

The room here is ours, but the method is general: a measured, real-time model of a space that people can walk through from a link, with the real hardware, finishes and content in it. It is how an AV integrator shows an LED wall at the right brightness before the order is signed, how a fit-out studio lets a client choose finishes in a room that responds instead of from a mood board, how a developer or a hotel group lets someone walk a space that is still on the drawings, and how a retailer, a museum or a training team puts real content in front of people in the place it will be seen. It is also the base for our own products, which put live content into rooms like this one every day.

Everything runs in the browser from static files. There is no server behind it, no account and nothing to install, which is also what makes it easy to hand to a client as a link.