Tag: augmented reality application

The furniture company is using the application to give a 3D display of how its products fit in a room.

IKEA shoppers will no longer need to rely solely on their imaginations when considering various furniture items for their homes, because of a new augmented reality app that will allow them to preview the piece in a 3D real time image.

Though walking through the store with a measuring tape is still important, it can also be very confusing.

Shoppers can’t always tell if a piece of furniture will fit properly into a room, or how it will look once it gets there, even when they have measured the space and the piece. Instead, they have been forced to rely on their imaginations and their memories to try to decide whether or not they are making the right choice. But IKEA intends to provide a helping hand through the use of augmented reality that can be used on a mobile device.

The augmented reality app from the Swedish furniture maker is Android and iOS compatible.

The new augmented reality feature to the app lets the 2014 catalog be used by the consumer along with his or her smartphone or tablet, so that they will be able to view in real time how a piece of furniture will look in one of the rooms of their home. Though this is not a perfect depiction of exactly how it will appear, it will certainly provide the shopper with a much clearer image of what they can expect, right there in their own homes.

According to the Ikea North America chief marketing officer, Leontyne Green Sykes, “While the hard copy is still relevant, allowing readers to tear out pages to create collages of the things they like, it’s also exciting to interact, throughout the year wherever you are, with a catalog when it becomes a mobile piece with a digital component.” The augmented reality feature is one that the CMO claims has been “desired by our users since we launched the app last year.” That first version of the app was downloaded by 8.5 million users last year.

Dekko is attempting to create a world comparable to the one in The Matrix with the help of real people.

Matt Miesnieks has launched an augmented reality project reliant on crowdsourcing in order to help his company, Dekko, to re-create as much of the world as possible, including some of its finest little details, in a digital form.

The hope is to take advantage of every possible camera and turn it into a scanner for the project.

According to Miesnieks, “In effect what we’re doing is taking every camera — in Glass or in smartphones – turning them in 3D scanners, and then taking all of those images to build a 3D model of the world.” Though this may appear to be a daunting project, to say the least, the Dekks team feels that it has what it takes to make it happen.

The team is highly experienced in technology and augmented reality and has learned from this experience.

Both Mike Miesnieks and his wife, Silka, who is the cofounder of Dekks, are Layar veterans. That augmented reality company was able to ride a considerable wave for the technology while it was still brand new. According to the couple, they have learned a tremendous amount from their time with that company, particularly that the traditional form of AR technology has been, in essence, a failure, so far.

He explained that “If the app works on one page of a magazine but not the next, people might use it once, but they’re going to toss it away.” From the standpoint of the experience for users, augmented reality may not, therefore, have lived up to the hype that has surrounded it.

The digitization process from Dekko is still considered to be somewhat on the rough side, but the couple says that this will lead to a rapid improvement. They have decided that instead of creating an augmented reality platform on the weak capability of a camera to be able to recognize the tremendous variety of different kinds of object that are found throughout the world, they are eliminating the entire concept of recognition.

Instead, the new augmented reality experience that is Dekko’s goal, is an entirely digitized world.