Built on Apple’s AR kit, Ikea place is an Augmented Reality powered application that lets the users make an informed choice on what furniture to buy from Ikea by placing the furniture in your augmented space in your home or desired space to see how it looks like. It was a huge success when it was first released on September 2017. It was immediately downloaded by many and it received a rating of 4.7 out of 5.0 out of 525 reviews. But no one knows how frequently the app was used. Right now it has a rating of 3.9 out of 5.0 from 100K plus people and this is just for android. Ikea received an idea and acted on it immediately when none of its competitors did and it was featured by Fast Company as one of 50 most innovative companies. Soon after other companies got on this and used AR for changing the color of the furniture. For this app to run you need an iPhone 6S or above with iOS 11 or an Android phone with ARCore.
One of the first things that you have to do on opening the app is to have a conversation with this chat bot which is really useful to figure out the interface. Once the app is open you can select the furniture of your choosing. To place the furniture you need to configure your space. This is done by tilt your phone to show the room. I was amazed at how the app figured out the ground plane and placed the furniture. The furniture also is mapped to the exact size as it would be in reality. You can drag the object anywhere and tap to place it. You can add multiple objects to your space. When you are satisfied you can look around. The objects are mapped correctly even when the objects come from out of focus to focus in your screen. The only time the app breaks is when the phone is shook vigorously which causes the items to move to the sides of the screen. But when the phone stabilizes again the objects are placed correctly back in the same place. It is amazing how the technology Apple AR can precisely map the furniture to the space. In the future when we buy furniture Ikea can also include an augmented tutorial to build it. All this gets humans to making life a little more easier.
Now let us look at the big picture here; augmented reality is already being used to design our homes. Soon after it will be used not just for furniture. With the emergence of Microsoft hololens it will be very simple to have an app that will do exactly the same thing and improve upon it possibly. Apart from furniture that you need to place your items upon, pictures, television can be replaced with nothing but software designed applications for them in the augmented world.
In a decade or so AR will not be a proof of concept anymore. Its use will be widespread and as this network of usage improves it will only become better. Games is a good venture that Augmented reality can and will go into. It can make the life more fun than how it is. Also with more people multiplayer games our homes will be cool like tony stark’s in Iron Man.
Some other industries that can really benefit from it is healthcare, engineering, live events like news, video entertainment, real estate, retail (like ikea), military and education.
AR is currently being used by motor cyclists to know the speed they are going in right on their helmets. This can be used for a wide variety of activities. Like flying jets, getting the analytics of a game while watching it live, etc. A simple game like chess can be analyzed in AR real time. There are also apps to view the mountains and the other areas. Imagine combining the applications into a single one. There can be so much use in knowing not just the location of the stars but much more. You can just disable the features that you don’t desire. This can be really handy for people who go on tours to other countries. They can admire nature and know about it without having to search them on the phone. It would be really cool if there is an option which on enabling it can take you to a virtual world where you can interact with the stars and can be in outer space (virtually). Also simulations of the meteorite hit millions of years ago and how the earth were in rumbles, simulations of its origins and the creatures as shown in the ending of the movie “Lucy”, starred by Scarlett Johansson. The ability to explore a vast multitude of the universe right from where you are is the dream.
One of my favorite sayings is, “Home Sweet Home”. A really cool projects would be to use augmented reality when we go travelling. You can have the same items in your space as your home did in the new space to feel like home! With the head sets like HTC vive, oculus and playstation VR are currently working on making the devices to have cameras to see the real world to incorporate augmented reality. Being able to mix items in VR and have them on a high performance Head Mounted Display to see models requires heavy computing power. The technology needs to be improved.