Anticipating poor design choices before you ever make them can be key to ensuring that you never again bring an ugly couch into your home. With a new app from Ikea, you can use augmented reality to “see” potential pieces of furniture in your home before pulling out your credit card, and save yourself a whole lot of consternation when it comes to (re)decorating your home.
Thanks to Ikea Place, customers will be able to experience and experiment with furniture from the retailer. You can place chairs, desks, and just about anything else in your kitchen, backyard, or heck, on the street, just to see how it all looks. And while Ikea Place was initially an iPhone only app, Android users can now take advantage of this AR technology as well. In March, Ikea launched its visualization app for non-iOS folks, too, giving customers the ability to virtually place some 3,200 Ikea products into their homes.
“When we first launched Ikea Place, we gave our customers the opportunity to ‘try before you buy’ for the first time since Ikea was established,” said Michael Valdsgaard, leader of digital transformation at Inter Ikea Systems. “Customers truly appreciate that and we are now helping them to create a better life at home using our AR technology. Today’s release is about bringing the ease of Ikea Place to over 100 million Android devices.”
In addition, the updated version of the app also now features Visual Search, which allows users to take a photo of any piece of furniture they fancy, then find similar or identical Ikea products through the app.
All items available in the app promise to be true to scale so you can ensure that you’re seeing precisely how an armchair would look in that particular corner of your room. Ikea Place claims to automatically scale products based on a room’s dimensions with up to 98 percent accuracy. Moreover, Ikea claims that the AR technology is precise enough to allow customers to see the texture of a fabric, and even the interplay of light and shadows on potential furnishings.
To use the app, simply scan the floor of a room, browse the list of products available in the app, and select the product you’d like to place. The iPhone version of the app will require iOS 11 to function, while Android phones will need ARCore in order to run the software.
“Now, technology has caught up with our ambition. AR lets us redefine the experience for furniture retail once more, in our restless quest to create a better everyday life for everyone, everywhere,” Valdsgaard concluded.
Updated on March 20: Ikea Place is now available for Android as well, with a few new features.
