Roomify: Spatially-Grounded Style Transformation for Immersive Virtual Environments

A research team led by Xueyang Wang and seven collaborators has unveiled Roomify, a novel system that addresses a fundamental challenge in virtual reality: the trade-off between full immersion and spatial awareness. Presented at CHI 2026, Roomify treats physical spaces as 'spatial containers,' using AI to understand a room's 3D structure and functional semantics, then applying radical stylistic transformations—turning a living room into a medieval castle or cyberpunk lounge—while keeping key furniture geometries intact. This approach allows users to remain spatially grounded in their real environment, preventing disorientation and collisions, while being fully immersed in a visually transformed world.

The technical pipeline combines in-situ 3D scene understanding, AI-driven spatial reasoning, and style-aware generation, supported by a cross-reality authoring tool for fine-grained control. Validation came from two user studies: one with 18 VR users demonstrated a 63% improvement in the sense of 'presence' compared to passthrough AR/VR and a 26% improvement over fully virtual environments. A second study with 8 design professionals confirmed high scores for scene quality (5.95/7) and creativity support (6.08/7), highlighting its potential for professional design workflows. The work, documented in a 24-page paper, points toward a future where mixed reality seamlessly blends the safety of the physical world with the unlimited creativity of the virtual.