IKEA rolls out an AI-powered interactive design experience for shoppers Posted on : Jun 22 - 2022

Today, IKEA is launching a new AI-driven interactive design experience called IKEA Kreativ for IKEA.com and the IKEA app. With the new feature, U.S. customers can design and visualize their own living spaces with digitalized furniture on their smartphones instead of traveling to the brick-and-mortar store where they are likely to be distracted by the warehouse-shaped labyrinth of showrooms, blue shopping bags and Swedish meatballs.

Currently, the IKEA Kreativ feature is available on iOS devices and desktops. It will be coming to Android devices later this summer. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) experience is expected to launch in additional countries in September. However, there are no exact launch dates.

With IKEA Kreativ, the company continues taking steps toward digital transformation. According to IKEA, it is the home retail industry’s first fully featured mixed-reality design experience for lifelike and accurate interior design, bridging the gap between e-commerce and in-store customer journeys.

Virtual home design platforms aren’t new. In fact, the Swedish retailer was one of the first furniture companies to ride the AR wave in 2017 with its IKEA Place app. The app works with Apple’s ARKit to allow customers to scan a room and place an IKEA chair, bed, etc., in the space. There is also visual search tech that recommends similar furniture when a user scans an item that already exists in their home. Amazon, Wayfair, Target, The Home Depot, Overstock, Houzz and others have implemented AR apps to help clients design a room with purchasable products, too.

But IKEA Place only allows you to do so much. It is essentially like Amazon’s “View In Your Room” feature as it’s designed to see how furniture will appear in a room when looking through your phone camera. This can still be useful, though, so IKEA says users will still be able to use the separate IKEA Place app alongside the updated IKEA app.

IKEA Kreativ captures a wide-angle 3D projection and allows the customer to design the entire space head-to-toe. It leverages spatial computing, machine learning and 3D mixed-reality technologies developed by Silicon Valley AI specialists Geomagical Labs, which Ingka Group acquired in 2020. The feature uses similar AI and computer vision technologies used by self-driving cars, such as AI neural networks that have been trained to recognize the objects and geometry of indoor spaces, stereo vision algorithms to see in 3D, computational photography algorithms and mixed-reality 3D graphics. View more