Introduction
Ikea Kreativ is a Virtual Reality (VR) design tool to help customers visualise how furniture will look like in their room. Powered by VR and AI-technology, home redesign/renovation is made easy, helping customers to visualise their ideas into their home. Features include:
- Scanning of users’ room using iPhone camera to accurate capture room dimensions.
- Remove of existing furniture and placing virtual furniture in its place to see its fit.
- Availability of more than 50 virtual showrooms for users to place furniture in.
- Includes more than thousands of furniture and decorations for users to interact with.
What do I like it?
Ikea Kreativ provides the convenience and hassle-free of redesigning space, skipping the process of measuring furniture, space and provides users the ability to imagine their space not just in their mind but right in front of their eyes.
It also provides good variety of customisability, with over thousands of furniture, decoration, and accessories, allowing user to customise their space with. The ability to select items to remove in the room further provides greater customisability for users who wish to integrate new items into the space containing existing items.
Why is it engaging?
I found the application engaging because of the good degree of freedom it provides. Ikea Kreativ allows user to adjust Ikea items with ease, through rotation and movement around the space, just like how user would move their items in real life.
What features are done well?
Ikea’s furniture into the virtual space/room does a good job in allowing users to picture the proportion of the furniture to the room. With Ikea Kreativ’s VR element, it helps to visualise how items would look like in users’ space, skipping the hassle of having to measure the dimensions of furniture and room.
The wide selection of items and showroom also does a good job replicating Ikea’s real-life stores, allowing users to browse through item selections, without comprising the experience users get from real-life stores.
What features could be improved and how?
Though marked as a selling point, the erasing tool is not perfect. For example, when removing existing items, the software does not perfectly understand how to fill in the empty space. On this note, this can be improved by feeding the software more data to learn. Nonetheless, it does not obstruct users in adding Ikea’s furniture into the space. Afterall, the eraser tool is a new feature and I believe Ikea will continue to improve it to make a better user experience.
Another feature I think could be improved on is the degree of freedom to navigate around the room. This would require more devices, such as head-mounted display and tracker, allowing users to “feel” its surrounding space and the ambience the new environment (new environment here refers to the space after user completes with setting up the space) creates.
References
Porter, J. (22, June 22). Ikea’s new virtual design tool deletes your furniture and replaces it with Ikea’s. Retrieved from The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/22/23178125/ikea-kreativ-room-scanner-ios-app-virtual-furniture-showroom
Wilson, M. (2022, June 22). Ikea’s new app deletes your living room furniture so you can buy even more. Retrieved from Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/90762368/ikeas-new-app-deletes-your-living-room-furniture-so-you-can-buy-even-more
IKEA Launches AI-Powered “Kreativ” Mixed Reality App. (2022, June 22). Retrieved from Hypebeast: https://hypebeast.com/2022/6/ikea-ar-furniture-preview-app-function-info