AR Furniture - Week 7

This week we're using the AR Furniture app 'Ikea Place' to impose some furniture on the floors of our home. When I downloaded the application and opened it on my phone, it started off extremely slow and was really chugging along. I started to earnestly think of what furniture would work in my house and when I was about to choose something, the whole thing crashed. Afterwards, I let it sit for a while and started it up again and it was running okay. Whenever I tried to load up .

I decided that among the leather sofas in the basement I should choose a leather ottoman to go with it. I found it, followed the app's directions to scan my phone along the floor of the room to calibrate the floor and the ottoman appeared almost PERFECTLY in the place I wanted it. I adjusted it to look more in line with the rest of the sofas and table and when it sat down onto the floor it actually surprised me how nice it looked. My instincts for how to move and rotate the furniture was right so I think the controls are easy for anyone to understand.

Seeing how well this worked in the home really sold me on making potentially bad furniture/other(?) decisions (like buying a sofa that doesn't work with your wallpaper; something like that) with an AR app like 'Ikea Place'. One thing I'm definitely skeptical about with this application is whether I can take the sizes of the furniture in accurately, because the ottoman that appeared was pretty large. I think when the sensing of the surroundings becomes that much better, the concept of having just using your phone to imagine a completely remodeled room would be great planning. The app would have price numbers to relate to all the changes to the room to give the customer or renovator an idea of how much they'll have to spend later.

Remember when I spoke of how okay the application worked inside my houes? Well... when using it outside it's probably the worse application ever, and now I realize the 3.1 stars. It almost felt like I was running some malware straight on my phone it was so bad with crashes.The outside picture may have been weird with the context of using a furniture app, but I can see the merit in its use still. I can imagine construction planning with the app using models of street lamps or fire hydrants for roadwork, or maybe a generic building fit to spec to see how it will look in real time. You can decide whether to change some aspects if you think sunlight might be a problem or catch potential dangers. You can even look at a graveled up lot and augment it to estimate how to efficiently organize the spaces of a parking lot and where to place the parking lot lamps.

My final thoughts are that after this and Star Tracker's different implementations of Augmented Reality, there's a lot of potential for it in the modern market. I'm sure there are a lot of apps like the two out there in the play store or the app store with support for AR, but there's not enough of a push to use them. Despite 'Ikea Place' having 3.1 stars, I thought it was a great application for indoors that did everything it needed to and was SUPPOSED to do.