Target’s Mobile Web Augmented Reality Lets You See Furniture In Your Space

We have covered a number of the new augmented reality apps coming into the market. With the release of ARKit and ARCore we have seen quite a few. What we haven’t yet seen much of is mobile web augmented reality. Target is among the first large companies to break this barrier. With See It In Your Space, users can take a picture of their space and visualize what pieces from the Project 62 line would look like in their own home.

Guests shopping the new Project 62 line can use the feature to place three-dimensional versions of real Target home products within photos of actual rooms at home, and move them around at proper scale to see how they’d look—all before buying the product.

Once a guest finds, say, a floor lamp or bedside table on Target.com using their smartphone, they simply tap the product’s See It In Your Space button and follow steps to do just that. All they need is a photo of the living space they want to decorate—which they can shoot in real-time or pull from an existing photo!

There are a number of augmented reality apps from competitors like Ikea, Wayfair and more. Target’s is differentiated because it is available to any user who visits their mobile website. The drawback is that the application does not do real time object tracking and placement and relies on placing their furniture in static photos. This is part of the challenge with mobile web augmented reality. Tools like ARKit would enable this functionality out of the box but they require that the user download an application to gain access. Despite this, developers are forging onward to build tools like AR.js which enable glyph-based AR in websites.

Have you heard of or used any apps that use mobile web augmented reality? We’d love to hear about them so send us a tip!