Wayfair Spaces: an amazing decoration app for Magic Leap One

Summary

• Wayfair Spaces: a very relevant use case of mixed reality

This Wednesday, October 10, Magic Leap held its first LEAP developer conference. As part of the event, American interior furniture vendor Wayfair presented their Wayfair Spaces app for the Magic Leap One Creator Edition mixed reality headset.

It's about a interior design app in augmented reality, allowing to place virtual furniture in its real environment. The objective is to preview how a piece of furniture will fit into a room in its home, in order to decide whether or not to purchase.

After scanning a room using the Magic Leap One, simply select a piece of furniture from the Wayfair catalog to place it in the room. It is for example possible to place a virtual lamp on a real table, or even to superimpose several virtual objects. If the virtual objects are placed behind a real object, the very realistic occlusion effect prevents them from being seen. Shadow effects, on the other hand, are not yet very realistic, but Magic Leap is actively working to resolve this issue.

Wayfair Spaces: a very relevant use case of mixed reality

At any time, it is possible to select a virtual object placed in the room to display a description bubble floating in space. The description indicates useful information such as the style of the furniture or its price. It is not yet possible to purchase directly from the app, but it will soon be.

According to Shrenik Sadalgi, director of “Next Gen” experiences at Wayfair, the Mixed reality headsets like the Magic Leap One will soon be used as tools, at the same tite as the PC or the smartphone in their infancy. The Wayfair Spaces application can for example be used by interior design professionals to offer configurations to their customers. Likewise, consumers will be able to use it to design their interior more easily.

There are already similar smartphone apps out there, like Ikea Place to name a few, but Wayfair Spaces is the first interior design app available on mixed reality glasses. After two and a half years of development, this app is available on the ML World software store of Magic Leap One, and directly on the web via the Helio browser of Magic Leap.