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Comment by flashman | Hacker News Reader

Whoever comes up with a way for furniture and homewares retailers to demonstrate their products in your home is going to make a fortune, whether it's an open system or a whitelabel platform for scanning rooms, ingesting models and integrating with a shopping cart.

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IKEA literally already has such an app in Steam.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/447270/

[2] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/about_ikea/newsitem/040516_Virtual...

That's not really what OP is talking about - it's just a single pre-assembled kitchen scene containing only a few Ikea items.

Even though the VR app is just a kitchen demo, IKEA has had Augmented Reality to place furniture in your own home in their standard catalog app for a couple years now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDNzTasuYEw So VR is the next step

Probably something like the Hololens is the next step for that, and Hololens is amazing, so seeing the furniture in your room without having to wave a phone around is going to change buying and decorating

VR is more a different direction, it's hard to take your house and represent it in VR for you to furnish. You could use something like the Matterport, but even then it's an hour or two before you can use it in VR.

It's a start. I already have my apartment mocked up in Sketchup, and I imagine it's not that hard to import that. It'll be hack-y at first, but it seems like a very achievable target for professional interior designers, etc. The tech could easily trickle down.

It even has swedish meatballs

I used to manage the engineering R & D department at a pretty major e-commerce retailer, they bought the oculus devkit and that was my first idea. I brought it up and was promptly shut down. Then they made me build a cars.com clone. Don't work there anymore.

Similar story: I backed the oculus kickstarter and one of the first thing I wanted to try it once it would be released is realtime 360 video (then move on later to realtime 3d 360). Not being in the Valley, obviously got zero funding, and now such cameras are commonplace; so frustrating.

This was demoed at Google I/O for Project Tango, featuring furniture from WayFair among others. It's not true VR but AR, which actually works better for this application. Until consumer project tango hardware has shipped in quantity, though, it won't get past the demo stage.

The great thing about project tango is that since it has accurate depth sensing and builds a 3D model of the space, furniture placed is accurate to scale. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYwc6nS7qs

I personally know of three companies trying to do this. It's a hard problem, one of them basically gave up on the problem, but someone's going to figure it out.

I guess the company that makes it easy will win.

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