Furniture giant IKEA has always provided a fun shopping experience, where kids can have their kids meals and play time at Småland, while the meatballs are always a top draw. You can practically spend an entire day there with your family while the whole bunch of you shops for different bits and pieces that you think would fit into the new home. Well, considering how times have changed, IKEA too, wants to keep up to date by offering Augmented Reality (AR) technology which makes it easier for customers to shop.
Needless to say, this AR tech would require shoppers to own a compatible smartphone, but then again, who does not have a smartphone these days? Apart from that, the mobile app would also allow customers to “test” furniture from the comfort of their own home, now how about that? We will be able to see the most extensive ever use of Augmented Reality (AR) by IKEA when they roll out the new mobile catalogue later this month.
AR will be used to place its products into customers’ rooms, letting them find the right fit, and when August 25th rolls around on the calendar, you will find the app launched in the Apple App Store and Google Play. The 2014 IKEA Catalogue app will enable customers to literally try out 90 products for size (of course, they will also take shape, color and positioning into consideration as well) in their own homes. The app will rely on the catalogue to judge the approximate scale of the furnishings, where it will measure the size of the catalogue itself when laid on the floor in the camera, resulting in an augmented reality image of the furnishings in order for it to appear as correct as possible in the room. This enables customers to check out just how different IKEA sofas, chairs, beds, bookcases, chests of drawers and desks will look like in their rooms virtually, all through your smartphone camera.
Of course, there will still be a print version of the IKEA catalog, but AR tech is definitely breathing new life into the furniture shopping experience!
