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IKEA Augmented Reality Catalog Lets You Preview Products In Your Apartment
Elliot Chang writes "IKEA's upcoming 2014 catalog will allow customers to preview products in their own homes using augmented reality via iOS and Android phones."
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you will have to assemble it using your own virtual Allen key.
The Klipsk personal office unit. The Hovetrekke home exerbike. Or the Johanneshov sofa with the Strinne green stripe pattern. What kind of dining set defines me as a person?
As long as it looks like this
People always say this. I don't think they've actually looked at real Ikea furniture, just Ikea-inspired 'modular' furniture from Walmart and Target. There is a major difference.
The La-Z-boy chair is the lowest quality furniture in my living room. And feels it.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The low end is foil-wrapped particleboard, and is crap.
The mid range, is stained pine, and some of it is okay as long as you realized that it will dent fairly easily and is just barely beefy enough to do the job so it "feels" cheap.
The high end is solid walnut/oak/birch/maple, and is reasonably good, given that it's mostly designed to knock down for transport.
I have a solid birch kitchen table that is 9 years old. It's still in fine condition, except for where the kids dented the top banging it with utensils. The main downside is that it's laminated together from a bunch of short pieces of wood, but it cost less than it would to just buy the wood if I were to build it myself (which I could).
The Ikea kitchen cabinets use Blum hardware, which is about as good as it gets. Even there, you can get foil-wrapped particleboard doors, or painted MDF, or solid hardwood....you pick the quality level (and therefore the price).
Because using Virtual Reality limits you to only seeing things that are computer generated? Augmented Reality allows the merger of virtual information with the real world. This allows you to see a virtual object, in this case the piece of furniture you are interested in, as if it were already assembled and placed in your home / office. I personally can't wait for the step past Augmented Reality where it merges with Diminished Reality to give us full Mediated Reality.
People always say this. I don't think they've actually looked at real Ikea furniture, just Ikea-inspired 'modular' furniture from Walmart and Target. There is a major difference.
The La-Z-boy chair is the lowest quality furniture in my living room. And feels it.
Ikea isn't low quality furniture, but it is built to a price.
I.E. Product development in Ikea is to give a team 100 Euro and say "build a table". So they build a table for 100 Euro and I have to say the Swede's are pretty good at it.
I've got an Ikea desk I bought for A$110 in 2002. I still have it, the laminate has faded but its still strong and stable enough to be a work bench in the shed.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
In 2008, Ikea had Google "Sketchup" models available for download. I had some, so went all-out before moving to a much-smaller place.
I measured the (funky-shaped) condo I was buying to make a 3D model. Downloaded and inserted models of actual Ikea shelves & dressers, then close-enough models of my various other furniture, available everywhere, and re-sized as appropriate. It was then effortless to arrange the furniture, and to try out all possible arrangements. NOTE: It is much easier to move bookcases and couches around with a mouse.
OK, so how to work with the movers? I wrote big numbers on Post-Its, and stuck them every big item. Then, printed a bird's-eye screen grab of the SketchUp model with furniture in-place. Finally, I magic-markered a big corresponding number on each item, and printed 4 copies.
The next step was to sit around drinking wine while they put everything exactly where it went. No confusion. Magically, everything fit, down to the inch.
Do you have to compile it yourself?
Do you have to spend 45 minutes hitting the back out of program button only to be shown another back out of program button before it lets you exit the program?
(I refuse to give Ikea any money at all after having been in one of there stores and wanting to leave)
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What I need is VR system to help me figure out how I can cram six flat-packs into my car.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Perhaps they should start slow attempt to sell a few products online before jump head-first into the Minority Report-style furniture catalog.
I'll take my girlfriend annoyingly scan our apartment with her smartphone rather than accompany her for hours in IKEA.
Do we? I don't know anyone who's got an Oculus VR or anything similar, but Android phones are ubiquitous.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The video is at least partially faked (the images do not move in sync with the devices, especially in the last shot with multiple devices) so I wonder how well it actually works?
I doubt that the tracking is really that smooth.
IKEA furniture is mostly knockoffs of quality furniture. I imagine that an IKEA knockoff will be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Ikea is famous not letting you leave, I would hate if the app kept running after you told it you wanted to leave, and kept taking over the phone again.
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The highest quality furniture in my living room is a La-Z-Boy chair. But it's from the sixties or possibly seventies, and it was owned by a little old lady and it's too narrow for me. Still, there it is. They make a range of products. This chair was originally something like $900, and it doesn't even rock. It just reclines and sticks out a crappy footrest. But it's solid as hell.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This year's catalog also had the same feature
Not the same feature at all. The 2013 version just shows 3D models above the pages of the catalogue so that you can see what products look like or browse directly to web pages for more information on the product. The 2014 version shows the products "in situ" so that you can see what they would look like if you had them in your room. This requires significantly better 3D tracking to work properly, though the promotional video doesn't really show how well it works in practice.
I think this is generally a great idea, but why not make it available for Windows/MacOS/Linux? If I wanted to see how an item looked in my home, I'd probably want to see that on my 23" monitor, not my iPhone screen.
I've definitely looked at real Ikea furniture, and I knew someone who actually made Ikea furniture. Some of the cheaper stuff is just plain garbage ... it won't survive a move, but if you assemble it and keep it in the same place for years it will serve. But, anything made out of particle board (sawdust and glue essentially) isn't going to be as durable as real wood is.
Are you sure it's a 'real' La-Z-Boy? Or just a La-Z-Boy inspired 'recliner'? ;-)
My leather sofa made by them is of really high quality, and my father's 25+ year old chair got the reclining mechanism replaced for free when it wore out.
My direct experience with La-Z-Boy is that the stuff is well made. Several notches higher than many competing brands in fact. And they stand behind their product -- not something I usually attribute to a company making low quality stuff.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.