Augmented reality offers new way to shop for furniture

Close your eyes. Can you picture that sofa you’re coveting in your living room? Now, open your eyes and pull out your phone — because edgy furniture stores are giving you a tool that’s more accurate than imagination.

It’s called augmented reality. And all you need is a smartphone or tablet.

Take Jerome’s augmented reality experience, which launched at the end of the June. The San Diego-based furniture chain now lets customers click a “see it in your home” button listed alongside products on its website. That action will launch a mobile app that allows people to virtually place true-to-size desks, dining sets and beds in their own home — up to three different items at any given time — and get a better idea of whether or not the pieces are a good fit.

“With furniture buying, visualization is a big aspect of it,” said Scott Perry, the vice president of digital for the family-operated Jerome’s. “The last couple of years, I’ve witnessed customers bringing in paint samples, pillows from a chair, a little piece of carpet. They’ll bring this stuff into the showroom.

So I had this wild idea: what if we had augmented reality so customers could see our furniture in their home with their tablet or phone?”

Actually, the ability to visualize furniture with the help of augmented reality, or AR for short, isn’t that wild of an idea. Early-adopter retailers like Ikea are already experimenting with a similar-but-different tech, virtually reality, to create immersive visualizations such as a life-size, walk-in kitchen where colors and styles are interchangeable.

And pretty soon AR is going to get a ton more love from name-brands including Lowe’s and Wayfair, which are betting on Google Tango, a computer vision hardware-software system debuting soon on the Lenovo PHAB2 Pro smartphone. Tango-powered apps will take AR beyond the superficial, so you can do more in real-slash-virtual environments and complete complex tasks, such as measuring your space with 3-D tools.

Perhaps that’s why some experts believe augmented reality is going to forever alter the way we shop and will help retailers, even brick-and-mortars, boost sales.

“I do think it’s a game-changer for the retail industry,” said Artemis Berry, the vice president of retail for Shop.org and the National Retail Federation. “What we know right now, though, is that it’s in the very early stages.”

Unlike virtual reality, which uses a head-mounted display that resembles a scuba mask to transport users to fictional realms, augmented reality relies on a see-through display, such as the lens of an iPad camera, to overlay digital elements on top of the real world. Both technologies are already impacting the way people buy and sell homes, but AR, in particular, is having a coming-out party. That’s thanks in part to smash-hit smartphone game Pokemon Go, which employs AR so players can catch Pokemon characters who appear on the screen in their same locale.