English

Roomify: Spatially-Grounded Style Transformation for Immersive Virtual Environments

Human-Computer Interaction 2026-03-06 v1

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.04917,
  title  = {Roomify: Spatially-Grounded Style Transformation for Immersive Virtual Environments},
  author = {Xueyang Wang and Qinxuan Cen and Weitao Bi and Yunxiang Ma and Xin Yi and Robert Xiao and Xinyi Fu and Hewu Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04917},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at CHI 2026 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems). 24 pages, 10 figures. Author's version

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:04:30.546Z