iStaging

So I tried out the interior design app, iStaging, and played with putting furniture pieces into rooms.

In the first image, I replaced a chair at a table with a more modern looking AR chair, and then in the second, I placed a bed in the middle of a walkway at the mall I work at. I thought this app was really interesting and could be super useful for deciding on furniture for a room. It worked pretty well in terms of sizing the objects you see based on your own height. It wasn't perfect, of course; measuring the size of the actual objects is still undetermined, and it would be difficult to get the exact sizing of a piece of furniture to show up on the screen by messing around with the settings. You also couldn't put more than one piece of furniture in the space(at least in iStagingBut I'm sure over time, the smartphone's capability of mapping the ground and walls of a space will greatly improve, making an app like this even more useful and fun.

I've seen other apps such as Snapchat and Quiver do the same kind of thing -- placing virtual objects on the floor through a smartphone -- and I'm excited to see more applications using this capability. One capability that's pretty interesting to me is facial recognition -- note the new iPhone's facial scan and recognition. Other apps such as Snapchat and Facebook Messenger use this capability to map textures and filters onto faces, but what I think would be actually useful would be to recognize silhouettes in a mirror and map outfits onto your body. I had in mind a similar idea to IKEA or iStaging in that you could try out furniture pieces in a room before you buy them, but this could be focused towards buying clothing. Online shopping is sometimes tricky because buyers have to guess whether an item will fit or even look good, and I think extending this type of AR capability would create for a more immersive and fun form of online shopping.