AssembleAR uses AR to help you through the steps of assembling IKEA furniture.
Toronto based designer, Adam Pickard took one look at the IKEA Place app and was immediately impressed with how AR has the potential to play a larger role furniture shopping. But at the same time, Pickard also had a vision of something a little more. What if AR could make the dreaded task of building furniture easier?
This is why Pickard created a proof-of-concept app called AssembleAR, which reimagines the step-by-step process of assembling your IKEA furniture in AR. Complete with animation and 3D images, the AR app is a promising evolution of the traditional printed out assembly manuals that comes in each box.
The AR experience begins when you open the app to scan the barcode located on the furniture packaging. This will create an animated 3D AR duplicate of each component inside the box, which you can use for a side-by-side comparison as you move through each step of the furniture building process.
The AR animation walks you through each piece of hardware to use, and makes sure you have the parts facing the right direction before tightening those bolts.
As you complete each step, you simply swipe right for the next set of instructions.
The idea is to eliminate the frustration that comes with building IKEA furniture, but AssembleAR does more than make self-assembly easier, it also proves that AR could possibly replace the idea of printed materials that come in each IKEA box, essentially reducing costs as well as natural resources.
AssembleAR was developed with a variety of programs like Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, Audition, and Cinema 4D.
Before you jump on the Apple or Google App store looking for this app, AssembleAR is a proof of concept, so unfortunately the app isn’t available anywhere for now. For Pickard, the project was to “experiment with the potential of this type of technology rather than presenting a finished user experience.”
Finished or not, AssembleAR is an interesting idea and proves that the future self-assembly manual for IKEA – as well as other step-by-step manuals – could have a life in augmented reality, and end up saving us all a lot of time and frustration.
