It’s not the first time IKEA has dabbled in AR room placement, but the furniture giant is hoping its latest app will inspire folks to do more than imagine new rooms.
Have you ever wondered what rooms of your home would look like if you had new furniture? It’s probably more common than you think, but imagining a new look isn’t always easy with all the stuff you have there already.
Every room in your home almost certainly has something in there affecting the look, and making it difficult to place new furniture in your mind. Planning for the next idea of how a room is going to look isn’t always easy.
Fortunately, there may be a way to imagine these rooms as something new, and it doesn’t requiring you moving all of the old stuff out of the way.
Rather, IKEA has been dabbling with an augmented reality app that uses AI to identify and digitally replace everything it picks up, allowing your room to be recreated in a virtual way and start dropping in digital furniture via the app.
The idea could make it easier to imagine what a Kallax shelving system could do to your living room, or what a Poang armchair would like near your TV, and it might also upsize your Swedish furniture name vocabulary after seeing enough of them in your life.
It’s coming in the IKEA app in a feature called Kreativ, launching free on iOS and Android, thanks in part to it being an obvious marketing tool by the furniture giant, though one that is a little more fun than simply browsing through an IKEA catalogue.
IKEA is no stranger to augmented reality (AR) apps, and was very early to the whole “place a digital piece of furniture in your home” space using its own app. Kreativ gives the concept a different spin by using a combination of AI and AR to recognise home environments and walls, and then work out how to recreate them digitally before mocking up items inside of them.
The app will reportedly let you start from templates, too, with existing 3D showrooms able to be quickly thrown into a digital room-recreation, before turning them into your own room-creations that you might later on use for shopping.
“IKEA is passionate about helping people create a better life at home, and the most exciting opportunity with this tool is its power to democratise home design and put it in everyone’s hands,” said Christine Gough, Interior Design Leader at IKEA in Australia.
“IKEA Kreativ can really break down barriers to having new ideas, designing, decorating and shopping for home furnishings, where people can feel the magic of the IKEA physical stores, through a virtual space,” she said.
IKEA’s Kreativ launches as part of the Australian IKEA app on iOS and Android this week.
