How IKEA's future-living lab created an augmented reality hit

Inside a former lobster tank in Copenhagen’s meatpacking district, IKEA’s future-living lab, SPACE10, maps out how we’ll be living in the next ten to fifteen years. Downstairs, a hydroponic farm grows tomatoes and leafy greens that the lab shares with a restaurant just down the road. Upstairs, a rotating cast of 20 or so bioengineers, chefs, designers and architects imagine the cities of the future and try to work out where and how IKEA might fit into them.

It was here, more than 800 kilometres from IKEA’s headquarters in Delft, the Netherlands, that the furniture company developed its augmented reality app IKEA Place. The app, which launched on iOS in September 2017 and is now available on Android, lets anyone drop virtual furniture into their own homes and view it through their smartphone camera. It was one of the very first apps to take advantage of ARKit, Apple's augmented reality framework that lets developers use the smartphone's motion sensors and cameras to overlay digital elements on the real world. On the day of its release, Apple CEO Tim Cook touted Place as the future of shopping.

But Place wasn’t IKEA’s first foray into the world of augmented reality, says Bas van de Poel, a creative strategist at SPACE10. “IKEA was really one of the first companies to be experimenting in augmented reality,” he says. Way back in 2013, before Pokémon Go brought AR to our smartphones en masse for the first time, IKEA released an app that gave an early hint of what IKEA Place would later become.

Even for its time, IKEA Catalogue was a little shonky. For it to work you had to have a copy of the paper IKEA catalogue, where certain items were marked with an orange label. After scanning a labelled page, users than had to place the physical catalogue on the floor wherever they wanted to drop their virtual furniture. The physical catalogue worked as a kind of size guide, so any of the few hundred items that were available when the app launched were the right size when recreated virtually.

At the core of Catalogue was IKEA’s secret weapon: a vast database of 3D models of almost every single item the company sells. “We have a lot of experience creating 3D models and making them look real,” says Michael Valdsgaard, digital transformation lead at IKEA. IKEA’s designers create these models as they develop new pieces, but in its autumn 2006 catalogue the company took this a step further and debuted its first computer-generated product image – the Bertil chair. In 2009, it followed up with the first complete 3D-modeled room set. Now, the majority of the catalogue is put together using these photorealistic product models instead of real photographs.

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