ReRoom: Blending Virtual and Physical Contexts for In Situ Room Planning in Mixed Reality

Abstract

Planning a real domestic space is an in situ authoring process: users evaluate candidate layouts at true scale, refine their intent, and carry accepted decisions into later iterations. Existing approaches either separate layout editing from the physical room or provide limited support for evaluating and refining whole-room proposals in situ. We present ReRoom, a mixed-reality system for in situ room-layout authoring. ReRoom presents a shared layout state through a virtual room proxy spatially registered to the target room, allowing interaction and layout generation to remain grounded in the physical context. Users refine the current proposal through direct manipulation or language and preserve accepted placements, allowing each generated update to continue the same evolving design. To balance layout quality with generation efficiency, ReRoom uses a skill-guided layout agent whose room-layout design skill operationalizes three principles that we formulate by synthesizing established interior-design guidance for real-room layout generation. The skill grounds these principles in a normalized representation of the scanned room and reusable geometric checks. Evaluations show that ReRoom produces high-quality layouts for non-rectangular rooms, while its in situ workflow improves the room-planning experience over an otherwise equivalent off-site VR workflow. Code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.