IKEA Augmented Reality Catalog Lets You Preview Products In Your Apartment 68
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."
Of course (Score:5, Funny)
you will have to assemble it using your own virtual Allen key.
Virtual Agmented Reality (Score:1)
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BTDT (Score:1)
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?
One problem... (Score:1)
...it's still Ikea furniture. I'm sure I'm not their target demographic, tho. 15-20 years ago, sure.
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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.
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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.
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IKEA furniture is mostly knockoffs of quality furniture. I imagine that an IKEA knockoff will be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
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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.
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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.
Ikea has a range of stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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So what you are saying is that if you stop and pay more for higher quality you get higher quality regardless of brand name?
Re: Ikea has a range of stuff (Score:2)
Yeah but if you move the expensive stuff will get damages
Ikea is cheap enough to just dump
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It depends what you compare it to. Other cheap furniture available here is complete crap, where as Ikea's is mostly quite reasonable. Not going to last 50 years, but not rubbish either. At the prices they charge you can afford to chuck it and get some new stuff in 5 years time anyway, wasteful as that may be.
Sometimes I pay more for furniture (Muji bed, for example) but at the moment with wages down thousands of Pounds I'm going to buy a cheap Ikea table and replace it when the economy eventually recovers i
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Solution, don't go to Lowes for fasteners. Go to a hardware store, not a big box store.
I'm in (Score:5, Funny)
As long as it looks like this [youtube.com]
Not already here (Score:1)
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.
Highly Recommended Approach (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Was doing this in the 90s using the Mac drafting program "Canvas" to arrange furniture in my dorm room.
Sure, it wasn't 3D (top-down view), but it worked GREAT!
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Since this is Ikea... (Score:2)
Virtual back-out button - (Score:2, Offtopic)
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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How in the hell is talking about Ikea off topic?
Leave the app like leaving the store: (Score:2)
Ikea is famous not letting you leave [dailymail.co.uk], 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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I wish I could mod you up.
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Maps? They didn't have those in Houston, I looked for them.
My first trip through Ikea I didn't already know that it was an intentional maze or I would have looked for the "wormhole" shortcuts you mention. These shortcuts in Houston are intentionally hidden in easily missed corners and behind displays.
I have trouble thinking in levels of dishonesty of that magnitude - putting up big signs that say "exit" and not having a fucking exit is called lying.
Considering you're actually defending Ikea, makers of su
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I've never bought their shit - my assessment comes from the reviews of others.
Considering there's a big "EXIT THIS WAY" sign anything smaller should be considered ancillary, not "the real version".
Honesty appears to be the issue here. If it helps - it's been eight years since I've been in the Houston one. Maybe things have changed? Wouldn't know. Not going to find out.
On the autism note - I always thought a good way to punish Ikea for their horrible store design would be to take a van full of autistic
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You look like a coward to me. At least I own my comments - pussy.
I don't really shop at Wal-Mart either. Something about having people stand in clumps that you can't get around without just plowing, Ikea quality products, six year old kids in shitty diapers screaming in the basket at 3:00 am, and the fact I have watched them put known tainted food back on the shelf.
If I want shitty furniture and kitchen supplies I'll go to Big Lots or something similar.
I deflected stupid back on the caller BTW, now I'm de
Never mind that... (Score:4, Insightful)
What I need is VR system to help me figure out how I can cram six flat-packs into my car.
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One step at a time, Ikea (Score:2)
Perhaps they should start slow attempt to sell a few products online before jump head-first into the Minority Report-style furniture catalog.
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I swear, last time I looked at their site (less than a year ago) they had only a very select few items that were available to purchase online, and that most of the site was simply a catalog for the items you could buy in their stores.
Boy, now don't I look like an idiot.
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What's wrong with their existing online-shop?
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I don't even buy stuff from IKEA because it is all shit (no really, ALL of it is shit, you'll see once you've owned it for a while and welds are breaking and so on, and the plastics STILL stink and the screws are rusting from nothing more than ambient humidity) but their website has long been one of the best commerce sites around, front-loading low-res images and replacing them with higher-quality ones to speed initial page loads, et cetera.
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you mean like progressive jpegs? something that has existed since rocks?
No, I mean image substitution. Maybe they stopped doing this but they would load a 1bpp or maybe 2bpp GIF and then swap in JPEGs once the page had loaded. Not the most revelatory of feature either, but they did it well. IKEA long had one of the fastest initial page loads for a complex dynamic site.
Cool. (Score:2)
How well does it really work? (Score:1)
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.
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Tracking is better the better that the AR marker can be identified.
In this case the marker is a tiny part of the image once you have moved to the other side of the room, so I imagine that they are tracking other parts of the scene as well, using the catalogue as an initial reference point.
We will know better once we see some real footage.
Why only mobile devices? (Score:3)
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Because it uses your mobile device's camera. It might not be as convenient to drag your computer and webcam around from room to room.
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The concept behind augmented reality is that you are looking at your real environment with virtual objects inserted into it.
Ideally this would be done with a head mounted display that contains a camera with a possibly transparent display.
Since we don't have such HMDs sitting around, phones are the next best thing. If you hold up your phone, point it at your living room and turn on the camera, it is like you are viewing your room through a window. Add some augmented reality software to insert furniture, an