Roomify: Spatially-Grounded Style Transformation for Immersive Virtual Environments

2026-03-05

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of balancing immersion and physical spatial awareness in virtual reality by proposing a spatially anchored style transfer paradigm that generates stylized virtual environments while preserving the geometric structure and functional layout of the user’s real room. The approach integrates on-site 3D scene understanding, AI-driven spatial reasoning, and style-aware generative techniques, complemented by a cross-reality authoring tool designed for creators to enable mixed-reality editing and VR preview. User studies demonstrate that, compared to passthrough and fully virtual baselines, the system enhances presence by 63% and 26%, respectively. Professional designers rated the generated scenes’ visual quality and creative support at 5.95/7 and 6.08/7, indicating strong practical utility and aesthetic fidelity.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Computer Vision: Computational Photography, Image & Video Synthesis

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

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.

Problem

• virtual reality
• spatial awareness
• presence
• style transformation
• immersive environments

Innovation

• spatially-grounded transformation
• immersive virtual environments
• AI-driven spatial reasoning
• style-aware generation
• cross-reality authoring