IKEA to use Augmented Reality for Perfect Furniture Planning

Swedish home furnishing retailer, IKEA is in the process of planning an update for its iOS and Android app, that will allow customers to fit furniture in their home before ordering using augmented reality.

Customers can virtually place up to 90 different products in the room to see how size, shape, colour and positioning would affect their living space.  IKEA plans to launch their 2014 Catalogue app for both Android and iOS  platforms in a few weeks time, on 25 August.

To allow the Augmented Reality part of the application to work, customers will need to put the physical IKEA catalogue into the space where they would like to test the product. Then the app will use the size of the catalogue against the size of the room and will then scale the products on to the handset. The 90 products which are available through the app catalogue include IKEA sofas, bookcases, chairs, desks, chests of drawers and beds.

Peter Wright, country marketing manager for IKEA UK & Ireland said, “Our customers want to be able to test out whether the products they’ve been inspired by in our catalogue will work in their own homes, particularly when it comes to larger pieces of furniture…Offering a way of using mobile technology to enable to test products means the technology has a practical purpose and really helps customers visualise the way their homes could look.”

According to the company’s research, “many customers suffer from ‘Square peg, round hole syndrome’ as 14 per cent say they’ve bought the wrong-sized furniture for their rooms and over 70 per cent say they don’t really know how big their own homes are.”  IKEA says that the main goal of this app is to help its customers to avoid buying the wrong size of furniture.

The printed version of the IKEA Catalogue will contain 50 pages that can also be scanned with the mobile app to receive additional product information, alternative views of products and videos.

Thanks to this new app, the next time I visit the big blue monolith, I won’t buy the wrong size table.

[Image via ideaxidea]

SOURCE: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/122724-ikea-will-use-ar-within-its-app-to-help-customers-find-the-perfect-furniture-fit