Urban Ladder's Living Spaces harnesses augmented reality to let you visualize a sofa in  your drawing room before deciding to buy
From Vishnu Anand
Bangalore November 6 2014: Furniture is a rather tricky thing to shop. Unlike clothes, you can't try them on to see how they look. It is nearly impossible to sample furniture at home, and the settings at the store almost never match your living room. An ideal case for augmented reality to take over and provide a near-real image visualization of how a particular piece of furniture looks in your home.
Urban Ladder, the Bangalore based online furniture retailer launched Living Spaces, a mobile application that helps you visualize sofas of your choice in your living room. A fairly simple interface allows you to choose the sofa model from Urban Ladder's catalogue, by which time the camera of your mobile device has automatically turned on and as you pan the camera around your room, the sofa you have chosen moves along, helping you understand how it would look in various parts of your room. The app goea a step further and really leverages augmented reality full throttle when you place a 'marker' -- essentially an A3 sized paper downloadable from Urban ladder's website -- at the location of your choice -- and voila, a real-life image of the sofa pops up on your screen. Essentially, the marker works as a barcode or QR code of sorts which pulls up the actual dimensions of the sofa.|
Says Rajiv Srivatsa, COO & Co-Founder, Urban Ladder:  "We are first in the country to leverage augmented reality for furniture retail. We believe that furniture buyers have multiple items on their checklist ranging from fabric to colour to how separate pieces of a furniture set blend into various rooms in the house. Of course, nobody has the time to go to physical stores anymore. The app allows you to choose different variants of the same furniture and compare."|
The app has been created in-house by  UL Labs, Urban Ladder's R&D organization, in collaboration with Whodat and Blue Beans, two Bangalore based startups focusing on augmented reality. Currently the app is available for download on iOS and Android, and users can browse Urban Ladder's sofa catalogue. "In the weeks to follow, we will incorporate our other furniture offerings like side tables, wardrobes, beds etc", Srivatsa adds. 

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