Ikea’s iPhone app can now replace your furniture with a virtual one, making it easier to imagine what your favorite pieces might look like in your home.
- Ikea’s impressive new feature will scan your room, erase your existing furniture and replace it with virtual couches, sofas, tables, beds and so on.
- Ikea’s iOS app has always supported trying out virtual furniture in augmented reality (AR) but it couldn’t replace your existing pieces with virtual ones.
- With the new capability, people will find it easier to imagine how pieces of Ikea furniture might fit in their home.
Ikea’s app can now erase your furniture
This feature uses artificial intelligence, spatial computing and computer vision to recognize various pieces of furniture in your room. The process starts with scanning your own home in the Ikea Place app [App Store link]. After a 3D replica of your room has been created, you can start deleting your existing furniture to see what Ikea’s couches, tables, nightstands and other items might look like in your home.
And if you like what you’re seeing, you can add those pieces to the shopping cart. You can also try out alternative designs. save your own ones for later or share them with others. The hope here is that people would be enticed to order their furniture after seeing it virtually. Read: How to turn off iPhone display zoom
How Ikea scans your room
Instead of scanning your own room, the updated Ikea app now permits you to choose between 50 virtual showrooms and then place any piece of furniture in them. The process takes advantage of the LiDAR sensor in your iPhone 12, iPhone 13 and iPad Pro, but it also works without one. Running the feature on a LiDAR-equipped device lets the app pull in additional spatial detail. You can even use this feature on the web.
You can even scan a room without LiDAR, which requires uploading a series of photos that are used to create a three-dimensional replica of the space ”with accurate dimensions and perspective,” per a press release on the Ikea website.
Ikea’s app is one of the first AR apps for the iPhone. Released in 2017, it lets you preview furniture in your home via AR. And now, it can actually erase your existing furniture and replace it with virtual pieces. In a brief chat with China Daily, Apple’s boss Tim Cook said there are currently 14,000 apps on the App Store which use the company’s ARKit framework for AR experiences.
Introducing iOS 16’s new FloorPlan API
This app should become even better after Apple launches its iOS 16 update for the iPhone. iOS 16 advances the ARKit framework with a new API, dubbed RoomPlan, which allows developers to create apps that can quickly create three-dimensional floor plans using LiDAR scanning. Apple explains that the RoomPlan API should be particularly useful for real estate, e-commerce and hospitality apps. “These scans can also be the first step in architecture and interior design workflows to help streamline conceptual exploration and planning,”it says.