Let’s face it – despite the bright colors, clever Swedish design, and exceedingly happy salespeople, few of us would actually choose to spend their entire Saturday at IKEA. It’s a chore! But good thing for you – we now practically live in Back to the Future, and augmented reality is, in this case, going to get you to spend less time on life administration by streamlining the time you spend planning, designing, and purchasing furniture for your home.
It’s not only one of the best use cases of AR, it’s also one of the most obvious: planning and designing interior spaces using easy-to-understand visuals – while you stand in the space you’re planning. Of course, IKEA already tried it back in 2013 – but the technology has advanced significantly. Now start-up app Roomle is making the process even easier – using Wikitude’s SLAM 3D tracking.
Check out the short demo below:
The benefits are clear, for everyone involved: less hassle, less travel, quicker and more intuitive understanding of how a space will look and feel. Customers love it because it makes their lives easier; retailers love it because it means more sales, and less overhead on showrooms and stores. And those are just the big benefits – here’s a few more:
- Real-time supply with up-to-date and individually relevant product information
- Visualization of residential environments and interior architecture
- Interactive interface creates strong brand connection
- The personalization factor is enhanced by the unique usability
- Simpler presentation of complex products
- Products ‘stick’ in the consumer’s memory and are recognized more quickly
Using Roomle is this easy
Roomle is even more impressive in the hands of a trained professional (that’s a nice way of saying ‘salesperson!’). It turns an iPad into a custom furniture showroom. Sales staff can pick furniture from the brand catalog, configure it according to the customer´s preferences and demonstrate the result in convincing 3-D or augmented reality views, live in every room. See the longer explanation about how Roomle works, here. So now that we’ve arrived at the future, what’s the future of the future? Good question – for one, we can imagine one-click ordering (á la Amazon) combined with the flat-packing genius of IKEA to facilitate home shopping even more – take a picture, pick your product, click ‘purchase’ and it shows up at your door one day later. What follows? Pre-fabbed house construction – calculate the price of a new floor or painting a room, or installing an addition to your home.
If you’ve been thinking about making some changes around the house, but the hassle of getting out the measuring tape, doing the research, and going shopping has been holding you back – wait no more, give Roomle a try!
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