AR Furniture Apps

 For this assignment I tried downloading the IKEA Space app but it wasn’t compatible with my device. I downloaded Roomle instead. I went to my kitchen (open space), and fired up the app. There’s an option to log in, but it can be bypassed. The main catalog is very aesthetic and is divided up by rooms (living, bath, etc.), with pets and toilets being the exceptions with categories of their own. I selected kitchen because that’s the room I was in and saw that they had multiple subcategories for Kitchen Cupboards, Kitchen Islands, Kitchen Appliances, etc. I chose the Kitchen Cupboards category and selected an item based solely on its name. It was the most German thing I’ve ever heard of. It was named “Unterschrank mit Kochfeld (3 Schubladen)” and the manufacturer was Küchenquelle. It had a medium wood base with 3 light wood drawers (Schubladen I guess), and what looked like an electric stovetop. 

I selected the option to “View in your room AR” and was prompted to hold it at chest height. After moving the camera around a bit, the Unterschrank came into view, but it was too small, and it was facing in the wrong direction. I was able to make the object bigger by reverse pinching the area on my phone screen that the object was rendered in. Also, by then rotating my fingers in a circular motion I was able to rotate the object so that it was facing me, and I could then take a screenshot of it in the middle of my kitchen floor.

I then tried to place a wastepaper basket in the corner of my bathroom. For some reason I could not get the object to render correctly. It was a white cube with moving grey stripes on it as you can see in the screenshot below.

I thought that maybe it was just a bad model, so I tried placing a tree, but as you can see below, that also was shown as a white cube with grey stripes on it. At this point I restarted the app, which didn’t help, before reinstalling it from the Google Play Store.

With the app reinstalled I opened it up again. The back room in my house is very small so I thought it would be fun to put a picnic table in it. And this time it worked! The bigger objects like the picnic table were hard to reorient and I although I tried for quite a while I couldn’t seem to resize them. The car too, but that was sideways which was even worse.

I figured I would try to take a relatively realistic photo next, so I went to my bathroom. I placed a bidet in the same area that I had tried to place the wastebasket earlier. It was easy to rotate it and move it into place, and it didn’t need to be resized as it seemed properly scaled. It also looked properly placed on the wall but moving the camera even a tiny bit breaks this illusion.

I also placed a tree in the dining area.

Overall, I’m not so sure about these AR furniture apps. I only tried one so other apps may be easier to use (I had downloaded Houzz but have not tried it yet). As far as Roomle goes though, I had issues where the only solution was to reinstall the app, I had issues resizing some of the larger objects, I had issues where the objects keep disappearing in low light settings, and I wanted to change the color of some of the objects but couldn’t figure out how to do it (so I don’t think it was possible in Roomle). There’s a lot that they need to work on before the app becomes practical for home design.

What I did like about it was that even if I couldn’t get the size correct, I could still see (generally) how that specific product would look in my house. My super awesome 360° swivel chair in the back room has been broken for weeks and I can’t seem to find parts for it. I may try more AR furniture apps in the near future when I’m looking for a replacement chair, but for the time being, nothing beats seeing the product in person.