He needed to paint his room but he just could not pick the right colour so he created an app that is becoming globally popular

Three years ago, Dominik Vagala, a student of the Faculty of Information Technology at BUT, wanted to paint his room. However, he was not sure which colour would look best on his walls. He wanted to solve this conundrum using modern technology but could not find any suitable application that would work on his phone and help him choose the colour. Although he eventually had to use a graphic editor to pick the colour, the idea for a new mobile application was conceived during the process. The app called 'Paint my Room' is now available on Google Play store and has already been downloaded by almost thirty thousand people. Dominik Vagala chose the development of the app as the topic of his Bachelor's thesis and presented his project at this year's Excel@FIT conference.

An application for smartphones that enables users to walk around in a room and try out different virtual wall colours in real time is based on personal experience of its author, Dominik Vagala. "Three years ago, I wanted to redecorate my room and I just couldn't choose the colour. After all, it is not easy to imagine which colour would go best with the furnishing of the room. At that time, I had to use a computer graphic software where I was changing different wall colours in a photo of the room. However, this entire process was quite lengthy," Vagala describes.

Although his room has been redecorated for quite some time now, he later remembered the problem when he was choosing the topic for his Bachelor's thesis. "I thought that other people may be dealing with the same problem as I had been back then. So I wanted to help them," Vagala explains, adding that at that time he had only very limited experience with the development of mobile applications.

His app called Paint my Room, which is available on Google Play, works in real time. "User can freely walk around the room and see the wall colours from different angles," Vagala describes. He says that it took him eight months to create and launch the application on the market. "It was quite challenging, but I enjoyed it very much. That's one of the reasons why I recommend people to work on their own ideas for their Bachelor's theses. In such a case, you don't see the hundreds of hours invested in the project as work, but rather as fun," he adds.

Of course, he is not the only one with a similar idea. "There are multiple similar applications on the market. However, the ones working in real time are all depending on a single library that is supported by only about 20% of Android devices. Therefore, vast majority of people cannot run such applications at all," Vagala explains. He also thinks that, in general, the user interfaces of the competing apps, as well as the manner in which the user selects the colour to be applied on the wall, needed some finishing touches.

The Paint my Room application enables its users to easily change the wall colours in real time | Author: archive of Dominik Vagala

Twenty-seven thousand people from all over the world has already downloaded his application. That is despite the author's lack of any promotion or investments in marketing. Given the interest of people, he plans to further develop Paint my Room. "I want to create a version of the app for iOS devices and add some new functionalities. Later on, I would like to approach companies dealing with paints and discuss possible co-operation. One company has actually already contacted me," Vagala specifies his plans for the future.

He also presented his project at the recent Excel@FIT conference. "My thesis supervisor, professor Adam Herout, suggested that I should participate in the conference for which I am very grateful as I would not have thought about that myself. But it was an amazing experience," concludes the student of FIT BUT.