Screen shot of Autodesk’s free online tool.

Budding home designers and decorators can now create realistic homes and stock them with virtual furniture, appliances and decorative products using a free online tool from Autodesk, which makes a wide range of powerful design software.

Using the new Web service, called Project Dragonfly, you can begin building virtual rooms in your preferred shapes and dimensions. Then, you can fill the rooms with things like washers and dryers, tables, vases, windows and rugs. And, when all is said and done, you can view the room in three dimensions.

“We discovered there were tons of people modeling their living rooms in the Sims video game,” said Mike Haley, a director of engineering at Autodesk. “Now they can design realistic spaces.”

The Dragonfly software features some sophisticated elements that add texture to the designs and make life easier on people using the technology. For example, you can set a vase on a table, then shuffle the two items around a room as a unit.

“There’s a sense of gravity to it,” Mr. Haley said.

In addition, Autodesk looks to tap into other software that handles how different light sources affect the appearance and feel of a room. It’s hoping that the virtual examples will appear as close to a crisp photo as possible.

The objects filling the virtual rooms come from Seek, another Autodesk online service that catalogs common objects and parts used for construction in the United States. Companies provide Autodesk with pictures and detailed information on their products, and those items then make their way into a vast, searchable database.

In just the last couple of weeks, Autodesk has turned Seek into a business, asking companies to pay for placement in the searchable database.

Autodesk hopes the technology might lead people to outfit their virtual rooms with products, total up the cost of the gear and then purchase it all at once. In addition, it looks to sell this type of software to stores that want their own, slick online services for displaying products.

As far as how the underlying technology magic happens, Dragonfly arrives via some hard-core cloud-on-cloud action.

The databases of product information all sit on Amazon.com’s S3 cloud storage service, and it is Amazon’s EC2 computing service that hammers away on the data to display the virtual images.

“Some of the hardest and most expensive problems to solve come from just hosting all of this data,” Mr. Haley said. “Amazon does it for just a fraction of the cost of what it would normally take, and the price goes up and down according to how many people use the service. They still have a ways to go, but there is no one else that can touch them right now.”

While a leader in the design field, Autodesk isn’t exactly a household name, so the company faces some large challenges in making people aware of this type of technology. Beyond that, it’s hard to say where a curious interest in such technology ends and serious applications begin.

But if you fancy yourself a home decorating whiz, Autodesk has provided a spot to post your best designs for others to see and use.

Source:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com