Introduction to Ikea’s Augmented Reality

Ikea, the Swedish furniture company, has been incorporating technology into its business for nearly so long as it has been designing and manufacturing assemble-it-yourself furniture. The company has experimented with various technologies, including wireless charging, smart lighting, and augmented reality. In 2012, Ikea began exploring using augmented reality to bring its products to life in customers’ homes.

The Evolution of Ikea’s Augmented Reality

Ikea’s first foray into augmented-reality shopping was five years ago, when it introduced its catalogue app. The app allowed customers to recreate a select few items in 3-D by opening them in a companion app. However, the 3-D furniture would sometimes float across the room, quite than staying put to the ground, and items often showed up within the fallacious proportions. According to Michael Valdsgaard, the Leader of Digital Transformation at Ikea, "The first [augmented reality] experience we had was more like an image. You could put in a 3-D object, but you couldn’t really move around it or trust the dimensions of it."

Ikea Place: A New Era in Augmented Reality

Ikea has now introduced a brand new app called Ikea Place, which represents a serious refresh of its augmented reality technology. The app allows customers to browse a list of over 2,000 products, delay their phone, and use the camera to put the digital furniture anywhere in a room. The app is free and available now, so long as the iPhone is updated to iOS 11. Ikea built the app with Apple’s ARKit, a developer toolkit created to usher within the augmented reality revolution on iOS devices.

How Ikea Place Works

With Ikea Place, customers can see how a bit of furniture will look of their home before making a purchase order. The app uses the phone’s camera sensors to map digital objects in a room, ensuring that the 3-D furniture shows up at scale with 98 percent accuracy. The app also loads faster than the previous iteration and doesn’t require any calibration on the a part of the user. According to Valdsgaard, much of the technological improvement comes from ARKit, which allows for true-to-life representations of the feel, fabric, lighting, and shadows of the furniture.

The Benefits of Ikea Place

Ikea Place has the potential to enhance the furniture-buying experience and relieve a number of the stress of measuring what is going to or won’t slot in a good space. The app might help customers make more informed purchasing decisions and reduce the likelihood of returns. Additionally, Ikea Place represents one in all augmented reality’s most vital use cases, and its success could pave the best way for other retailers to adopt similar technology.

Conclusion

Ikea Place is a major development in using augmented reality in retail. The app’s ability to accurately map digital objects in a room and supply true-to-life representations of furniture has the potential to revolutionize the best way people shop for furniture. As technology continues to evolve, it’s going to be exciting to see how Ikea and other retailers incorporate augmented reality into their business models. With Ikea Place, the corporate is taking a serious step forward in providing customers with a more immersive and informative shopping experience.