ARVR

Augmented Furniture

"No hassles of ordering and uHauling up new furniture and returning it again because of a buyers remorse, because we now have applications for handheld devices which can place these furnitures at your space and you can check wether or not it suits the theme of you living room or bedroom". Alrighty, emough marketing, lets get straight to the point. We have applications which are actually capaable of doing this if provided with enough hardware. I have used application named Houzz on iOS platform. It works astonishingly well in the indoor spaces (Not so well on the outdoor spaces). Lets dive into the findings by first discussing pros and cons of this AR application

PROS

Certainly, this makes the life easier for anyone who intents to buy new furniture. People can immediately decide as it places the furniture with scales in your space. This can help someone decide wether or not it wil fit properly in the available space. It also gives proper dimensions on the height which is quite necessary when someone intents to buy a working desk or a Dining Table or a desk in Kitchen.

CONS

Although the application seems quite useful, it certainly has some cons as well. The first drawback of placing the furniture virtually is that the person wont be able to take the feel of the material of which the piece is made of. Taking up the feel of the texture is important as it can be smooth surface or a rough one. The second drawback which I would like to put upfront is the light intensity varitation. If you look at the two images of the same furniture piece, then according to the color of the background light the model should be adjusted. The application doesnt yet supports this feature. The third drawback which should be addressed, is the accessory testing. Testing up the smoothness of, for example, vanity drawers is not yet possible with this technology. All the above mentioned drawbacks can be well understood from the image given below. As you can see the natural light in the image is yellow while the model doesnt appears to carry any traits of the surrounding light. The texture of this model cannot be deduced even though it virtually available to the user.

Some Insights

If we take a closer look at the pictures and compare the pictures involving same household furniture, indoors and outdoors then one can notice that the visual aspect of the furniture doesnt matches up with the dimensions. Lets take into account the picture which has a bed placed besides the zebra crossing.

If we take a look at the car behind the bed in the above image then one can notice that the bed height which is supposed to be around 4ft should match up to the car door almost, if not exactly.

The same bed, which is included in the above picture when placed indoors, seems more realistic than the previous image. To put this up in different words, the dimension of around 4feet actually reflects in the indoor image. Hence I conclude that, with respect to the outside spaces this application doesnt seem to be working as effective as indoors. BEWARE when buying outdoor furnitures :p

Another example

This is another set of image which shows the discrepancy in the physical dimensions of the models when placing the same piece of furniture, indoor and outdoor.

Vanity placed in livingroom

Same vanity placed outside

Future Perspective

If I were to quote the future standing of this AR application then I really dont think that this is something more than a luxury to the buyer and a marketing tool for the seller. I think this application is something irreplacable in terms of just placing the model in the real world but it is not yet perfect enough that someone actually goes ahead and buys the furniture. Even if it is perfect, I personally regard furniture shopping to be a part of home decor which should be done with utmost care.

Quote taken from:Link

Every furniture speaks for itself. So I think the best practice in future will be that people are just using this application for the sake of fun and not actually buying.