Would some Fyrkantigs look good in your living room? How about a Knutstorp?
Your smartphone may soon have a high-tech answer to your Swedish furnishing conundrum.
Home furnishing giant IKEA is working with Apple on an augmented reality-based shopping app, allowing users to virtually furnish their home before a purchase. The app is expected to launch later this year.
It’s not the first time an app has virtually dressed up your home: the recently launched Hutch acts in a similar way. But it does point to a promising future for AR that steps beyond Pokémon Go (reminder: augmented reality superimposes computer-generated images over a real world view). As the tech publication DiGital notes, Apple sees the IKEA collab as a way for AR to become accepted outside of the gaming world.
To that end, Apple recently released ARKit, an augmented reality platform for iOS developers that could herald a new Cupertino take on Google Glass. And Tim Cook himself said earlier this year that AR is a “core technology” for the company going forward (Facebook is also creating a platform for AR).
As long as it can help us set up our Dombas and Gronkullas, we’re all in.
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