Challenge
Find a way to bring the showroom experience to people’s homes while showcasing the modularity of their sectional couches.
Solution
An augmented reality experience for visualizing Lovesac Sactional configurations in your home.
People are still hesitant to buy furniture online because oftentimes our mental images of how furniture will live in a space differs completely from reality.
Augmented reality gives us the ability to visualize whether or not a product is an aesthetic or spatial match for our homes. Inspired by Ikea, Target and Amazon we decided to come up with some ideas on how to use AR to make the Lovesac online furniture shopping a better user experience.
Lovesac Sactional couches are sectionals that can be adapted to fit your space. We wanted to use augmented reality as a way to help customers visualize various configurations in their homes. Below are our two initial concepts.
Concept 1
Tap to place couch
Concept 2
A step-by-step custom builder
R&D was required to learn how we could execute our first AR experience. After testing various platforms we found building a test experience was easiest using 8th Wall’s SDK. They have a unique and reliable SLAM engine that works well on mobile browsers.
We tested triggering animations on touch using javascript events and 3D models saved using the glTF file format which allows animation data to be stored using JSON (a web friendly format for animation data).
Lovesac provided us with the 4 most popular configurations ordered online. Using our research findings we baked transition animations into the 3d couch model allowing the user to toggle through configurations.
In augmented reality, complex backgrounds are unavoidable. We conducted several visual tests to define best practices for UI elements. Our findings were that vignettes can be used to ensure contrast on key branding elements and a central safe zone should be kept clear so users can interact with their environments.
Users could place a virtual sactional in their home, use tap and drag to position the couch in the optimal location or toggle between configurations smoothly. Relevant product information would update in the UI as users switched between configurations.
