How I create virtual twins for fabrics and furniture

“I work in the home-goods industry, building virtual worlds that are faithful to reality, to aid online sales. For example, I might make a virtual apartment, complete with rendered furnishings, such as tables, chairs and cushions.

But the fabric of a virtual sofa, or the wallpaper on a virtual wall, is hard to get across digitally, because so many different elements — colour, roughness, transparency and so on — contribute to the make-up of a 3D surface.

To build a material virtually, I’ve rigged a camera together with 18 spotlights to create what I’ve named a Total Material Appearance Capture (TMAC) device. It works by scanning a sample of material in many lighting scenarios to collect data on all the elements of the surface. Software then processes these photographs into a complete digital version, or twin, of the material, for use in renderings. This is one of the first automated tools on the market for digitizing 3D surfaces.

Tools such as these mean that if someone is looking to purchase a sofa, they could select a product digitally, knowing that the visualization is faithful to the real version.

This photograph was taken in my home office in Prague, where I conceptualized and built the TMAC from scratch. I have a master’s degree in engineering from the Technical University of Košice, Slovakia, but I had to teach myself new skills as I built the machine, such as how to 3D-print parts. It’s taken me three years to develop and build this technology, in collaboration with scientists at the Institute of Information Theory and Automation in Prague.

Before making this machine, I had created computer-generated imagery for seven years, giving life to imagined spaces or those that couldn’t be photographed. But I lacked the tools to achieve the nuance I wanted in my virtual worlds. This technology allows me to execute my ideas more precisely than I’d been able to before.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.