# Miiu — using it
Miiu is a spatial reasoning engine: a room or a yard as **objects with sizes
and places**, the maths over them, and a picture of the result. This book is
what a person does with it on `inspired.comm.ee`. The other two books are the
machine surfaces — [REST](/docs?s=rest) for a program, [MCP](/docs?s=mcp) for
an agent.
Every length is a **millimetre**. A place is the **top-left corner** of an
object's footprint, measured from the room's own top-left. A turn is 0, 90,
180 or 270 degrees **clockwise**, and 0 faces south.
## Starting a plan
Say it in your own words on the front page:
> a living room and kitchen 4,6 by 8 metres with a couch, a coffee table, a
> dining table with four chairs and a bookshelf
The reader takes the dimensions however they are written — `4,6 x 8 m`,
`460x800`, `4.6 by 8 metres` — and the things from the catalogue of kinds it
knows. What it does not know it leaves out rather than guessing. A yard is a
plan too: say *a yard 20 by 30 metres with a shed, a terrace and three trees*.
There are also **presets** — a small kitchen, a bathroom with a bath, a
bedroom — and **ten examples** anybody may open, sign in or not. The examples
are rewritten at every start, so they are always what the engine does today.
Three plans are free. After that a month is €10 (see **The month** below).
## The plan screen
The picture fills the window; everything else floats over it.
**The rail**, down the left: your plans, the examples, a new plan, this
plan and its pictures, the books, the assistant, your account.
**View** — 3D, or straight down (Top), or from any of the four sides. Drag to
turn, wheel or pinch to zoom. **Reset to original** puts the camera back; a
double press does nothing, deliberately, because on a telephone it is what a
hand does by accident and it threw away an angle you had worked to find.
**Render** — five ways of drawing the same scene. The first three are there **in
one frame**: nothing gathers and nothing settles. The last two follow the light
itself and are a job with a clock on it — they spend the time you give them and
then stop (MARIE-41, MARIE-65).
| | what it is |
|---|---|
| **Wire** | the edges alone; the fastest |
| **Shaded** | flat surfaces with one light; what you design in, and where a plan opens |
| **Ultra quality** | soft shadows with real contact under a chair, light bouncing twice off the floor and the walls, darkening in the corners, a sun that warms as it sets, and a highlight on every surface — and still one frame, with no grain at all (MARIE-40, MARIE-42) |
| **Path traced · WebGPU** | the light followed for real, a ray a pixel at a time, over the seconds you give it; the WebGPU engine (MARIE-65) |
| **Ray traced · WebGL2** | the same arithmetic in the WebGL2 engine, which every machine here has (MARIE-67) |
**Ultra quality** is the one to look at a room in. Instead of firing rays at
the plan, it builds a small cloud of the room — a grid of cells about 45 mm
across, each holding the light that leaves it — and reads the light off that
cloud along a handful of widening cones. It is a picture, not a sum of samples,
so there is no grain to wait out and no clock; the corner shows frames the way
Wire and Shaded do, and you can turn the room about while it draws.
Try the **Sun** slider with it: at six in the morning or seven in the evening
the sun comes in low and orange and the shadows go blue, which is most of what
makes a photograph of a room look like one.
What it gives up is the last of the sharpness: a shadow a long way from what
casts it is softer than it truly is, a mirror is a little vague, and a thing
much thinner than a cell may leave no shadow. What it costs is said in
**Machine** — *Light grid*, its cells and its megabytes — and nothing is built
at all until you first ask for it. Building takes about a fifth of a second, so
the light follows a quarter of a second behind a dragged sun or a typed
measurement; the thing itself moves at once.
**The two tracers** follow the light itself: a ray out of your eye, a hit, a
shadow ray at the sun, a new direction off the surface, and again — a few
hundred of those a pixel averaged together. Each names the engine that draws
it, because two engines can answer the same question and you should always be
able to say which one is on the screen; the one that is not this machine's says
so in words rather than going quiet. **Budget** says how long: 3 seconds, 10,
60, or ten minutes. When the time is up the picture stops and the machine goes
quiet — there was a tracer here once that never stopped, and that is why it was
taken out.
Anything you change starts the clock again, and the raster answer is there in
the same frame, so you are never looking at an empty stage. Pointing at a thing
does **not** start it again: that changes nothing the light did.
**Floor** — plain, parquet, herringbone, planks or concrete.
**Walls** — what the walls are made of: one of the tiles, and a colour of
their own over it, exactly the way an object's finish and colour work. *As it
is* is the painted plaster a room comes with. That is the whole room at once;
**one wall at a time is a different thing** — see below.
## A wall is an object
A room has four walls and they are objects like anything else (MARIE-37):
*north wall*, *east wall*, *south wall*, *west wall*, in the objects list and
in the picture. Press one and the same form opens, with that wall's own
**thickness**, **height**, **finish** and **colour** in it — so one wall can be
plywood and the next brick, and a room whose walls are 600 is drawn as one.
The thickness is the side of the wall that runs *through* it: `d` for the
north and south walls, `w` for the east and west ones. Make one thicker and it
grows **outward** — the room stays the size you said it was — and the wall goes
on spanning its whole side.
A window or a door is not a thing standing in the room: it is a hole the wall
**has**. Each one knows which wall it is in, and the wall is drawn in pieces
around what it holds. The walls on your side of the room are left out so you
can see in, and those are the ones you cannot press — pressing the floor picks
nothing at all, the way it should.
**Sun** — the hour of the day, six in the morning to seven in the evening. It
is a summer's day at 59° north; the ceiling is open, so the sky lights the
room.
**Machine** — what the picture costs: which renderer is drawing and on what
card, the size it is drawn at, what is held in memory, and how long a frame
takes. No browser will say how much memory a card has or what the processor is
doing, so these are what Miiu itself asked for. If the picture is slow, this
is the drop to read: a frame that takes too long makes Miiu draw smaller
rather than hold the machine.
**Show objects**, bottom right, opens the list of what is in the plan.
## Changing things
On a plan of your own:
- **Press a thing in the picture** to pick it. It flashes and the form docks
at the foot on the left, with the picture still live beside it.
- **Hold Ctrl** with something picked and the three axes are drawn through it;
**drag** it to move it along the floor, or with **Shift** up and down.
- The form's **levers** run what the room leaves that object — *1,5 m of
3,1 m* — so the scale between the numbers is on the page rather than in your
head. A number typed moves the lever, and the other way about.
- **Finish** and **Top** are what the thing is made of: as the kind is, one of
the eight tiles that ship (plaster, oak, plywood, rosewood, white stone,
dark stone, concrete, steel), or a tile cut from your own picture.
- **Add** puts a new thing in; leave the place empty and the placer finds one
that fits. **Openings** are doors and windows in a named wall.
Every change is checked: things overlapping, a door that cannot swing, a way
through too narrow for a person, something outside the room. What is wrong is
said in words under the title — *nothing wrong* when there is nothing.
## The kitchen
A kitchen is drawn as the joinery it is: base units **700 deep** unless you
measured your own and said otherwise, on a plinth
set back under them, a front to each bay with a shadow gap around it and a
handle over it, and a **clean white stone** worktop over the run with a small
overhang. Over it hangs a run of **wall cabinets** — 350 deep, 700 tall, at
1450 off the floor, which leaves a person room to work under them. Say *wall
cabinets* (or *seinakapid*) in the sentence and the placer hangs them over the
worktop; they are an object like any other, so they move, and the maths knows
they are there.
The fronts are **veneer** by default and the worktop white stone; both are a
finish you can change to any tile, on the object like everything else.
## Pictures
**Pictures** on the rail reads a room out of photographs. Upload one or more
(up to 40 MB in all); the eyes find the floor, the walls, the windows and
doors in the far wall, and the things standing on the floor, each as a
fraction of the room. You then give the one thing the camera cannot know —
the room's real width and depth — and it is scaled onto the grid and poured
into the plan.
The same page cuts a **texture** from a picture: the middle of it, mirrored so
it repeats without a seam, kept as this plan's own and offered as a finish.
Nothing is kept of the pictures themselves but what was seen.
## The assistant
The robot in the corner is the engine's own. It reads your plans, places
things, moves them, asks the maths, and opens a plan on the screen beside it.
It writes directly — there is no card to confirm — because a design is made by
moving a thing a hundred times.
It reaches what you connect to it (a gear in the panel), and which model
answers is yours to pick where the deployment has more than one.
## Sharing, and taking it with you
**Download** under the title:
- **plan.svg** — the drawing, top down.
- **plan.zip** — `plan.json`, `plan.svg`, `check.json`, `graph.json` and a
README, which is the whole plan as files.
- **plan.json** — the plan as the API answers it.
- **A share link** — anybody holding it sees the plan and its picture, with
nothing of yours around it. Press again to take it back.
The free version wears the `inspired.comm.ee` tile over the picture and in the
SVG; a paid month takes it off.
## The month
Three plans free, for ever. A fourth asks for a month: **€10**, tax within,
paid by bank transfer. The account page prints the payee, the IBAN and the one
thing that matters — the **reference**, which goes in the transfer's
description, the field an Estonian bank form calls *selgitus*. Copy it exactly
and write nothing else there: it is the only thing the bank tells us, and a
transfer without it arrives and pays no month. Pay from an account in your own
name; a transfer in somebody else's name is sent back rather than credited.
The operator reads the bank's own statement into the screen — the file the
internet bank saves, CSV or XML — and the reference is what settles the month.
A CSV export must carry the column *Konto teenusepakkuja viide*, which is what
names an entry: without it the file is refused rather than read through a
column that would make one payment look like two. The month is paid from the
day the money reached the bank, not the day the statement was read, so a
transfer on a Saturday buys the whole month whenever the file is carried over.
Reading the same statement again changes nothing and says so — and if an
earlier reading had left a month unmarked, the second finishes it. The account
page says where you stand, what is owed and what has been paid; a month is
billed to the name on the account, so the account needs one before it can be
billed.
## What it does not do
A room is a rectangle and a footprint is axis-aligned: an L-shaped room is two
plans, a round table is a square that reads as round in the picture, and a
diagonal wall is not drawn. Heights are kept but not reasoned about. One plan
is one room; nothing joins two rooms by a door. The drawing, the zip and the
thumbnails are flat colour — the tiles and the light are in the picture on the
screen, not in the file you download.
Miiu — using it
Miiu is a spatial reasoning engine: a room or a yard as objects with sizes and places, the maths over them, and a picture of the result. This book is what a person does with it on inspired.comm.ee. The other two books are the machine surfaces — REST for a program, MCP for an agent.
Every length is a millimetre. A place is the top-left corner of an object's footprint, measured from the room's own top-left. A turn is 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees clockwise, and 0 faces south.
Starting a plan
Say it in your own words on the front page:
a living room and kitchen 4,6 by 8 metres with a couch, a coffee table, a dining table with four chairs and a bookshelf
The reader takes the dimensions however they are written — 4,6 x 8 m, 460x800, 4.6 by 8 metres — and the things from the catalogue of kinds it knows. What it does not know it leaves out rather than guessing. A yard is a plan too: say a yard 20 by 30 metres with a shed, a terrace and three trees.
There are also presets — a small kitchen, a bathroom with a bath, a bedroom — and ten examples anybody may open, sign in or not. The examples are rewritten at every start, so they are always what the engine does today.
Three plans are free. After that a month is €10 (see The month below).
The plan screen
The picture fills the window; everything else floats over it.
The rail, down the left: your plans, the examples, a new plan, this plan and its pictures, the books, the assistant, your account.
View — 3D, or straight down (Top), or from any of the four sides. Drag to turn, wheel or pinch to zoom. Reset to original puts the camera back; a double press does nothing, deliberately, because on a telephone it is what a hand does by accident and it threw away an angle you had worked to find.
Render — five ways of drawing the same scene. The first three are there in one frame: nothing gathers and nothing settles. The last two follow the light itself and are a job with a clock on it — they spend the time you give them and then stop (MARIE-41, MARIE-65).
| what it is |
|---|
| Wire | the edges alone; the fastest |
| Shaded | flat surfaces with one light; what you design in, and where a plan opens |
| Ultra quality | soft shadows with real contact under a chair, light bouncing twice off the floor and the walls, darkening in the corners, a sun that warms as it sets, and a highlight on every surface — and still one frame, with no grain at all (MARIE-40, MARIE-42) |
| Path traced · WebGPU | the light followed for real, a ray a pixel at a time, over the seconds you give it; the WebGPU engine (MARIE-65) |
| Ray traced · WebGL2 | the same arithmetic in the WebGL2 engine, which every machine here has (MARIE-67) |
Ultra quality is the one to look at a room in. Instead of firing rays at the plan, it builds a small cloud of the room — a grid of cells about 45 mm across, each holding the light that leaves it — and reads the light off that cloud along a handful of widening cones. It is a picture, not a sum of samples, so there is no grain to wait out and no clock; the corner shows frames the way Wire and Shaded do, and you can turn the room about while it draws.
Try the Sun slider with it: at six in the morning or seven in the evening the sun comes in low and orange and the shadows go blue, which is most of what makes a photograph of a room look like one.
What it gives up is the last of the sharpness: a shadow a long way from what casts it is softer than it truly is, a mirror is a little vague, and a thing much thinner than a cell may leave no shadow. What it costs is said in Machine — Light grid, its cells and its megabytes — and nothing is built at all until you first ask for it. Building takes about a fifth of a second, so the light follows a quarter of a second behind a dragged sun or a typed measurement; the thing itself moves at once.
The two tracers follow the light itself: a ray out of your eye, a hit, a shadow ray at the sun, a new direction off the surface, and again — a few hundred of those a pixel averaged together. Each names the engine that draws it, because two engines can answer the same question and you should always be able to say which one is on the screen; the one that is not this machine's says so in words rather than going quiet. Budget says how long: 3 seconds, 10, 60, or ten minutes. When the time is up the picture stops and the machine goes quiet — there was a tracer here once that never stopped, and that is why it was taken out.
Anything you change starts the clock again, and the raster answer is there in the same frame, so you are never looking at an empty stage. Pointing at a thing does not start it again: that changes nothing the light did.
Floor — plain, parquet, herringbone, planks or concrete.
Walls — what the walls are made of: one of the tiles, and a colour of their own over it, exactly the way an object's finish and colour work. As it is is the painted plaster a room comes with. That is the whole room at once; one wall at a time is a different thing — see below.
A wall is an object
A room has four walls and they are objects like anything else (MARIE-37): north wall, east wall, south wall, west wall, in the objects list and in the picture. Press one and the same form opens, with that wall's own thickness, height, finish and colour in it — so one wall can be plywood and the next brick, and a room whose walls are 600 is drawn as one.
The thickness is the side of the wall that runs through it: d for the north and south walls, w for the east and west ones. Make one thicker and it grows outward — the room stays the size you said it was — and the wall goes on spanning its whole side.
A window or a door is not a thing standing in the room: it is a hole the wall has. Each one knows which wall it is in, and the wall is drawn in pieces around what it holds. The walls on your side of the room are left out so you can see in, and those are the ones you cannot press — pressing the floor picks nothing at all, the way it should.
Sun — the hour of the day, six in the morning to seven in the evening. It is a summer's day at 59° north; the ceiling is open, so the sky lights the room.
Machine — what the picture costs: which renderer is drawing and on what card, the size it is drawn at, what is held in memory, and how long a frame takes. No browser will say how much memory a card has or what the processor is doing, so these are what Miiu itself asked for. If the picture is slow, this is the drop to read: a frame that takes too long makes Miiu draw smaller rather than hold the machine.
Show objects, bottom right, opens the list of what is in the plan.
Changing things
On a plan of your own:
- Press a thing in the picture to pick it. It flashes and the form docks at the foot on the left, with the picture still live beside it.
- Hold Ctrl with something picked and the three axes are drawn through it; drag it to move it along the floor, or with Shift up and down.
- The form's levers run what the room leaves that object — 1,5 m of 3,1 m — so the scale between the numbers is on the page rather than in your head. A number typed moves the lever, and the other way about.
- Finish and Top are what the thing is made of: as the kind is, one of the eight tiles that ship (plaster, oak, plywood, rosewood, white stone, dark stone, concrete, steel), or a tile cut from your own picture.
- Add puts a new thing in; leave the place empty and the placer finds one that fits. Openings are doors and windows in a named wall.
Every change is checked: things overlapping, a door that cannot swing, a way through too narrow for a person, something outside the room. What is wrong is said in words under the title — nothing wrong when there is nothing.
The kitchen
A kitchen is drawn as the joinery it is: base units 700 deep unless you measured your own and said otherwise, on a plinth set back under them, a front to each bay with a shadow gap around it and a handle over it, and a clean white stone worktop over the run with a small overhang. Over it hangs a run of wall cabinets — 350 deep, 700 tall, at 1450 off the floor, which leaves a person room to work under them. Say wall cabinets (or seinakapid) in the sentence and the placer hangs them over the worktop; they are an object like any other, so they move, and the maths knows they are there.
The fronts are veneer by default and the worktop white stone; both are a finish you can change to any tile, on the object like everything else.
Pictures
Pictures on the rail reads a room out of photographs. Upload one or more (up to 40 MB in all); the eyes find the floor, the walls, the windows and doors in the far wall, and the things standing on the floor, each as a fraction of the room. You then give the one thing the camera cannot know — the room's real width and depth — and it is scaled onto the grid and poured into the plan.
The same page cuts a texture from a picture: the middle of it, mirrored so it repeats without a seam, kept as this plan's own and offered as a finish.
Nothing is kept of the pictures themselves but what was seen.
The assistant
The robot in the corner is the engine's own. It reads your plans, places things, moves them, asks the maths, and opens a plan on the screen beside it. It writes directly — there is no card to confirm — because a design is made by moving a thing a hundred times.
It reaches what you connect to it (a gear in the panel), and which model answers is yours to pick where the deployment has more than one.
Sharing, and taking it with you
Download under the title:
- plan.svg — the drawing, top down.
- plan.zip —
plan.json, plan.svg, check.json, graph.json and a README, which is the whole plan as files. - plan.json — the plan as the API answers it.
- A share link — anybody holding it sees the plan and its picture, with nothing of yours around it. Press again to take it back.
The free version wears the inspired.comm.ee tile over the picture and in the SVG; a paid month takes it off.
The month
Three plans free, for ever. A fourth asks for a month: €10, tax within, paid by bank transfer. The account page prints the payee, the IBAN and the one thing that matters — the reference, which goes in the transfer's description, the field an Estonian bank form calls selgitus. Copy it exactly and write nothing else there: it is the only thing the bank tells us, and a transfer without it arrives and pays no month. Pay from an account in your own name; a transfer in somebody else's name is sent back rather than credited.
The operator reads the bank's own statement into the screen — the file the internet bank saves, CSV or XML — and the reference is what settles the month. A CSV export must carry the column Konto teenusepakkuja viide, which is what names an entry: without it the file is refused rather than read through a column that would make one payment look like two. The month is paid from the day the money reached the bank, not the day the statement was read, so a transfer on a Saturday buys the whole month whenever the file is carried over. Reading the same statement again changes nothing and says so — and if an earlier reading had left a month unmarked, the second finishes it. The account page says where you stand, what is owed and what has been paid; a month is billed to the name on the account, so the account needs one before it can be billed.
What it does not do
A room is a rectangle and a footprint is axis-aligned: an L-shaped room is two plans, a round table is a square that reads as round in the picture, and a diagonal wall is not drawn. Heights are kept but not reasoned about. One plan is one room; nothing joins two rooms by a door. The drawing, the zip and the thumbnails are flat colour — the tiles and the light are in the picture on the screen, not in the file you download.