Interior Design and AR –

Get your furniture into your living room by just a tap of a finger

You’re moving and all your furniture no longer fits your style right? You need new furniture, but the problem with trying to buy that online is not a lack of selection, but rather your imagination.

Our imagination is not trained enough — how often have you bought pieces of furniture, dragging them into the house, full of sweat, just to realize that… that’s not it. That dining table from the website, the catalog, or the furniture store would fit into your living room, suit the design you’ve planned, assuming the color of the sofa would match the color of your wall, but end up realizing that none of it worked out. By the time you’ve gotten to this point, however, you have already wasted plenty of time and energy assembling, dragging, and pushing it all around. And you could have avoided all of that.

Augmented Reality is the solution for that. The use of AR in interior design and planning gives you the edge by offering you a possibility to design the room just how you want it — digitally.

Need a change of scenery at home? AR got you!

Anyone who has ever dealt with designing the perfect home on your own knows that it can be tricky to find the right wallpaper. You are likely gonna put more effort and time into planning which furniture you want to put in the rooms, and only consider wallpaper later, when the room is completely furnished, or you just need a change of scenery.

Augmented Reality is the key to solving this problem. The English wallpaper manufacturer Graham & Brown, for one, has developed an app that enables users to find the best wallpaper for their rooms using Augmented Reality.

All you gotta do is scan the room, or the wall, that the wallpaper should cover in the future, and you get a preview of that wallpaper all finished up.

With just the push of a button, you can select something from a massive variety of different wallpapers, picking whichever you find the most beautiful. Not only does it help you visualize, but it also happens to automatically calculate how many rolls of wallpaper you’ll be needing for that renovation.

“People love the thought of using wallpaper but often struggle to visualize what it will be like on their walls. Whilst there is a lot of inspiration to be found socially, online and in magazines, making that jump to what it will look like in your own space is a challenge for most of us. This app makes it easy and is very intuitive. You can save your favorites or take an image of your creation to review and share. If you like what you see you can buy it then and there,” said Alan Kemp, Head of Brand at Graham & Brown.

AR allows users to walk around during the preview, seeing the room from any angle, with different light sources, and even at close range to inspect the motif of the wallpaper in greater detail.

The complete setup by AR

So — the rooms are redecorated, it’s just the furniture that’s missing? Or maybe you need a new piece of furniture because you were tired of the old chair, shelf or desk. But does the wooden table actually fit into the kitchen, and is the shelf maybe somehow not too bulky for the living room? Augmented Reality can address these concerns. Simply beam the desired furniture into the room with a special AR app — virtually of course. This way, you can look at what your furniture will look like in your home before ordering it.

Delivery time: a few seconds

One of the best known AR apps is the “Ikea Place” app. Launched in 2017, the app helps to find the right pieces of furniture for your home. Initially, users had the opportunity to choose one of 90 pieces of furniture in the Ikea product range and to project these pieces of furniture into their rooms with just a few clicks. In the following years, the free app was continuously optimized so that currently about 3000 products can be selected. In the future, all new items will be included in the app. The products are displayed three-dimensionally and true to scale, enabling people to get an impression of the size, design, and functionality of the desired furniture items in their own homes. They no longer have to imagine the furniture in their familiar home, they simply experience it directly. Thus, the user can see whether the desired furniture items actually fit into the room, move it around the room, and view it from all perspectives.

Today, the app even offers more functions, such as furnishing tips or showing alternatives to existing furniture when the camera is pointed at it.

In addition to increasing sales, the app also provides another advantage for the company: the visualization leads to better purchasing decisions. Purchase regret and return rate are drastically reduced, as customers get exactly what they saw in the app before.

In addition, AR can also be an advantage when viewing real estates. Usually, the walls are bare, the floor is grey and the room is empty. Interested parties often find it difficult to imagine empty rooms furnished, but as we should have learned by now, this is no problem for AR.

This way, the property can be virtually furnished with furniture, etc. during the inspection and the prospective buyer can already get an impression of how the rooms might look furnished.

By the way: An application that is probably known to many Apple users is the tape measure that was released in 2018 with the iOS 12 operating system. What most people don’t know is that this is an AR application. With Apple’s ARKit 2, users can measure objects by pointing the device’s camera at the object. This is very useful if, for example, you want to measure a piece of furniture in a furniture store or at home but don’t have a folding rule at hand. All you have to do is select the starting point of the measurement with the camera in the app and move the phone to the endpoint. After tapping on the display, the measurement is displayed directly.

Of course, Augmented Reality does not replace a visit to a furniture store, because you might want to touch and test the furniture. Customers have to try out a lot of things such as lying or sitting on a test bench or feel the material. The goal is not to replace this; rather, AR is intended to make furnishing easier and help users find the right furniture for their dream rooms.

Welcome to a new era of interior design.