Roomify: Spatially-Grounded Style Transformation for Immersive Virtual Environments

TL;DR

Roomify is a system that transforms physical rooms into themed virtual environments, preserving spatial and functional features while enabling stylistic changes, thus enhancing immersion and spatial awareness in VR.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel spatially-grounded transformation pipeline combining scene understanding, spatial reasoning, and style generation for personalized VR environments.

Findings

63% increase in presence over passthrough VR

26% increase in presence over fully virtual environments

High user-rated scene quality and creativity support

Abstract

We present Roomify, a spatially-grounded transformation system that generates themed virtual environments anchored to users' physical rooms while maintaining spatial structure and functional semantics. Current VR approaches face a fundamental trade-off: full immersion sacrifices spatial awareness, while passthrough solutions break presence. Roomify addresses this through spatially-grounded transformation - treating physical spaces as "spatial containers" that preserve key functional and geometric properties of furniture while enabling radical stylistic changes. Our pipeline combines in-situ 3D scene understanding, AI-driven spatial reasoning, and style-aware generation to create personalized virtual environments grounded in physical reality. We introduce a cross-reality authoring tool enabling fine-grained user control through MR editing and VR preview workflows. Two user studies validate our approach: one with 18 VR users demonstrates a 63% improvement in presence over passthrough and 26% over fully virtual baselines while maintaining spatial awareness; another with 8 design professionals confirms the system's creative expressiveness (scene quality: 5.95/7; creativity support: 6.08/7) and professional workflow value across diverse environments.