Amazon’s shopping app brings enhanced AR tools

Augmented reality has a few quite legitimate use cases, like home furnishing. Ikea uses augmented reality in its Place app to a great success, and now Amazon’s expanded augmented reality capabilities of its shopping app with a new Room Decorator feature making it easy to create more than a hundred different configurations consisting of dozens of virtual products.

Amazon first introduced augmented reality functionality in its mobile shopping app, which is available free in the App Store, back in November 2017.

To activate the augmented reality view, tap the camera icon within the app and select the option ARView. There are thousands of different items that can be placed virtually throughout your home. Before today’s update, however, you could only place one virtual piece of furniture at a time, but now you can adorn your home with dozens of virtual pieces of furniture.

According to CNET, Amazon now lets you create “full rooms” of AR furniture:

Amazon said Tuesday it’s now expanded its AR capabilities with its Room Decorator tools, letting people add and arrange dozens of furniture pieces within the same room, save up to 100 of those designs and keep editing the arrangements on mobile or desktop. Amazon will also recommend items to combine together in a design.

I think augmented reality is especially great for getting a feel for how different items might fit in your home, which can be particularly useful for not just reducing the number of returns but also helping customers avoid going to physical stores during the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon said Room Decorator can be used with tens of thousands of items sold by both Amazon and independent merchants on its site. You can access the new tools by clicking on the “view in you room” button available on the pages of these items.

The new AR experience is available to the United States customers on iOS starting today. The update is scheduled to roll out to Android devices “in the next few months”.