Two things were certain during the pandemic– we all redesigned our homes and shopped online…a lot. While some of us took this time to peruse IKEA and design the home that we’ve been planning for years, the rest of us took a riskier approach and just bought what caught our eyes. To help mitigate the embarrassing effects of buying furniture without seeing how it fits in our room, IKEA in continued partnership with Apple has given their AR app, now called IKEA Studio, a complete overhaul.
Previously called the IKEA Place App, the augmented reality app allowed users to position furniture even outside of the bedroom – landing sofas and armoires in distant factory lots and busy city streets. Nowadays, retail brands across the interweb are implementing AR apps into their online shopping experience– from sunglasses to makeup companies, consumers are more aware than ever of what’s headed for their doorstep. While IKEA largely started the AR app trend four years ago, since more brands are catching on, the retail tech company turned to SPACE10 to transform IKEA Place App into IKEA Studio, a reenergized and sensor-oriented AR experience.
Still operating in beta, IKEA Studio relies on LiDAR sensors in the iPhone to register and analyze rooms, allowing iPhone users to completely redesign their living spaces. Relying on iPhone’s LiDAR sensors to capture physical spaces, IKEA Studio captures complete 3D plans of the user’s living space including the measurements and placement of every piece of furniture from the window sill to the loveseat. Replacing their current furniture with white boxes, users can furnish their virtual room with new IKEA pieces, redesign previous color schemes, and then generate the final rendering in either 3D or 2D to export and share with others. Similar to IKEA Place, IKEA Studio still does not have a shopping feature so users have to exit the AR app to purchase furniture online or just fill up their shopping carts with prospective purchases.
Those interested in following IKEA Studio to its final stages can sign up for beta testing and start the design process as soon as they get approved. While the AR app is currently limited to a mobile application exclusively built for the iPhone, designers at SPACE10 are also envisioning a future AR experience that replaces the mobile application with glasses that users can wear to envision and redecorate their home spaces as they see fit, literally.
Designers: IKEA, Apple, SPACE10
With help from the iPhone’s LiDAR sensors, IKEA Studio captures and registers every piece of furniture’s exact measurement and placement within the room.
Additional functions within the app include features that allow users to redesign previous color schemes of living spaces.
IKEA Studio works by replacing old furniture with blank white spaces that generate virtual space for newly chosen pieces of furniture.
