Mark Chen, mchen200
CS 428 - Week 7 Homework
I think AR applications such as IKEA Place would be very useful in the future. In the case of using IKEA Place, people can see how to furnish their homes with IKEA products that they are interested in buying and how it would look like in their home without buying the product. The application also allows the user(s) to see how much room a piece of furniture takes up in their home which is another benefit for the user(s) because with the application, they would not have to measure out space for the furniture. Overall, this would save time in the form of measuring, taking a trip to IKEA or ordering products from online and wait for shipping, assembling the product, and find out that it doesn’t fit and have to spend more time to place the product elsewhere or if the product isn’t right, then another trip to the store to return it or handling the return process online. This is not exclusive to IKEA, but to any store that sells furniture. Furniture shopping is generally boring. With AR furniture apps, user(s) know what they want and how it’s going to fit in their homes before buying or browsing for furniture. In the images below, I was able to place various products in a room, at a restaurant, and next to train tracks. The application allowed me to resize the product as well. This product would probably be best for new homeowners or real estate agents. For new homeowners, it would be obvious what furniture they want and where to put it. But for real estate agents, they wouldn’t need to furnish a home for sale during an open house. If possible, the real estate agents could have a preset of furniture on their AR furniture application and show home buyers that instead. This would reduce the labor required for real estate agencies to furnish homes for sale.
Another application that would be useful and be similar to how the AR furniture application works would be an application that lets you design art or buildings or however a person would design anything. There are some advertisements online that I saw for Minecraft Earth which is Minecraft using augmented reality. Users are able to craft Minecraft structures using their AR device. It also allows users to collect resources via Minecraft versions of “PokeStops” from Pokemon Go. These resources are used to build their structures. From the video, it is shown that you can make the Minecraft structure take the space of an entire room, or you can make it as small or big as the user wants it. Users are also able to interact with their structures too such as fighting, mining, chopping. I assume that the player structures are stored through the cloud, so you can place your Minecraft structure anywhere. An AR application that would be similar to Minecraft Earth but with real life materials to design structures could be effective in the future. Some careers that it could benefit are civil engineers in terms of building design, structure integrity. To put it in short, it would be an AR application for design on the go. If you wanted to just make creative structures, then the possibility of the cloud could be implemented where you and other users can put their structures in the cloud for other people to see and you can upload for yourself to see other people’s creations through the AR devices.