It’s currently available for a limited range of shoes, plus some t-shirts and eyewear. Here’s how the company describes the feature:
Virtual Try-On for Shoes uses augmented reality to enable you to visualize how a pair of shoes will look from every angle. You can tap the “Virtual Try-On” button below the product image and point the camera at your feet so you can see how the shoes look from every angle. You can also use the carousel to try on different colors of the same style.
This ability to see products in the real environment was one of the key promises of augmented reality on mobile devices. One of the earliest examples was virtual try-on of lipstick, back in 2017.
Ikea was another early adopter.
One developer even showed how an AR instruction manual could be used for building self-assembly furniture at home.
Place hit the App Store this evening touting the ability to position furniture wherever you want in your home using augmented reality. Designed for both iPhone and iPad, Ikea Place uses ARKit as its foundation and features a catalog of thousands of Ikea products, whether it be a sofa, bed, or any other piece of furniture. Everything is true-to-scale, meaning how it looks in the app is how it will look in your home:
Pottery Barn soon followed.
But AR has so far been a bit of a slow-burn. Pinterest, for example, took five years to move from beauty products to furniture.
You can pick a piece of furniture and virtually place a life-sized rendering in your house with augmented reality. You can choose from all sorts of Pottery Barn products and customize them by color, size, and more.
